Quote from: Zelen on September 04, 2022, 09:56:33 PM

Quote from: 3catcircus on September 04, 2022, 09:18:50 PM
All other things being equal, sure. But stupid choices like "hey, we're 3rd level, we can take that warband of a dozen hill giants. The DM wouldn't have them out here to encounter if they were too tough." or "We don't need to check for traps - we're 20th level" deserve deadly consequences - whether it's being beaten into goo by a mob of giants armed with clubs or being incapacitated as a "mister soon to be living the rest of his short-ass life in agonizing pain" by a deadly demonic spider poison trap.

What you're talking about is a a cultural shift and change in expectations-of-play that occurred (in a large way) as a result of players growing up on computer games. Seems unfair to pin that on 3E.

I guess there's some argument to be made that the more developed the system is, the more your unconscious expectation is that engaging with the system itself is the right move. i.e If 90% of your character sheet talks about things you can do in a fight, the other ways of engaging with the fictional world are less prominent inherently.

I don't think we can definitely say that's the case - CRPGs had been around for at least 20 years when 3e came out. I would argue that there were still some save or die spells in 3e, for example, but they were much higher level that most players would never actually encounter routinely.  Compare that to hold person. In older editions, it was kinda save or die since if you didn't make the save, you were vulnerable to anyone who decided to slit your throat as you stood there paralyzed. You could even hold more than one person. The limitation on those affected was about a dozen different species (mostly demihumans,) In 3e, the difference were you could only try and hold one person, but the list of affected species was any humanoid, and you got a chance every 6 seconds to break free.  That's certainly not a CRPG thing where being held/paralyzed/etc. was always a frustrating thing that didn't give you the opportunity to break free from it.

I would make the claim that it was more a function of the participation trophy syndrome that became more prevalent in the 1990s where everyone was told they were special and were sheltered from bad things.

It's not pinning it on 3e - 3e is merely a symptom of it, but it has continued to get worse with each new edition to the point that some games (others moreso than D&D in some cases) codify what it means to be "fun" gameplay.

If I want to make throwaway characters with a focus on randomness and punishing diffulty Il play rougelike videogames.
Save or suck can go shove it as a waste of time.

If live wasps where included with oldschool D&D box sets there would people today saying that a hospital visit is critical to the experience.

Quote from: Chris24601 on September 03, 2022, 06:12:43 PMThe best fix for the fighter (and monk and paladin... another underperformed) is drop them entirely and replace them with the Warblade and other classes from "The Tome of Battle" where WotC actually made the effort to fix them with a ground up rebuild. It was late in 3.5e's run when most of the known issues were understood and dealt with.

Chris,

I've never seen ToB. It is OGL content? It sounds like you are suggesting:

Replace Fighter with Warblade?
Replace Paladin with Crusader?
Replace Monk with Swordsage?

Quote from: Aglondir on September 05, 2022, 03:31:36 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on September 03, 2022, 06:12:43 PMThe best fix for the fighter (and monk and paladin... another underperformed) is drop them entirely and replace them with the Warblade and other classes from "The Tome of Battle" where WotC actually made the effort to fix them with a ground up rebuild. It was late in 3.5e's run when most of the known issues were understood and dealt with.

Chris,

I've never seen ToB. It is OGL content? It sounds like you are suggesting:

Replace Fighter with Warblade?
Replace Paladin with Crusader?
Replace Monk with Swordsage?

It's not OGL, but yes; it's the WotC supplement Tome of Battle, one of later books for 3.5e (shortly before announcing 4E). As noted on the tier list post above it took classes that weren't even great at what they were supposed to do (tier 5) and presented versions that were quite robust and able to contribute in and out of combat.

Quote from: 3catcircus on September 04, 2022, 03:51:22 PM
And these responses are all the reasons why 3.5+ are terrible design goals.

The classes *shouldn't* have equal power. The PCs *should* have the possibility of encountering something else only response is to run away.  I don't want a game on rails with training wheels.

There's a difference between the range of power in the tier 3-4 range and one where a fighter can do maybe 5% of a monster's hit points if they do well while the wizard has a 95% chance of killing every monster they come across with a single spell.

3.x didn't get the nickname "Casters & Caddies" for no reason. Limiting the range of difference between the upper and lower extremes to more "Knights & Knaves" range doesn't mean there's no range... just that one PC isn't reordering the cosmos while the other needs the GM's permission to do anything fancier than hitting things with a weapon for trivial damage.

QuoteThere are *so many* things wrong with the progression from 3.0 onward in trying to make everything equal and fair. Bring back save or die spells. Bring back save or helpless spells. Get rid of feat and ability stacking (whether it's a competence bonus to AC or a deflection bonus to AC, you only get one of them).

What's really funny is that Save or Die spells plus borked save math where it was nearly impossible to actually save against them are what made 3.x the rocket-taggy mess it became and one of the main reasons fighters became useless (they went from having amazing saves in TSR to just about the worst saves in WotC... and the ability of monsters to save was similarly borked such that the wizard just needed to know which of your save modifers was lowest and could then drop a Save or Die targeting it to basically make all the hit points the fighter was supposed to chew through with weapon attacks  irrelevant).

There is a solid robust game in 3.x; but it actually needs what you want to pull out and suffers for the things you want to keep in or increase to the point it sounds like you aren't doing anything more than throwing out platitudes without bothering to look at the underlying system mechanics to see if what you suggest would even produce the effects you desire.

Quote from: Chris24601 on September 05, 2022, 09:07:11 AM

Quote from: Aglondir on September 05, 2022, 03:31:36 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on September 03, 2022, 06:12:43 PMThe best fix for the fighter (and monk and paladin... another underperformed) is drop them entirely and replace them with the Warblade and other classes from "The Tome of Battle" where WotC actually made the effort to fix them with a ground up rebuild. It was late in 3.5e's run when most of the known issues were understood and dealt with.

Chris,

I've never seen ToB. It is OGL content? It sounds like you are suggesting:

Replace Fighter with Warblade?
Replace Paladin with Crusader?
Replace Monk with Swordsage?

It's not OGL, but yes; it's the WotC supplement Tome of Battle, one of later books for 3.5e (shortly before announcing 4E). As noted on the tier list post above it took classes that weren't even great at what they were supposed to do (tier 5) and presented versions that were quite robust and able to contribute in and out of combat.

Quote from: 3catcircus on September 04, 2022, 03:51:22 PM
And these responses are all the reasons why 3.5+ are terrible design goals.

The classes *shouldn't* have equal power. The PCs *should* have the possibility of encountering something else only response is to run away.  I don't want a game on rails with training wheels.

There's a difference between the range of power in the tier 3-4 range and one where a fighter can do maybe 5% of a monster's hit points if they do well while the wizard has a 95% chance of killing every monster they come across with a single spell.

3.x didn't get the nickname "Casters & Caddies" for no reason. Limiting the range of difference between the upper and lower extremes to more "Knights & Knaves" range doesn't mean there's no range... just that one PC isn't reordering the cosmos while the other needs the GM's permission to do anything fancier than hitting things with a weapon for trivial damage.

QuoteThere are *so many* things wrong with the progression from 3.0 onward in trying to make everything equal and fair. Bring back save or die spells. Bring back save or helpless spells. Get rid of feat and ability stacking (whether it's a competence bonus to AC or a deflection bonus to AC, you only get one of them).

What's really funny is that Save or Die spells plus borked save math where it was nearly impossible to actually save against them are what made 3.x the rocket-taggy mess it became and one of the main reasons fighters became useless (they went from having amazing saves in TSR to just about the worst saves in WotC... and the ability of monsters to save was similarly borked such that the wizard just needed to know which of your save modifers was lowest and could then drop a Save or Die targeting it to basically make all the hit points the fighter was supposed to chew through with weapon attacks  irrelevant).

There is a solid robust game in 3.x; but it actually needs what you want to pull out and suffers for the things you want to keep in or increase to the point it sounds like you aren't doing anything more than throwing out platitudes without bothering to look at the underlying system mechanics to see if what you suggest would even produce the effects you desire.

There really is nothing wrong with the idea that fighters grow up to become kings - powerful though they may be, that shouldn't be reordering the cosmos while hedge wizards grow up to manipulate the very essence of reality. That's how pre-3e did it and that's how vanilla 3e does it.  When they started trying to make the martial classes on par with casters as to the scale of their influence, which was somewhere towards the tail end of the 3.0 supplements is when it became a problem.

But then again, I also think that D&D of all flavors could use the idea that only a certain percentage of casters have full abilities with access to the most powerful of magics (stealing the idea from many other RPGs or of the way they do for Paladins, Rangers, etc). 

Quote from: 3catcircus on September 05, 2022, 09:29:03 AM
There really is nothing wrong with the idea that fighters grow up to become kings - powerful though they may be, that shouldn't be reordering the cosmos while hedge wizards grow up to manipulate the very essence of reality.

Why would the wizard let the fighter be a king? Manipulation of all reality also includes the kingdom. So the fighter, even a king would be a puppet figurehead fir the wizard who for some reason made the fighter a king instead of some construct the wizard could make better and stronger.

This isn't Batman and Superman. This is Superman and a goldfish.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 05, 2022, 10:32:16 AM

Quote from: 3catcircus on September 05, 2022, 09:29:03 AM
There really is nothing wrong with the idea that fighters grow up to become kings - powerful though they may be, that shouldn't be reordering the cosmos while hedge wizards grow up to manipulate the very essence of reality.

Why would the wizard let the fighter be a king? Manipulation of all reality also includes the kingdom. So the fighter, even a king would be a puppet figurehead fir the wizard who for some reason made the fighter a king instead of some construct the wizard could make better and stronger.

This isn't Batman and Superman. This is Superman and a goldfish.

For that matter... the fighter isn't skilled enough to be a king. 2 skill points per level with no social class skill except intimidation and only climb, jump, swim, ride, craft and profession as the other class skills.

The only thing the 3.x fighter is competent to do is hit things that the wizard doesn't feel are worth burning a spell slot on.

The rogue or bard or even the freaking Barbarian has more capacity for being able to lead than a 3.x fighter. They're second only to the monk in the "worst core class design" competition.

Quote from: Chris24601 on September 05, 2022, 10:44:28 AM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 05, 2022, 10:32:16 AM

Quote from: 3catcircus on September 05, 2022, 09:29:03 AM
There really is nothing wrong with the idea that fighters grow up to become kings - powerful though they may be, that shouldn't be reordering the cosmos while hedge wizards grow up to manipulate the very essence of reality.

Why would the wizard let the fighter be a king? Manipulation of all reality also includes the kingdom. So the fighter, even a king would be a puppet figurehead fir the wizard who for some reason made the fighter a king instead of some construct the wizard could make better and stronger.

This isn't Batman and Superman. This is Superman and a goldfish.

For that matter... the fighter isn't skilled enough to be a king. 2 skill points per level with no social class skill except intimidation and only climb, jump, swim, ride, craft and profession as the other class skills.

The only thing the 3.x fighter is competent to do is hit things that the wizard doesn't feel are worth burning a spell slot on.

The rogue or bard or even the freaking Barbarian has more capacity for being able to lead than a 3.x fighter. They're second only to the monk in the "worst core class design" competition.

I don't think anyone is arguing that the design of 3e - 5e classes was ideal. It was done that way to try and balance things, to horrible effect. Absolutely a fighter should have the same skill points as every other class. The skill points per level need to be based on intelligence score rather than class.  But, casters need to be extremely rare (everyone is either a fighter or a rogue as the default) where they can only gain access to full practice of magic as a function of both training or divine intervention and luck.  This is a tradition in the real world stories and legends  that had never been implemented to this effect in D&D and none of the WotC editions had tried to do it

Basing game systems on tradition and legend is a terrible idea unless you wanna have a storygame writing jam.

The argument is: spend tons of dpace on wizard powers and then don't use them because they are broken.

Oh, and for the record, my favorite WotC edition is Post-Essentials Only 4E. It's Monster Vault and Threats of the Nentir Vale are some of the best monsters books ever and they had largely worked out the kinks of early material player side.

It had simple classes (Knight, Slayer, Thief, Scout, Hunter and Elementalist) for those who wanted them (along with more advanced classes), a concise and more focused Feat list (took the more than a thousand pre-Essentials feats and distilled it down to about a hundred in well defined categories), and while many from early 4E complained about how none of the spells were as good as before... this was largely because they'd realized how broken their stun condition was if it could be employed regularly for long durations against multiple foes and so used it primarily for higher level single target/short duration spells instead of having it everywhere (which turned many fights into punching helpless bags of hit points).

Essentials was also where they really started looking at non-combat features to help distinguish the classes.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 05, 2022, 11:07:24 AM
Basing game systems on tradition and legend is a terrible idea unless you wanna have a storygame writing jam.

The argument is: spend tons of dpace on wizard powers and then don't use them because they are broken.

My argument is that players should play the classes for what they are instead of trying to make them all able to do more than their role. If you are using a traditional definition of a wizard, it'd be a bit of a recluse who is the power behind the throne. The wizard is able to influence major events in between spending time congregating with powerful otherworldly beings. They're not supposed to be the mayor of a town.  There supposed to be rare.  Don't cripple them, just make them less accessible to begin with.  Going with an Asian flavored wu jen or a native American medicine man? Just as rare and mysterious.

If you are using the traditional definition of "fighter" they're all cannon-fodder who sometimes rise above to become a king.  There's a lot more of them than there are wizards because the every criteria is so low - can you carry a spear? 

But that's the role of them in any culture - the king/chief/jarl/shiekh is usually the most violent one of the tribe who rules until he shows weakness. The spiritual leader/witch doctor/magician is usually the shrewdest or most intelligent of the tribe.  One provides for earthly concerns and orher for spiritual. It also so happens that the kingly types are also scared of the wizardly types because they just don't know what they're capable of.

None of the WotC D&D games achieved this, but by use of prestige classes that don't overlap, early 3e is the closest to ideal.

Quote from: 3catcircus on September 05, 2022, 12:16:14 PM
My argument is that players should play the classes for what they are instead of trying to make them all able to do more than their role.

Your making massive, massive, assumptions on players, worldbuilding and assuming mythology is all the same across the world.

Edit: your assumptions are that D&D should have upper-est tier mythological wizards in the same place as leftover single soldier simulator characters from a wargame. Which isn't accurate to myth at all anyway outside of D&D 3e

Quote from: 3catcircus on September 05, 2022, 12:16:14 PM
My argument is that players should play the classes for what they are instead of trying to make them all able to do more than their role. If you are using a traditional definition of a wizard, it'd be a bit of a recluse who is the power behind the throne. The wizard is able to influence major events in between spending time congregating with powerful otherworldly beings. They're not supposed to be the mayor of a town.  There supposed to be rare.  Don't cripple them, just make them less accessible to begin with.  Going with an Asian flavored wu jen or a native American medicine man? Just as rare and mysterious.

If you are using the traditional definition of "fighter" they're all cannon-fodder who sometimes rise above to become a king.  There's a lot more of them than there are wizards because the every criteria is so low - can you carry a spear? 

The fighter doesn't just represent the random rabble though. They're represented by the 0-level NPCs in older games, and by the NPC classes in 3rd edition. Going all the way back to Chainmail, a leveled PC fighter is supposed to represent an exceptional warrior, adventurer and leader. That's why they can go on fantasy adventures, and its why they had strongholds and followers built into their class progression.

Quote from: 3catcircus on September 05, 2022, 12:16:14 PM
But that's the role of them in any culture - the king/chief/jarl/shiekh is usually the most violent one of the tribe who rules until he shows weakness.

That's just not true. It's not even entirely true of apes, but in human societies, physical strength has never been the sole source of leadership. Charisma, intelligence and (perceived) virtue are every bit as important. Just being the most violent person in a society is likely to get you branded a criminal. Even the worst tyrants usually get into their positions either through accidents of heredity, or by a combination of wit, strength and charisma. And even then, they tend to have short reigns and come to sticky ends.

To paraphrase how a friend put it regarding playing the myths... "I wanna play Rothgar the warrior who can lift mountains. You can play Vanis the wizard who sees the future and gives advice. That seems like a fun game."

The idea that wizards should be anything more than seers or cute decorations for the end of warriors' spears is a rather modernist take on magic. Meanwhile myth and legend is full of fantastic feats of strength, agility and endurance performed by warriors that Superman would get an inferiority complex if you shoved them into a single class the way all the wizard spells from across multiple cultures' stories have been shoved into the wizard class.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee link=topic=45114.msg1229238#msg1229238
Why would the wizard let the fighter be a king? Manipulation of all reality also includes the kingdom. So the fighter, even a king would be a puppet figurehead fir the wizard who for some reason made the fighter a king instead of some construct the wizard could make better and stronger.

Same reason characters might wear plate armor or use swords. Because the game is intended to evoke European mythological/heroic tropes. A warrior king who inspires his men by leading them in battle is good. A wizard manipulating a kingdom with puppets is almost always bad.

RAW might support what you're suggesting, but who cares. Rule0 & shared vision win.