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RandomCasualty2
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Post by RandomCasualty2 »

FrankTrollman wrote: Conan is basically a 4th level Fighter/Thief in the grand tradition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. He has a high Strength score and can backstab with a bastard sword, but there is basically nothing he ever achieves that would make triumphing over a manticore anything but a big deal. So when people hold up Conan (or Aragorn, or Theseus, or Percival, or any other literary character who is basically a 4th level character) up as the paragon of what a warrior should achieve - they are implicitly telling warriors that they can't aspire to completing high level tasks.
I'm never quite sure why this is so. I mean, high-level is entirely arbitrary. Sure, you wouldn't be able to do high-level stuff in the D&D sense, but so what? If the game literally isn't D&D, then 20th level doesn't have to mean the same thing.

I mean Conan fought gods. Xena fought gods. Buffy fought gods. It was just that those gods didn't happen to be the omnipotent spellcaster kind that we're used to in D&D.

I mean, yeah. We know that Elminster could kick ass if he visited the Xena-verse or the Buffy-verse, but who cares. If Elminster literally doesn't exist there, it's not a problem.
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Post by endersdouble »

Heck, I've been listening to the Iliad on podcast recently, and Diomedes (among others) fights gods. In hand to hand. And wins. His powers are limited to, uh, having a loud war cry.
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Post by Username17 »

xechnao wrote: And you do not need powers to make a system that can mechanically handle this.
What is your point? Yes, you can have a free-form stunt system instead of an explicit power system. That is a perfectly valid way to do a role playing game. However first: so what? And second: free-form stunt systems ass rape characters who don't have reality altering phlebtonium. When the rules come down to "come up with a story on how you do something" then the guy who does things "by magic" has an epically ludicrous leg up on anyone who is expected to do things manually.
The problem now becomes what natural casters could be allowed to do so that they are not fundamentally superior to Perseus and the prince. The answer to this could still be to the system itself. If there are mechanics so that a fighter can try to use his shield or something to reflect a petrification gaze or to be able to run from cover to cover and evade a caster's beams we are home. High fantasy and its casters need not be about dragonball super sayen to be fun. As fighters are supposed to try to avoid a caster's beams, casters should be supposed to try to trap, expose and open enemies to their special powers with equally tactical play.
Even in the instance where in pure head to head combat the guy with a sword is equal to the wizard on the back of higher damage numbers or whatever the fuck, the moment you step out of combat mini-games and into the role playing portion, the guy who can break physics is better than you.

If Heroes are supposed to be marrying the princess and leading armies, it is they, and not Wizards, who should be getting Charm and Mass Charm effects off their power list.

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Post by xechnao »

FrankTrollman wrote:snip
You are supposing things you shouldn't. I did not speak of free-form. I just said that you could make a system to handle this. This does not mean that such a system should be free-form. It could be as mechanically rigorous as the powers you are talking about.
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Post by RobbyPants »

My understanding is the discussion of abilities in this thread spawned off of other thread discussing a WoF system to prevent people from spamming the same abilities over and over. So having those abilities is the pretense of this discussion.
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Post by Alansmithee »

FrankTrollman wrote:What you got there is just a very slight variation on the "Fighters cannot have nice things" meme. Both Conan and Elric fit into it in their own way.

Conan is basically a 4th level Fighter/Thief in the grand tradition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. He has a high Strength score and can backstab with a bastard sword, but there is basically nothing he ever achieves that would make triumphing over a manticore anything but a big deal. So when people hold up Conan (or Aragorn, or Theseus, or Percival, or any other literary character who is basically a 4th level character) up as the paragon of what a warrior should achieve - they are implicitly telling warriors that they can't aspire to completing high level tasks.

Then there is Elric. Elric lives in a campaign world not unlike Lord of the Rings, in which everyone who is high level is a Wizard. I don't mean that only wizards show up as high level characters (although this is true), I mean that seriously the act of becoming a high level character makes you a wizard. Just as low level Elrond is a spearman who becomes a powerful magician as he ascends to the ranks of bad ass, Elric' progression of power is marked by him becoming a more and more powerful magician. People who advocate Elric (or LotR) as a model for warriors have to come to grips with the fact that warriors in that model actually become wizards if they hear the level up music.

There are lots of warriors who can compete as individuals on a playing field that includes "high level" wizards. But these warriors are named things like Lü Bu, Hercules, Wonder Woman, and Thor.

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I think 3 of your examples help prove my point (and I'm not really familiar with Lu Bu outside of video games, so I won't make any judgments about him). Hercules' accomplishments/greatness are solely marked by bigger numbers/what & who he beats. We are told cleaning the Aegean stables is a titanic task, that's why we know he's different from some NPC farmhand. He holds the world for Atlas-that is nothing but strength bonuses taken to the extreme (with maybe some help from hulking hurler). Thor is essentially the same, with magic gadgets on top of it. Where other guys smash regular vikings, he smashes giants/the world serpent. Wonder Woman is a lesser Thor-super strong + magic gadgets.

I'll admit I might be missing something, but none of the examples you listed really seem to show how fighters are really doing much more than getting bigger bonuses or new effects, as a caster would. We know Thor is greater than Conan because we're told Thor is smashing giants, not mortals. But even then, Thor's always being tricked by Loki and other giants using magic-it's only when GM fiat makes the opposition go toe to toe with Thor that he gets to shine (with his giant strength, attack bonus, and magic items).
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Post by RandomCasualty2 »

FrankTrollman wrote: Even in the instance where in pure head to head combat the guy with a sword is equal to the wizard on the back of higher damage numbers or whatever the fuck, the moment you step out of combat mini-games and into the role playing portion, the guy who can break physics is better than you.
Possibly, and possibly not. It all depends on what skills can do. Certainly I don't feel that magic has to be innately superior, unless you define it as being capable of anything. In Shadowrun for instance, I would definitely take a hacker over a mage, even though the hacker doesn't break physics.

And the idea should not be so much that wizards break physics, so much as they just have their own variety of physics and mechanics. Just like lockpicking lets you open a lock, so too does fireball let you toss magic fire. Now the biggest problem with wizards is that we try to let them do too much. People go apeshit at a fighter disarming traps, but nobody bats an eye when a wizard turns into a war troll and fucks people up in melee combat. That's the main problem.

Inherently the fact of the matter is that magic doesn't really break physics in a game world sense. It's bound by all the mechanics that everything else is bound by and it does precisely what your rules system wants it to do. The main thing we have to do is simply put limits on what magic can do.
If Heroes are supposed to be marrying the princess and leading armies, it is they, and not Wizards, who should be getting Charm and Mass Charm effects off their power list.
That'd really be more like diplomacy skill, leadership or reputation rather than a true charm effect. Charm effects are more of a deception, where the guy gets forced into liking you for a little while. With heroes, people really do trust them with armies, and the princess actually likes them. It's not really some mojo, magical or otherwise, that they put on people. About the only martial character I could see with a possible charm power is James Bond.

The way I see it being set up is a bunch of binary traits, or power cards basically for noncombat stuff.

So your wizard may have:

Scrying
Legend Lore
Locate creature
Mage Hand

While your Hero type may have:

Disable Device
Trustworthy reputation
Wilderness Lore
Stealth

Now seriously, it's very possible to balance those ability sets so that the two work together fine and everyone contributes.

The main problem with D&D is that right now, wizards are getting way more cards than warriors, and those cards are flat out better than a lot of what warriors get (Stealth versus invisibility). But that's an innate problem that can get resolved. The nice thing about magic is that you can toss any restrictions you want onto it.
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Post by Parthenon »

Alansmithee wrote:I think 3 of your examples help prove my point. Hercules' accomplishments/greatness are solely marked by bigger numbers/what & who he beats. Thor is essentially the same, with magic gadgets on top of it.

We know Thor is greater than Conan because we're told Thor is smashing giants, not mortals. But even then, Thor's always being tricked by Loki and other giants using magic-it's only when GM fiat makes the opposition go toe to toe with Thor that he gets to shine (with his giant strength, attack bonus, and magic items).
Thor is essentially the same as Hercules? Thor drank half the fucking sea! He could also cast spells such as resurrections. Other versions of Thor can fly or change shape.

Now true, he does have magic girdle, gloves and weapon, but he himself is plenty badass.

I'm still slightly confused by this, mostly because I'm getting it confused with actual cards/decks like MtG. Mostly because one "Card" can hold a single ability, or it can hold several abilities and four or five lists of powers which is way more than can fit on an actual card.
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Post by Username17 »

Hercules cleaned the stables by redirecting a river with his fist. That is well outside the realm of what another +2 to strength checks could ever do.

Parthenon wrote:
I'm still slightly confused by this, mostly because I'm getting it confused with actual cards/decks like MtG. Mostly because one "Card" can hold a single ability, or it can hold several abilities and four or five lists of powers which is way more than can fit on an actual card.
You can have an actual power card that says what your powers do individually, and you can also have charge cards that tell you what power cards you get to have.

So you only need one card to tell you what powers you get for having Water as your elemental choice for your wizardy. But then you can have five different in-combat Water cards that have your actual combat action options on them. A far as fitting in the WoF system, you could literally have a pile for each WoF result, and just pick up that hand and read the choices at the end of your turn after having rolled up what the tide of battle had let on your doorstep.

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Post by Red_Rob »

If you're going with cards with abilities, and having a random number of them come up as options each turn, is there a compelling reason not to just make a deck and draw some number each turn?
Simplified Tome Armor.

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Post by Crissa »

Lu Bu is both a historical character and a myth, capable of defeating thousands of men on his own, and having the strength of a hundred.

He's a secondary character in the novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is a historical docudrama written in the 1300s of the times of the second to third century China.

It's actually quite romantic and awesome, with even powerful female characters taking pivotal roles.

Of course, most of us know it by the video games based upon the setting, but there are some awesome movies, like Red Cliff.

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Post by Crissa »

Red_Rob wrote:If you're going with cards with abilities, and having a random number of them come up as options each turn, is there a compelling reason not to just make a deck and draw some number each turn?
Well, we have dice, and we don't want to require someone to shuffle six cards repeatedly.

Or maybe we do.

But personally, I don't think we're in the business of selling cards.

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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Crissa wrote:Of course, most of us know it by the video games based upon the setting, but there are some awesome movies, like Red Cliff.
I got a (poorly subtitled) complete set of the old Chinese TV series.

But yeah, Red Cliff is boss: "Hey guys, who wants to see a historical battle that makes the siege of Minas Tirith look like a fucking skirmish?"
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Post by Zinegata »

Thor and Hercules are both technically gods. The may not be Wizards but they're certainly powered by Divine Magical cheatery.

Lu Bu isn't powered by magic, but he does have legendary loot like the greatest horse in all of China. And he's ultimately still beaten by more cunning strategists, and (if I recall correctly) he meets his end ignominously by hanging.

Honestly, guys with swords in legends are almost ultimately gonna get some kind of magic cheatery. Either the Gods or the local Wizard soups them up, or they get a magic sword.

Why? Because if they didn't the real-world sword-wielding guys around camp will scream "Bull shit! You can't do that with a sword!" at the Skald telling Thor's story.
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Post by Dean »

I believe a problem that's being run into here is one that's run into over and over again especially in the D&D rulebooks. It really helped -me- to identify a number of problems in D&D when I finally pinned it down, and I believe it weighs in here.

The problem is a difference between Abilities and Sources. To put it another way, between Powers and the Source of those Powers. This is primary reason that Wizards will always be given more swag and more awesome than "Fighters": because Wizards have an automatic "Source" for their powers, namely magic.

So Magic for wizards is both a power and a source. When you ask "How did he make that tree appear" you say magic and when you ask "What did he just do" when the tree appears you also say magic. A Fighter can't make a tree appear because he has no Source, he has no well of otherwordly power to draw upon to provide an engine of Deus Ex Machina for him when he needs it.

The solution of course is to recognize that a Source is something that -all- characters have to have by a certain level if they are going to be able to -be- that level. For instance in my system all characters are required to obtain a Source by, in D&D terms, 6-8th level. Because if you are going to, say....walk on water (a very reasonable thing to expect someone to be capable of doing by a certain level) you need a narrative reason why that can happen, and that is your Source. Magic is by far not the only one however, Sources include:

Magic: Fuckin Magic, How does it work? Who knows. But people who have it can walk on water because they have magic. Cool.
Divine: Clerics or People simply blessed by the Gods, they can walk on water because Jesus could, and because no one would question an Angel's ability to do something wierd like that.
Spiritual/Otherworldly: Whether Shaman friend-to-the-Earth power, or the Spirit of a powerful Ancient king that inhabits your character or the blessing of Cthulu. You can walk on water because people barely understand what gives you the powers you have so can't question them
Ancestral: Your Daddy or Grandaddy was so awesome that you can walk on water after unlocking your bloodlines potential.
Artifact: You have a -thing- that makes you awesome. You may not even know what it is but when you really need it your Sigil Amulet glows and you do crazy shit
Super Skill: Often intruding in the realm of the Divinely blessed you are -so- intrinsically awesome that you can run on water just by being that good. You can run on air and use your sword to cut sound. You're crazy and that has been so established that when you do something even -kind- of normal like run on water it's totally cool.
Locational: You draw power from the Fey Realm, or the Shadow Realm, or the Holy Spires of Antioch at which you were blessed. You are a conduit for somewhere elses power so you can run on water by channeling their mojo.
ETC.


The idea of understanding that Wizards are allowed to be better than fighters in peoples mind because their "Class" allows instant access to a narrative Source is, I think, important. With this in mind it becomes a matter of allowing characters access to sources outside of those dictated by class because unless ALL classes have some automatic source the Mages and Psions and Druids and Clerics will -always- be able to do more stuff because even at first level they have something which makes people OK with them breaking all the rules.
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Post by RobbyPants »

deanruel87 wrote:Ancestral: Your Daddy or Grandaddy was so awesome that you can walk on water after unlocking your bloodlines potential.
Does this imply that Daddy or Grandaddy had one of the other "sources" to begin with?

One option is indeed to force people to gain something special by level X. Another is to limit magic so it doesn't get powerful to the point that non-magical heroes can't keep up in a high-fantasy setting.
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Post by Username17 »

RobbyPants wrote: One option is indeed to force people to gain something special by level X. Another is to limit magic so it doesn't get powerful to the point that non-magical heroes can't keep up in a high-fantasy setting.
And that's pretty much it. Madmartigan can compete with a shitty wizard like Willow, but not against a powerful one like Bavmorda. So either you don't allow there to be Bavmordas in your setting, or you make sure that Madmartigan gets turned into a Magic Knight or something by the time he is of a level that Bavmorda is.

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Post by RandomCasualty2 »

FrankTrollman wrote: And that's pretty much it. Madmartigan can compete with a shitty wizard like Willow, but not against a powerful one like Bavmorda. So either you don't allow there to be Bavmordas in your setting, or you make sure that Madmartigan gets turned into a Magic Knight or something by the time he is of a level that Bavmorda is.
That's not a really fair example. No character in that setting could compete with Bavmorda in a straight up fight. She was meant to be a puzzle monster, not something beatable via a frontal assault.
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Post by Username17 »

RandomCasualty2 wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote: And that's pretty much it. Madmartigan can compete with a shitty wizard like Willow, but not against a powerful one like Bavmorda. So either you don't allow there to be Bavmordas in your setting, or you make sure that Madmartigan gets turned into a Magic Knight or something by the time he is of a level that Bavmorda is.
That's not a really fair example. No character in that setting could compete with Bavmorda in a straight up fight. She was meant to be a puzzle monster, not something beatable via a frontal assault.
Well, it was the entire party against her, so yeah. The point is that there wasn't any amount of being more of a bad ass warrior you could be that would bring you to Bavmorda's level of power. While of course, adding more levels of Wizard to Willow eventually would.

If the game went on long enough such that the characters were individually a match for Bavmorda and the end bosses were dragons, demon lords, and other things that required a special effects budget just to walk in the room - then Madmartigan's player would either have to update Madmartigan into a magic knight or scrap the character and make a new one that had some juice.

Because levels of "can do mundane things" simply do not, and cannot go up to "do things that surpass mundanity."

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Post by MGuy »

I'd be forced to agree with Frank at this point. I tried to approach it different ways when I started making my own system. In the end I threw my heads up and said "Every one gets to cast". Its still just an option, and everyone, casting classes or no, have to spend resources on it.

The only other way is to have an awesome limit on what magic can do. Magic can be reduced to parlor trick level or it can have battle only applications like 4e did. I really don't see another way of doing it outside of giving people abilities that are exactly like magic just not tagged as such.
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Post by RandomCasualty2 »

FrankTrollman wrote: Well, it was the entire party against her, so yeah. The point is that there wasn't any amount of being more of a bad ass warrior you could be that would bring you to Bavmorda's level of power. While of course, adding more levels of Wizard to Willow eventually would.

If the game went on long enough such that the characters were individually a match for Bavmorda and the end bosses were dragons, demon lords, and other things that required a special effects budget just to walk in the room - then Madmartigan's player would either have to update Madmartigan into a magic knight or scrap the character and make a new one that had some juice.

Because levels of "can do mundane things" simply do not, and cannot go up to "do things that surpass mundanity."
It depends on what you consider "mundane" exactly. I mean I could totally see batman sneaking up on Bavmorda and batteranging her before she could get a spell off, and he's what we would consider mundane. I could see Legolas taking out a dragon, a hydra or a demon with his bow.

Bavmorda would come out on her balcony and say "Pigs! You're all Pi-" interrupted as an arrow hits her in the face and she falls to hear death. That's totally a way the movie would have ended if Robin hood was the hero instead of Willow.

I could even see circumstances where Conan would beat her. He may just be tough enough to shrug off the spell, unless you'd consider that some kind of mystical property and that's only true if you defined magic that way. Perhaps magic can be fought off by people with a strong "Badass factor", I mean you can totally design it that way such that nonmagic has means of fighting it off, in much the same way you can have a disciplined non-psionic mind fight off a telepath.

The one thing that doesn't work is a frontal attack on her castle with a bunch of meleers when she know you're coming. Aside from that, I really didn't see any great magical defenses on her that would prevent any mundane weapon from fucking her up.

I can see if you're arguing about fighting the undead or some shit and saying that normal weapons don't affect them at all, but seriously, anything that can get killed by decapitation or any other kind of mundane wound is beatable by a fighter.

Now keep in mind, in a lot of cases, this means the fighter has to be willing to pick up a bow. A swordsman is going to run into a lot of things he just can't beat. But even then, the amount of flying ranged attackers you put in your world is up to the designer. There may not be many at all, and archery from atop a pegasus may well not be stable enough to get any kind of reliable accuracy. Or the threat alone from having your mount get arrow'd from below and a fatal drop might be enough to deter people from using flying mounts much.

If you want to use monsters like in D&D, where you have mass teleporting super casters, then yes, you're absolutely right that fighters can't compare. But as far as designing a game from scratch, you could totally design one that could simulate fantasy movies like Willow while allowing fighters to still be useful.

Ironically if you look at manifested Sauron in LotR, you could possibly even make the argument that high level wizards can't compete with him, given he's basically immune to magic, but you can beat him by cutting off the ring. There you've got a Bavmorda level warrior type. Yeah, sure he's a magical being, but he's basically just a dude hitting people with a mace. If you don't beat him the right way, by severing his ring finger.. you just lose. Yet Sauron totally loses to Isuldur and Elrond, even though Sauron could have walked up to Bavmorda and backhanded the old witch without any effort.
Last edited by RandomCasualty2 on Fri May 28, 2010 8:37 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Post by Crissa »

The point isn't what Frank considers mundane, it is what you end up with in Fighter vs Wizard threads everywhere. You get Stealth that can't sneak up on Wizards because wizards can be Invisible, etc and so forth.

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Post by RandomCasualty2 »

Crissa wrote:The point isn't what Frank considers mundane, it is what you end up with in Fighter vs Wizard threads everywhere. You get Stealth that can't sneak up on Wizards because wizards can be Invisible, etc and so forth.
Well yeah, in D&D land that's absolutely true. And if you're talking about just D&D in terms of fighter vs mage duels, then yeah, Frank is correct. What I'm arguing against is that magic users are somehow inherently better than noncasters in every setting, simply by virtue of being able to cast spells.
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Post by Crissa »

But that's not the argument. The argument is that we have to make rules so that the 'mundane' fighter doesn't get stuck with encumbrance leverage ratios while the wizard gets tenser's floating disc (nevermind how you get things onto the damn thing).

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Post by RandomCasualty2 »

Crissa wrote:But that's not the argument. The argument is that we have to make rules so that the 'mundane' fighter doesn't get stuck with encumbrance leverage ratios while the wizard gets tenser's floating disc (nevermind how you get things onto the damn thing).
Not really sure what the big deal there is. Fighters can lift X amount of weight. The disc can carry X amount of weight.

The only real problems exist when people want to create magic that flat out replaces skills to the point of making them useless. Like invisibility. Seriously invisibility needs to be mind-affecting, similar to the psionic cloud mind. So it works at sneaking by simple minded stuff, like animals and shit (in fact due to the fact that many animals are very perceptive, it may well be the best way), but it shouldn't be very effective against things with strong wills.
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