Compared to the fighter who takes power attack, weapon focus (greatsword), shocktrooper, weapon spec(greatsword) and cleave has his abilities almost completely synergize. All of those can work with each other on the same attack action. And this makes super specialization really pay off for fighters.
Wizards DO have synergy, it's just that it's not immediately obvious--unless it's broken--mainly because D&D have accepted some (really stupid) design paradigms for wizards.
- Being able to cast arcane spells makes you completely blow at combat in almost all ways.
- Spells of new levels are almost always universally superior to spells of previous levels. Why bother picking up empower spell and some feat that will let you shape the spell of your fireball when you can just pick up cone of cold?
Then characters could go out there and have some actual abilities without having to spend all their class features and feats on accounting bullshit that doesn't even keep their head above water. Do you think it's a coincidence that Fighters stop being good at almost exactly the point they get their second attack? Or that the point they stop mattering at all at about the same level they get their third attack?
In One Piece, there's an organization of villains called CP9, whose signature skill is that they have surpassed the human limits on really basic things.
For example, to even be a member of this organization, you have to be able to perform six feats:
Float in the air like paper--making you dodge really well.
With a press of your finger, inflict wounds more powerful than bullets at point blank range--giving you a really powerful and stealthy way of killing people.
Jump repeatedly in the air without touching the ground--letting you tag flying opponents, perform amazing aerial combat feats, and be capable of long range travel no one else can do.
Kick a sickle of air at your opponents--always having a good ranged attack.
Move along the ground really fast when you have to.
Harden your muscles and withstand powerful blows.
Granted, a lot of the members have expansions to these abilities. For example, Kalifa has the power to produce bubbles that have a save-or-die ability and Kaku can friggin' turn into a killer giraffe.
They all have the same basics in their fighting style but a few abilities on top of that turn them into totally different characters. Since they've mastered the basics so well, all of them are good in almost any generic combat situation (with a few weird ones like incorporeal enemies--which don't exist in One Piece) but they can develop strange and weird schticks on top of that. And the best thing is that since they've mastered the basics so well that their weird schticks will pretty much synergize with anything they do.
I think you're asking a complicated question that gets to some core questions about D&D. Like most class-based systems, D&D munges together flavor and mechanics in its classes. This tends to create a tension between two schools of thought with regards to classes: the "If you want to play a swashbuckler, play a fighter, don't wear heavy armor, and call yourself a swashbuckler," school, and the, "Playing a neutered fighter is not the same as playing a swashbuckler," school. One of the real centers of the argument, the thing that gets people riled up, is that everyone knows that concepts supported by classes are stronger than ones that aren't. The poor gish (I mean "character with a sword who casts arcane spells," if there's any ambiguity) is a perfect example, since until the endless procession of PrCs and new base classes, the concept was weaker than the core melee classes, which is to say, awful. Likewise, a fighter who uses a light, finesse-oriented weapon ends up weaker than one who doesn't, because fighters don't get any special abilities to overcome the mechanical disadvantages of wielding a light weapon and they've "wasted" all the free proficiencies they get with heavy weapons. 3e did not decide this issue in the core books, because it supported some concepts with additional classes while not doing so for others. If the designers had wanted, they could have said to proto-barbarians, "Play a fighter, we'll make rage and damage reduction feats," and to proto-druids, "Play a cleric and choose 'nature' as your cause, we'll make a domain with polymorph so you can turn into an animal;" but they didn't. However, for other popular concepts such as the gish and swashbuckler, they did exactly that. The splatbooks have pushed the official material towards the second position, but in ways that usually aren't balanced and often don't mesh.
A related issue is that D&D is a game about archetypes. In the case of the PHB classes, it's often easy enough to identify exactly what author Gygax stole the archetype from: the original thief, which evolved to the rogue, from Leiber, the barbarian from Howard and Leiber, the wizard from Vance, and so on. (A few of them I haven't figured out, such as the bard and the druid.) Does the fighter have such an archetype? If so, is the absence of the archetype one of the reasons for the mechanical weakness in 3e? (I have friends who claim the fighter was the strongest class in 2e; I never played it, so I don't know.) For other classes, expecting a single clear archetype may be too much to ask: a single author provides a unifying vision, but ideas pulled from fantasy in general or the legends of real-world cultures are rarely so simple. The bard is a good example: the word's etymology alone is so complicated it's not worth going into, and people's conceptions range from a poet employed by a lord to write propaganda for him, to a wandering minstrel, to the D&D "music magic" bard, to the Celtic priest, and so on.
What it comes down to is that if you're planning on revising things, you have to decide which concepts you want to support, and which concepts you want to (implicitly) screw. Once you do that (have you done it already?), you have to decide which version of each archetype you want to work with. What follows are my takes on some popular archetypes, some of the ones you mention and a few others I feel obligated to point out.
The 3e fighter's flavor text, as written, is "professional soldier." But there are a lot of problems with this, starting with the reality that professional soldiers, as such, didn't exist until the end of the medieval period. Prior to that, everyone who was a "fighter" was either a noble or simply an adult male in a particular culture. In the first category, you find knights and samurai; in the second, Viking and Mongol warriors. Fighting styles and equipment all varied by culture more than by role in a single culture.
This leaves a couple of options. The first is to try to make a professional soldier class, another anachronism to add to the long list in D&D. The major difficulty with this is that I have no idea how a single character plays as a professional soldier: the logical approach to the challenges you list would be, "bring an army," which is no longer allowed in D&D because the rules don't support it. Another would be to play the fighter as the "adult male warrior," where you start out as a putz and become Beowulf or some other archetypal warrior as appropriate to the game world and character concept. However, this obviously overlaps the barbarian's territory, and less obviously the ranger's. A similar approach works for the noble warrior, only your goal is to become Lancelot or some such, and it overlaps the knight and samurai. (Historically, there was a division between "barbarian" cultures with the former type of warrior, and "civilized" cultures with the latter.)
How would such a character meet the challenges you describe? It depends on the culture, but generally has the common element of taking the most direct path to the solution of the problem. I'll note some examples.
A hallway filled with magical runes: You don't. Archetypal warior heroes either get a plot-device-cum-magical-item for dealing with such things from the gods/wizards/ancestors, or they die to them.
A Fire Giant: A Viking would take his axe and hack it to pieces. A Greek would stab with a spear. A knight or samurai would kill it with a sword; the knight has the additional option of charging it with a lance. A Mongol would run around it in circles while pincushioning it. To do this, the character would need to be able to compete with the giant in both damage and resilience.
A Blue Dragon: See above. Of course, dragons in D&D are flying and intelligent, so this tactic doesn't strictly work. The archetypal warrior would either need a way to fight the dragon on an even footing (which probably means flying), or a way to force or trick the dragon into melee. Guile does play a role in many archetypal hero stories, with the heroes tricking opponents who have advantages into giving up those advantages, but this varies by culture. The character needs a magic item or steed or what-not to get flying, or some way of getting the dragon into melee, which probably involves better sensory, stealth, or convincing abilities, and then the damage and resilience to kill it; archer-warriors need none of these things, necessarily, of course. Alternatively, the dragon just screws meleers.
A Bebilith: See above. Noticing a pattern? In particular, the character either needs a way to pierce the damage reduction or enough damage to not care, some way of either dodging or ripping through webs, and some way of not dying to the poison. Whether the warrior survives the ambush directly, by being too tough to die, or sees it coming and works around it is a matter of particular culture. Of course, he isn't going to stop the bebilith from plane shifting away.
A Vrock: The same notes about the blue dragon and the bebilith apply here; again, the character can't reasonably be expected to deal with the teleport escape.
A tag team of Mind Flayers: This is probably one of those encounters the character just loses. If he did win it, he would throw off the flayer's mind blasts and then kill them swiftly.
An Evil Necromancer: I don't think it's possible to build a non-caster capable of dealing with a 10th-level caster without a radical revision of the magic system, so this one counts as a loss.
6 Trolls: Damage and resilience, then a torch; or feather them from a distance, followed by fire arrows.
A horde of Shadows: Another lost encounter, most likely. Warriors are not known for their ability to kill things that are already dead. If they did succeed, it would be with outside help.
Should be definite wins (trolls, fire giant): 2.
Draws (bebilith, young blue dragon, vrock): 3
Losses: 4
In general, what these various warriors need is obvious: melee ability comparable to the things they're supposed to be killing or ranged ability and a way to keep away, and better resistance to the instant screwing effects they're so vulnerable to now. About the only other general suggestion I can make is that mounted characters need mounts that don't die when a high-CR threat looks at them funny. There are, however, multiple ways to implement that. The fighter-design approach would be to split the necessary abilities up into feats, then let people select a combination as appropriate to gameworld and concept. The barbarian/knight/samurai-design approach would be to create several classes, one for each culture you want to see represented, with fixed abilities.
Almost all of the legendary aspects of the knight are contained in the paladin: the stories that Europeans told themselves about the medieval period as it was ending, such as the Song of Roland, were about what D&D would call paladins. This leaves only the knight's fighting styles, both dismounted with sword and mounted with sword and lance, characteristic plate armor, and noble rank to hang a class on. I don't know if that's enough.
The samurai is actually a more complex topic. The real question is, which samurai? During earlier periods of Japanese history, the samurai were mounted nobility not much different from knights. (Japanese armor was probably not as developed as European, much like European metallurgical techniques didn't really catch up with Japanese ones until after the medieval era; but the essential role, and many of the tactics, were identical.) After the Tokugawas took over, the samurai gradually evolved into impoverished nobility in a parallel of the process in Europe, but without all the other changes that European society underwent; the kimonoed warrior and the notion of the code of conduct come from idealizations of this period. Finally, the Japanese constructed their own stories of the samurai after the Meiji government eliminated the caste system. All of this was filtered through Western perceptions before it made its way into D&D, not to mention that the Japanese were picking up Western ideas at the same time. (Akira Kurosawa drew from Shakespeare, among other sources.) In summary, will the real samurai stand up? I have no idea what I consider the "canonical" samurai, much less what other people do.
The swashbuckler is an archetype based in the post-medieval era, after guns had started to erode the value of heavy armor and an increasing amount of the fighting done with swords was dueling between nobility, not warfare. Given this, I don't have anything to work with except the fighting style, which used lighter stabbing weapons to take advantage of the weaker armor, the weaker armor itself, and the dueling style.
I think that the archetypes that D&D is working with aren't really analagous to real-world people. They're much more self-referential than that. The Fighter represents, not a professional soldier or a viking warrior, but a D&D Fighter. Really, D&D has been arund longer than most of us have, and the D&D rules generate our stories. Today our legends are told to us in mediums such as Lodoss Wars and Legend of King Arthur, and those things are inspired by actual D&D games often in a scene-for-scene manner.
So the point isn't "what would Sir Charles Hammerhand do?" The question is "If we were going to tell a tale of sword and sorcery today, what would a swordsman do?"
And in that case, I think it's pretty clear that he'd somehow kill that dragon. Because hey, noone tells stories about the brave knight who totally got schooled by a dragon and had to run away while his friend the wizard shot it with laser beams from fa away until it died.
FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1151351075[/unixtime]] And in that case, I think it's pretty clear that he'd somehow kill that dragon. Because hey, noone tells stories about the brave knight who totally got schooled by a dragon and had to run away while his friend the wizard shot it with laser beams from fa away until it died.
The main feature however of most stories is that monsters have notoriously poor tactics. Dragons in stories don't use their full tactical advantages most of the time and don't choose to fly when they're fighting the swordsman, which enables him to kill it in melee combat.
In fact, very rarely do you see flying things utilizing ranged attacks unless the enemy has them too.
If we want to tell a story that's "like Lodoss War" or whatever, then generally we would have to be willing to have dragons land and fight on the ground where swordsmen can reach them, as opposed to just making breath weapon fly bys.
And I'm not sure how to adequately represent that. We could always have a "dragon code of honor" that forces him to land if the enemy doesn't have ranged weapons or something like that. But really, the main problem with dragons is getting them to sit still so the swordsman can kill them, since mobility whoring will beat the swordsman easy.
FrankTrollman wrote: So the point isn't "what would Sir Charles Hammerhand do?" The question is "If we were going to tell a tale of sword and sorcery today, what would a swordsman do?"
And in that case, I think it's pretty clear that he'd somehow kill that dragon. Because hey, noone tells stories about the brave knight who totally got schooled by a dragon and had to run away while his friend the wizard shot it with laser beams from fa away until it died.
I'll freely admit I'm not a typical D&D player, since I tend to be more interested in "realism" (which is short-hand for cultural authenticity and world integrity). So that's what I'd like to see out of the classes, which is my personal response to the poll.
In a more global sense, what most people bring to D&D comes from previous incarnations of D&D (and similar games, e.g. Palladium or whatever), movies/video games/books that may or may not fit the standard setting (which is, admitttedly, nebulously defined), and cultural preconceptions about the setting (there's definitely an American cultural image of a Viking, which involves a horned hat, lots of furs, and an axe; and I'll be damned if some of that hasn't leaked into the barbarian). Given the last two, I think it's useful to think about the cultures that movie/book/video game creators base their stuff off and that are the original sources of their images in the zeitgeist.
As for slaying dragons, yes, the fighter ought to be able to slay dragons. Slaying dragons is an archetypal warrior role in practically every source I mentioned above for D&D. This presents a problem, though, because there's a big disjoint between what a dragon is capable of in D&D and how the archetypal dragon behaves. This is because, I imagine, dragons as presented elsewhere are not superintelligent flying spellcasters, but instead are big dumb predators, or even if they're supposed to be superintelligent flying spellcasters, they _act_ like big dumb predators. If D&D dragons act like their stats say they should, a fighter will either have to use ranged attacks or fly, either from a class ability or from magical equipment. I think most people agree that flying as a class ability is not a trait expected for any of the warrior classes, so that leaves equipment. If you want fighters et al. to be able to kill dragons without using flying equipment or ranged attacks, then the dragons have to play dumb or be dumb, there's just no way around it.
Guest (Unregistered) at [unixtime wrote:1151439734[/unixtime]] If you want fighters et al. to be able to kill dragons without using flying equipment or ranged attacks, then the dragons have to play dumb or be dumb, there's just no way around it.
More importantly, in stories, heroes don't generally kill dragons by flying at them or using ranged weapons. Well, sometimes they use ranged weapons, such as in The Hobbit, but rarely do you see a flying hero, not unless it's on the back of another dragon and a lance duel or something.
Really too I think flight is a boring ability, because it nullifies a lot of the tactical wargame aspects and makes terrain virtually nil. That's my main objection to just having everyone fly. Really I'd like to come up with some paradigm by which we can keep swordsmen without handing out flight or ranged weapons to everyone. Because I don't want the game to make all characters end up looking the same. That'd be boring.
And really whenever everyone has a single ability, like good ranged attacks or flight, the game ends up becoming more one dimensional because everyone does the same thing.
If having a net meant that you could make dragons reliably crash for lots of damage, would dragons get into the fisticuffs that we want them to get embroiled in?
Missle weapons do double damage against flyers (or something like this). Flying is defacto the rock to melee's scissors. So make something the paper which might as while be missle weapons. I know it isn't so archtypical for dragons but so what? I suggest some dragons have pussy vestigal wings that don't work anymore because they have grown too big to be lifted off the ground. Spice of life.
It almost makes me miss the clumsy flight rules from the miniatures days, where winged flight was tough, and you'd only actually be in combat for a teeny bit while missile weapons and spells wailed on you whle you tried to make your turn for another straife...
Made landing and fighting a way to cut down on the damage they'd do to you while increasing the amount of focused damage you could do to your foes individually.
But then we'd have to make a way that your mount, your minions don't just topple over and die from splash damage. If someone in a cone effect makes a save, those behind them (in a cone) don't have to?
Minions are knida meant to get owned from splash. One thats all splash is good for and two its a knight vs a Dragon, not a knight and his army vs a Dragon.
People do need to have mounts that don't keel over instantly in an AoE though.
You should be able to hide from cone or breath damage by getting cover or something. It just sucks that no matter how far you stick the caddy back, or behind some rocks, he still dies if the dragon breaths in that direction.
And how is the Knight supposed to save the princess if she can't take cover behind him?
Behind rocks works better against a cone than a burst because the mook only needs to arrange total cover from the Dragon rather than the point of origin of an explosion that hasn't happened yet.
FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1151468407[/unixtime]]What if flying was just really dangerous?
If having a net meant that you could make dragons reliably crash for lots of damage, would dragons get into the fisticuffs that we want them to get embroiled in?
-Username17
Definitely. Slightly off topic, I've been playing Red Hand of Doom and every damn session I wish we had access to an Earthbind spell (a la Magic:the Gathering). As it is, there's not much we can do against flying enemies except try to blind them with glitterdust. Or hope they're stupid enough to fly into some trees where we can web them up.
The easiest thing I could think of would be simply limiting the amount of actions you can take while flying.
There's nothing that says you have to be able to concentrate on spells or fire ranged weapons while flying. In fact, we could just as easily say that dragons can't use their breath weapon while flying. Thus we can allow only melee attacks while flying, but we don't care so much about those, because you can ready actions to attack back at people doing swooping attacks.
Now that does remove the dragon's rather archetypical breath weapon strafing run, but if we want to balance dragons, we probably don't want them doing that anyway since that makes the temptation to stay in the air too great.
If you cut the breath weapon damange in half and let you add your shield bonius to your save if the dragon was flying it would make strafing much less viable.
Or you could just say that the breath weapon doesn't recharge when flying, or recharges much slower.
Some fantasy authors, trying for 'realism,' have set forth ideas like dragons being filled with (and producing) hydrogen, which makes them (the dragons) naturally bouyant. They can make pretty fireballs, and it lets them fly despite their weak, relatively small wings.
Mainly it's just funny, but it also gives a god reason for giving them only one opening strafe before they have to land. It also doesn't work with the d&d draconic system of colors and immunities, but fuck that.
My favorite dragons are Swanwick's, and those have missiles. Fantasy F16s forged of cold iron. You're still just as screwed as a knght in shining armor with no ranged weapons and no cover, but I'm OK with that because they make for a great story.
Not any critical hit, because that would unbalance high-damage and high threat critical weapons. Honestly, I think the concentration (or perhaps balance) DC being set by the damage is fine. A critical hit does more damage and thus it is more likely to drop you.
Otherwise people are just going to throw bullshit touch attack crap because 1 in 20 is a critical... and that kind of tactic makes me feel dirty in my mouth.
Flight is a type (C) effect, huh? I ike that, but most animals don't have an appropriate skill, and would need a decent rule of thumb one.
Another throw-out suggestion... What about Ranks in a skill controlling how much benefit you get from stats? Or ranks changing the difficulty levels? Something to make increasing stats stats or ranks worth it, but not exceed the curve?
Well the problem with the "make a check if you get hit" is that it still forces you to have an archer type. And probably, at least as far as dragons are concerned, there's no reason for them not to fly. Instead they'll just take feather fall as a mandatory sorcerer spell.
Well, technically, feather-fall would screw up alot of types of flying... It would impede your ability to move through the air. I suppose in 3.5 it's one of those free-action spells, but feather-falling towards your opponents only lets them hit you more.
I'm just thinking there needs to be more drawbacks to flying, being spotted, being hit, being impeded, and as a corollary, an advantage to being on the ground when being shot at. For instance, there's nowhere to hide in the air, and breath weapons or other spells should be particularly nasty to things that have no cover on at least one facing (the ground, for instance).
And I don't see why anyone wouldn't either have cover (think shield wall, phalanx) or a ranged attack, let alone both.
It should be noted that feather fall only effects the velocity vector along the z axis. Dragon travelling rapidly gets nailed, starts falling, casts feather fall = glider. Its x and y velocity vectors are unaffected.
(Feather fall has not changed in this respect since 1st edition. I've had a character take more damage from casting feather fall than he would have otherwise - falling 100' is much better than travelling 5500' across a cavern and smacking into the far wall while travelling really fast.
But stalling affects the X and Y axis. If getting stalled out was a real threat from ranged attacks on fliers - that would make even feather fall an unattractive position. You're stalled until you hit the ground, so the feather fall just makes you take longer to get out of a position that's obviously bad for you (although it does protect you from falling damage, it does nothing for the arrow damage).
