OSSR AD&D 1e Players Handbook

[tussock]

Ah, you're trolling. Suddenly everything makes sense. My bad, no longer feeding the troll.

[deaddmwalking]

Ah, you're trolling. Suddenly everything makes sense. My bad, no longer feeding the troll.

I don't think he is. He argues that 'fighting man' conceptual space used to include Cavaliers, Paladins, Rangers, Berserkers, etc. In the beginning, you could (MTP) any 'fighting man' character from a book. As classes were defined, the conceptual space was diminished. Now people don't want 'Fighters' having the skills required to camp in the woods because that's the Rangers job. People don't want Fighters to have the skills required to sneak up on their opponents because that's the thief's job. Notice that nobody objects to the Ranger being a sneaky bastard, either.

I won't put myself into the role of defending the 3.x fighter. We all agree that the conceptual space is extremely limited. Especially the 'not having skills'.

But I don't think that the direction that D&D took was necessarily bad. Having a 'specialist class' has merit - you just can't make that an 'exclusive domain'. If you have someone BETTER at trap-handling, that's fine, but other people should have the ability to deal with traps, too. It's okay to have a BETTER healer, but other people need to have healing too.

Imagine, for a moment, that clerics weren't strictly better than a Paladin at everything - in concept, a 'cleric' as a better caster but lesser warrior, and a 'paladin' as a better warrior but lesser caster makes sense: they cover the same thematic area, but their specializations differ. On the other hand, if you had a cleric class then created a Paladin and took away healing, wearing armor, and a good HD, you're basically left with a wizard.

The solution is to allow overlap between classes; this protection of 'niche roles' has to go. The Sorcerer Versus Wizard can show what we're talking about. They both cover the 'arcane magic-user role'. The differences between them are mostly minor (same HD, same save progression, same spell lists). People don't say Wizards suck because sorcerers (and I know that Sorcerers suffer for slower spell level advancement) - but they're in the same thematic area. The difference is that they're both permitted their role and the areas of overlap are not a problem.

If people would let 'Fighter' overlap other roles more fully, there would be less of a problem.

[Stinktopus]

Also in 3e, the non-combat skills are more complete and Fighters get less of them than ever before. But that's not a problem from the dawn of Thieves, it's 25 years later now and the skill system has started to exclude pure MTP resolution from people's games. DMs by now will ask for a skill check when you try things, so fuck trying things when you don't have skills. No falling back on ~60% success stat checks when you fuck up, 3e drops you right off the RNG.

And 3e skills fall apart if you lean on them much: diplomacy notoriously can't handle any actual diplomacy, MTP is still vital to the game. But when people talk about Fighters not being able to do things outside combat that's what they mean: 3e DMs asking for a skill check when your class doesn't give you any skills you can use anywhere, or 4e punishing you for even being in the fucking room with your Fighter.

Well, you're supposed to stop being a munchkin and make a "well-rounded character*" with a couple of points in everything. At that point, you're either supposed to face constant DC 10 challenges as the DM makes the story work for the party, or you're supposed to have the "true fun" of constant, hilarious failure outside of a few moments where the whole table jumps up and cheers because someone successfully tied their shoelaces without garroting themselves.

*Bonus points if your DM requires you to explain how you got ranks in Disable Device and forbids you from taking more until you've encountered, and failed to disarm, a certain number of traps.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The neckbeards have a relatively simply platform:

• No High Level Adventures! If something can't be done by a human with a lever, they don't want it to be something that can be done.
• Always Succeed! Conversely, if something could even theoretically be accomplished by a man with a lever in the right place at the right time, they want to succeed at doing that. If they announce that they are going to "the mountains" to "find Osama Bin Laden's cave", they expect to succeed. Hell, their actual example was that they would tell the DM to shove it and walk away from the table if the DM expressed incredulity over basically exactly that action.
• No Rules! This actually flows from the first two points. They view rules of any kind with suspicion, because any ability that had any rules text at all could only allow them to succeed at tasks beyond normal people with sticks or disallow them from succeeding at tasks that are theoretically within the realm of normal people with sticks.

Now, you might notice that that is basically the 4rry argument for why skill challenge rules don't need to work. And well, yes it is. There is a lot more overlap between the OSR and the 4e crowds than either would like to admit. That is also why both groups are fringes of the hobby compared to the 3e players.

[Cyberzombie]

I don't think he is. He argues that 'fighting man' conceptual space used to include Cavaliers, Paladins, Rangers, Berserkers, etc. In the beginning, you could (MTP) any 'fighting man' character from a book. As classes were defined, the conceptual space was diminished. Now people don't want 'Fighters' having the skills required to camp in the woods because that's the Rangers job. People don't want Fighters to have the skills required to sneak up on their opponents because that's the thief's job. Notice that nobody objects to the Ranger being a sneaky bastard, either.

It's actually a pretty good argument. The fact that we can have a superclass like wizard and sorcerer that get to draw from eight schools of magic, and yet D&D subdivides fighters into barbarian, ranger, cavalier, rogue, etc.

[Lago PARANOIA]

But you'll note the 4e Rogue is also a much better combatant than the 4e Fighter, so I don't think that niche exclusion argument holds water.

No.

[darkmaster]

You know... I think the problems with the rogue could be fixed if we thought less King of Thieves and more Desert Punk. For the uninitiated Desert Punk is an anime about a legendary mercenary said to always get any job done without fail. He does this by using various tricks such as balloons in the shape of himself a sweet ass backpack-mounted grappling hook that makes it looks like he can fly and various other tricks. Though a mixture of cunning, cruelty, and an actually insane level of disregard for his own life and the lives of others he built up the belief that he is an actual literal demon in human flesh. One of his feats through the show is literally taking down a tank with nothing but his wit, foul mouth, and a single shotgun shell.

Under this metric the Rouge would be more about field control and subterfuge. They don't contribute by flanking the enemy and hitting them for lots of dice but by convincing the enemy they're up against an army so they run away, or by sowing confusion in the enemy ranks, or limiting their ability to move and so on by engendering a belief in their, ideally fake, supernatural powers.

For anyone interested Desert Punk is a hilarious comedy about how that very same man I just described loses everything he worked so hard to obtain because he can't focus when faced with a pair of tits. It is misogynistic, and perverted, and in a couple places borderline soft core porn and it is pure gold. Last time I checked it was available on netflix.

[Seerow]

You almost had me wanting to check out that show until your last line. And then it reverted from interesting concept back to the sort of tripe that makes people hate anime.

[tussock]

@No. ?

People don't want Fighters to have the skills required to sneak up on their opponents because that's the thief's job.

Bullshit. Who objects to sneaky Fighters? Paizils recently got all butt-hurt because the Rogue lost their last unique class feature, because unique class features are kinda the point of having a class and level system in the first place, but players totally want those options for Fighters. People explicitly hated on the 3e Fighter being excluded from the stealth/perception game for it's whole era, and 4e changed that so they weren't.

As you might note, I disagree with the rest of your thesis. Unique class features are vital, it is all you have at the end of the dev cycle. The 3e Fighter not actually having anything unique, just a few things faster, was a huge conceptual problem for the developers. Making everyone like the Fighter is also not a solution to the problem of Fighters: see 4e.

To your concept, someone will write a 4th level Paladin spell that's better than your best Cleric spells, or a 4th level Cleric spell that makes them better warriors than Paladins are forever after, and there goes your clever balance trick out the window.

The fact that we can have a superclass like wizard and sorcerer that get to draw from eight schools of magic, and yet D&D subdivides fighters into barbarian, ranger, cavalier, rogue, etc.

Wizards that can do everything was a design decision C1988, because they simply couldn't figure out how to fit ~5 different partly-shared spell lists into the space they had for Wizards. Many players were not fans, people liked Illusionists (and the other non-core early casters). 3e Wizards are just Monte having a hard-on for 2e Wizards.

Clerics who are better than everyone was a design choice of C1998 because people hated playing 2nd edition Clerics. But that was because their class features are "protect PCs from level drain", "cast CLW repeatedly after combats", and "the DM can screw you at any time" in an edition where the DM was encouraged to screw everyone over quite a lot. 2e's Cleric is 3e's Bard, and fuck playing that guy.

None of that is really related to niche protection, especially not in terms of player demand. Players have been screaming for Fighters to get more skills and more access to skills since ... well, since skill-based games came out in the 80's and everyone outside D&D got to have their cake and eat it too. People have been wanting more unique Clerics and Wizards all that time: the Beguiler, the Dread Necromancer, very popular despite their modest power. 4e is in part a response to that.

[darkmaster]

It's a comedy, but the characterization of the punk as a morally bankrupt hooligan for hire is really good, it gets... really serious at the end and it's kind of a sudden change that isn't in the show's favor (it's still okay but a couple more episodes for the transition wouldn't have gone amiss). Anyway most of the jokes really work, not in small part because the punk is a terrible person and he's usually the butt of the joke. For instance here is an excerpt from an episode about him and another mercenary fighting over who gets to sell a young girl into slavery to pay off her fathers debts. and then this happens. Does it help to say the punk is like 15 or something so his weakness is not out of line with that of his peers IRL. Also, all those things are on display, but that's also the joke. The punk is a terrible person in no small part because he is a misogynist asshole who can't control his hormones.

[Seerow]

It's a comedy, but the characterization of the punk as a morally bankrupt hooligan for hire is really good, it gets... really serious at the end and it's kind of a sudden change that isn't in the show's favor (it's still okay but a couple more episodes for the transition wouldn't have gone amiss). Anyway most of the jokes really work, not in small part because the punk is a terrible person and he's usually the butt of the joke. For instance here is an excerpt from an episode about him and another mercenary fighting over who gets to sell a young girl into slavery to pay off her fathers debts. [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEzqjt13z1I]and then this happens. Does it help to say the punk is like 15 or something so his weakness is not out of line with that of his peers IRL. Also, all those things are on display, but that's also the joke. The punk is a terrible person in no small part because he is a misogynist asshole who can't control his hormones.

No, the more you talk the less interested I am. Because now you've added in "The protagonist is the butt of every joke" and "The protagonist is a 15 year old asshole" to the list of traits known about the show, and both of those are awful.



Seriously, your initial described concept was basically Mercenary Batman without the daddy issues, and without billionaire quality gadgetry. Which sounds awesome. Then you go and throw a bunch of other shit on it that hits every note of "This is why I don't watch anime".

[darkmaster]

*shrug* I said it's a comedy, and it's basically a satire of all the things that are wrong with anime. The protagonist is a hypercompetent asshole who has the misfortune of also representing the misogyny endemic in the genre so while he still does really amazing things his greed and views on women ruin his life... So what I'm saying is Desert Punk is basically a Greek tragedy but with more laughs.

[shadzar]

You know... I think the problems with the rogue could be fixed

no it cannot. as long as the rogue class existed to protect that niche class to be able to do those thing, then no other class could have any reasonable chance to do them.

throw the barbarian, ranger, thief, etc back into the fighter class, then he will have lots of things to do like the cleric or wizard. spread the thief skills type shit back out to everyone like OD&D, and then you can play Conan if you want. a fighter specializing in those skills would then be your "rogue" that picks pockets and climbs walls. a swashbuckler would be your tightrope walking wall climbing multiple sword wielding fighter. the advanced archer would be your woodland fighter. the gladiatorial fighter would be the barbarian path....just put it all BACK into the fighter class where it came from to split the class is the ONLY way to fix the rogue, by removing it.

IF everyone is a murder hobo, then they are all murdering "thieves". if everyone is a thief, then why have a thief class?

imagine the "list" of things a fighter could do if you merged all those classes back into fighter, and compare that to the common spell list for wizard or cleric.

HELL even give the fighter the type of "spell", for lack of a better comparative word, progression. 1 at 1st, 2 and 2nd, 2 and 1 from the second tier of abilities at 3rd. just look at the wizard or cleric spell progression and make all those functions of the other classes, parts for the fighter character to choose as he gets levels, but he doesn't have to memorize shit daily, or have limits to their uses (like 4th), and then the fighter can choose his path and become stronger.

if the cleric and wizard can still do the "rogues" stuff except backstab, then the rogue is superfluous. backstab/sneak attack is all the rogue really is made for, and it isnt really that good.

[darkmaster]

Fuck off shadzar and learn to fucking read. That said, if your so fucking attached to the idea of the rogue as the thief that you can't possibly allow it to cover a different conceptual space you don't have to stop anyone else from being a passable to competent thief. You just have to a) make the rogue a better thief, or b) give the rogue other interesting things to do. Seriously, let other people find traps and sneak around whatever, but give the rogue things like shape change limited to humanoids, let them walk though walls and stuff, give them cool things to do that make them better infiltrators and you can still let other people do the whole sneak and steal thing whatever.

Fuck man, give them the ability to speak to rodents and like a rat or bat cohort that can spy for them.

[Maxus]

Darkmaster, the sooner you accept that Shad's a troll who argues odd things and stop responding to him, except for the lulz, the happier you'll be.

[darkmaster]

This is true, but Shad gives an oddly good impetus for airing ideas and then later if people really hate them you can blame it on being mad at Shad. In this case, if you REALLY have to have sneaky rogues or no rogues at all then it's truly is fine to let other people sneak at least as well as the party rogue as long the the rogue has other things to do. Even something as simple as letting them walk through walls would be a game changer. Then the rouge is just MASSIVELY faster than the rest of the party, they could run ahead and play the saboteur, give them like the Tome Assassin's death attack on top of that and they could also take out soft targets like enemy wizards it's not something you absolutely need but it's really useful and it's also COOL so people would want to do it.

[Username17]

If one of them has to go, the Rogue is a much better character concept than the Fighter. The fact that the Rogue "knows tricks" means that people don't really seem to object when he starts getting magic tricks. Rogues can just self generate phlebtonium and no one seems to mind.

The 2nd edition AD&D Epic Level Thief simply starts casting spells and zero fucks were given. But if you so much as let the Fighter turn his sword flaming and everyone loses their fucking minds.

-Username17

[darkmaster]

That is also a good point, however something you said recently and, ah, not so recently, has also gotten the wheels in my head turning. It is certainly true that the fighter has no space in its concept for super powers. But that doesn't have to be the case for the fighting man. The problem is that people have become intrenched with the idea that the fighter must only stab things, but we can create a new conceptual space that can hold stabbing things AND doing interesting shit.

Now if you will recall this thread you made a little choose your own adventure to decide classes and posited a "hero" class as one of the end states, and over here in the Warhammer Fantasy review you mention the existence of a protagonist class and I think you already see the angle I'm driving at. People EXPECT the hero to do impossible things. To defy the laws of physics, to overcome the big bad and rescue the dragon from the ferocious fire breathing princess.

Now as for solidly building the idea that the hero is just magic into that conceptual space over in the Weapons of Legacy thread I put forth the idea that the fighter should awaken the potential of their weapon and vice versa. This idea could be build right into the Hero Class, the Hero has something special about them, perhaps it's a distant ancestor, or maybe a great destiny, but whatever the case their weapons and armor as they awaken their powers through training and effort become more and more fantastic right along with the hero and this is something that can be passed down, so the price when the kingdom is faced with great distress can take up his great ancestor's heirlooms and once again awaken the great power both within the equipment but in his own blood.

Personally I think this is a rather elegant solution. It lets the kind of generalist stabby type have things they can do and also allows for a wide variety of the classic fantasy tropes.

[OgreBattle]

You know... I think the problems with the rogue could be fixed if we thought less King of Thieves and more Desert Punk. For the uninitiated Desert Punk is an anime about a legendary mercenary said to always get any job done without fail. He does this by using various tricks such as balloons in the shape of himself a sweet ass backpack-mounted grappling hook that makes it looks like he can fly and various other tricks. Though a mixture of cunning, cruelty, and an actually insane level of disregard for his own life and the lives of others he built up the belief that he is an actual literal demon in human flesh. One of his feats through the show is literally taking down a tank with nothing but his wit, foul mouth, and a single shotgun shell.

Under this metric the Rouge would be more about field control and subterfuge. They don't contribute by flanking the enemy and hitting them for lots of dice but by convincing the enemy they're up against an army so they run away, or by sowing confusion in the enemy ranks, or limiting their ability to move and so on by engendering a belief in their, ideally fake, supernatural powers.

For anyone interested Desert Punk is a hilarious comedy about how that very same man I just described loses everything he worked so hard to obtain because he can't focus when faced with a pair of tits. It is misogynistic, and perverted, and in a couple places borderline soft core porn and it is pure gold. Last time I checked it was available on netflix.

I hadn't known anything about it other than the round headed helmet in a desert setting, will check it out.

[Username17]

Now as for solidly building the idea that the hero is just magic into that conceptual space over in the Weapons of Legacy thread I put forth the idea that the fighter should awaken the potential of their weapon and vice versa. This idea could be build right into the Hero Class, the Hero has something special about them, perhaps it's a distant ancestor, or maybe a great destiny, but whatever the case their weapons and armor as they awaken their powers through training and effort become more and more fantastic right along with the hero and this is something that can be passed down, so the price when the kingdom is faced with great distress can take up his great ancestor's heirlooms and once again awaken the great power both within the equipment but in his own blood.

Personally I think this is a rather elegant solution. It lets the kind of generalist stabby type have things they can do and also allows for a wide variety of the classic fantasy tropes.

That isn't an elegant solution. That's not even a fucking solution. Your suggestion is "I think that the Fighter should get some magic weapons and weapon specialization bonuses" which is bullshit. We tried that. We tried that in AD&D. And it doesn't work, because it's bullshit.

There are genuinely "mundane flavored" abilities that scale to any power level you are likely to see. Stealth, Scouting, and Social are the three S-words of things characters can do that could plausibly contribute at any level of power. If you need to sneak past, find, or get the assistance of a "god of fire" rather than the Black Knight, you can just do that. Stabbing things, on the other hand, is something that has an outright limit to our ability to give an actual shit. There are enemies that you cannot effectively sword to death.


Too big.


Too numerous.

Giving Fighters a magic sword and a bonus to using it doesn't fucking work. It didn't work in 1984, it didn't work in 1989, it didn't work in 1997, and it doesn't fucking work now. It's not a fruitful line of inquiry. It's not an elegant solution, it's not a solution. It's just fucking around with the same myopic horse shit that Fighters have been stuck with since 1974.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

@tussock No. It's beyond the scope of this thread, though, because it's a numerical problem unique to 4E D&D rather than a conceptual problem generic to fantasy games.

[virgil]

That isn't an elegant solution. That's not even a fucking solution. Your suggestion is "I think that the Fighter should get some magic weapons and weapon specialization bonuses" which is bullshit. We tried that. We tried that in AD&D. And it doesn't work, because it's bullshit.

Was darkmaster necessarily advocating just bigger bonuses? If your sword casts army-sweeping beams of light and cleaves dimensional barriers, you're still aesthetically a Fighter even if you're actually just a Mage with a material focus.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If your sword casts army-sweeping beams of light and cleaves dimensional barriers, you're still aesthetically a Fighter even if you're actually just a Mage with a material focus.

This would be more convincing if:

[*] Every time someone makes a Fighter revision or reimagining made to fix the failings of the D&D fighter, they never even come close to that.

[*] Every time someone makes a melee character class that does those things, they never call it fighter. They're always called paladins or psychic warriors or swordmages or whatever the fuck.

The absolute closest anyone has ever come to making a non-casting sword-based class that had real superpowers and people were comfortable calling 'Fighters' (or Warblade, close enough) was in the Book of Nine Swords. And even then, the powers fell way short of what was actually needed. Not to mention that -- what's that? -- the book's nickname is Weeaboo Fightan Magic.

The most visually impressive superpower in Book of Nine Swords is 'fireball someone by thrusting your sword into them', which is like a 2nd or 3rd-level effect. 95% of powers in Bo9S are shit that people could staple onto a VAH/DMF without anyone noticing.

[nockermensch]

@Frank: What if the fighter's "magic sword" is a sorcerer follower?

The more I think about this, the more I like it. People who fap to fighters seem to have an essential failure of imagination in that they want to keep their concepts low level forever. Giving the Fighter class an explicit "Finds Intelligent, Spellcasting Weapon" ability on level 3 should have the following advantages:

1) It shouldn't be too abusive, since the behind the scenes idea is to give a half-strength leadership feat to a very weak character concept. The weapon/sorcerer would forever remain at Fighter Level -2, so it can't by itself eclipse the party's main casters.

2) It lets the fighter players keep feeling "pure". It's not their character that's casting ghost form or plane shift, it's their weapon!

3) More deviously, it could work as a gateway drug for spellcasting. At first the MC controls the weapon, but then he starts leaving more and more of the spellcasting details for the fighter's player. Maybe by the end of that campaign the player has noticed how cool spells are, and gets cured from the "playing bad classes" disease.

[Cyberzombie]

What if the fighter's "magic sword" is a sorcerer follower?

You don't need to get very elaborate with giving fighters all kinds of planar teleportation powers or wide area nukes. People that play fighters don't want that stuff anyway. If people wanted to be doing that they'd be a wizard.

Fighter players have simple needs. All fighter players really need are a good set of noncombat skills and combat dominance. The biggest problem with the 3E fighter isn't that he's lacking in noncombat powers, it's that he sucks in combat compared to the spellcasters.