The Gaming Den

You're better off just making everyone a gestalt wizard and making every list a wizard spell.

Not sure how much this applies to D&D, but in general isn't the balance between wizard and warrior in part dependent on how long the adventure is? The wizard only having an advantage as long as the have magic left, once they've used it up the fighter takes over until they can regain it.

Though, if it was that simple, I'd imagine it'd be used to balance things more.

Thaluikhain wrote:Not sure how much this applies to D&D, but in general isn't the balance between wizard and warrior in part dependent on how long the adventure is? The wizard only having an advantage as long as the have magic left, once they've used it up the fighter takes over until they can regain it.

Though, if it was that simple, I'd imagine it'd be used to balance things more.

Nope. That ain't it at all. At later levels there is no amount of time at which a fighter becomes useful.

erik wrote:Nope. That ain't it at all. At later levels there is no amount of time at which a fighter becomes useful.

Out of interest, what level (roughly) would that be?

Thaluikhain wrote:

erik wrote:Nope. That ain't it at all. At later levels there is no amount of time at which a fighter becomes useful.

Out of interest, what level (roughly) would that be?

Depends on how hard core the Wizards want to go. In general, around 7th level, Clerics and Wizards can - through charm monster and planar ally, lesser respectively, simply spend a spell slot once a week to "have a fighter" (or an Earth Elemental, or a Hill Giant, or whatever). If the spelljockies don't feel like going that far, by 11th level the casters can use trivial amounts of spell slots to simply reset their prepared spells in safety whenever they come close to running out. It won't be more than a level or two before they figure that out.

So somewhere between 7th and 13th level, the Fighter becomes completely superfluous whether he's ultra-optimized and killing level appropriate monsters or not. Killing level appropriate monsters and being a modestly survivable meat shield is simply not enough when the Druid is being followed around by Dire Bears and the wizard has charmed a pack of Frost Giants. Combat against level appropriate monsters isn't the hard part of high level adventures, and if that's all you're doing you aren't contributing much.

-Username17

Yes, I could imagine that could be a problem.

FrankTrollman wrote:A more pressing issue for this idea specifically is that individual domains are rarely balanced, and pretty much never balanced across multiple levels. There are no domains I can think of that give level appropriate abilities at low, medium, and high levels. Clerics are able to be effective by voltroning "builds" where they use domains that provide good abilities at level X to cover for holes in their other domains.

The Animal Domain gives the monster slaying antilife shell at 6th, and fucking shapechange of all things at 9th, but the first level spell is calm animals, which is a spell I have never seen or heard of being cast to any effect. On the other end of the scale, the fucking Plant Domain gives you entangle at 1st and Wall of Thorns at 5th, but it gets way worse after that, and the capstone spell summons 4 Shambling Mounds, which is something you don't actually wipe your ass with as 17th level characters.

-Username17

oh hey we're back in the Class Tracks thread