Community

Apr 30, 2012 -- 12:59AM, TheMormegil wrote:

Apr 30, 2012 -- 12:56AM, hatta wrote:

I think what they mean by "fighting" is not necessarily combat in general, but weapon based combat. Fighters really should be the king of the weapon rack. They know weapons and armour, it's their bread and butter.

I'd rather have a specification then. The problem is, there's a sizable amount of people who refer as fighting as in combat pillar in general. They have good reasons to do so, too.

It would be better if they had been more specific.

This is why I like the concept of Roles.

With Roles, the Fighter can be "the best at fighting" defensively, the Ranger can be "the best at fighting" offensively, the Rogue can be "the best at fighting" dirty, and the Warlord can be "the best at fighting" alongside friends.

If the Fighter is just "the best at fighting" period, then what are the other three "the best" at? Why should a Ranger be any less good in a fight than the Fighter? Why should a Paladin, or Swordmage, or Warden be less good in a fight than the Fighter?

If this weren't a game that was, in the end, _about_ fighting, I'd be less upset. But D&D is and always has been an RPG that is built around killing monsters and taking their stuff, so I can think of no good reason why ANY class should be less good at that task than any other.

That the designers have not realized this (or have not spoken about it if they have) worries me. It seems to me that eliminating the circumstances where one of the players leaves the table or pulls out an iWhatever to waste time on because they're useless at that moment--say a Wizard during a battle or a Fighter during a gala--should be a high-priority goal of the design team.

Moving on:

Points 2 and 3 contradict each other. The entire point--the entire appeal!--of characters like Beowulf and Roland and Conan and Aragorn is that they are SUPERHUMAN. I don't mean in the spandex-cape-and-heat-vision sense, but in the sense that they are capable of accomplishing feats that are explicitly and specifically beyond the ability of any mundane mortal, no matter how skilled that mortal may be.

There comes a point where no amount of "overwhelming skill" will be as much fun to play as the Wizard who can fly and teleport and shoot lightning from his fingertips. Thus, I think there MUST be an acknowledgement that Fighters are supernatural. Not magical, necessarily (though I do choose to interpret D&D fighters as magical in the same vein as Shadowrun Physads are), but supernatural--literally "above normal". Fighters don't push the limits of what people are capable of; they exceed them. That's what makes them heroes; that's what makes them capable of standing as equals among people who can call down pillars of fire with a gesture and heal wounds with a word; that's what makes them PCs.

On the subject of points 4 and 5:

So where does this leave Rangers, who have classically been the best archers and who clasically have been the masters of fighting with a weapon in either hand?

Where does this leave Rogues, who have classically been peerless masters of the dagger, short-sword and rapier?

Where does this leave the Paladin, whose iconic badge of office has always been the Longsword, and who favors plate armor and shields in every edition?

Where does this leave the Barbarians, who in their berserker rage were capable of absorbing staggering amounts of damage; so much that even the Fighter in his heavier armor would not have survived?

The Fighter cannot be the all-and-everything of combat in D&D if these other classes exist. If the absolute best that any other class can ever hope to be is second-best to the Fighter, then what incentive is there to play anything other than a Fighter (remember that D&D is ultimately a game ABOUT fighting)?

Of point 6:

This says to me that, despite years of discussion on the topic in the community, the designers still don't understand what the "Linear Fighter, Quadratic Wizard" problem really was.

I say "was" because the problem HAS been solved, though the designers are choosing to throw it away. That's foolish, but I understand that the designers are not truly at fault for this; it's the fans, who have spent those years complaining about the solution because it was too different for them and offended their sensibilities who are really to blame.

The "Linear Fighter, Quadratic Wizard", the 5-minute workday; it's all tied together, and it all stems from a broken and unbalanceable root--the Vancian casting system. These problems are going to exist for as long as that system does, because the Vancian system allows the Wizard to expend five encounters' worth of combat resources in a single encounter, and the Fighter cannot do the same. So long as that flaw exists, these issues will exist.

The correct answer--and the answer that 4e used--is to give the Wizard one fifth as many combat resources, but let him refresh them five times more often. That the Wizard and the Fighter used the SAME resource system in 4e is coincidental and utterly irrelevant to this.  

Apr 30, 2012 -- 12:59AM, wuzzifizit wrote:

I'm going to have to agree with Qmark here.  Balance is a difficult thing to achieve in games.  

A game like chess has balance because everything is symmetrical.  The problem with that is that the game does tend to get old after a while.  A great deal of thought goes into each move, and it can take quite a long time to play.  While this is fine for a two-player game, the dynamic of a table top RPG doesn't lend itself well to this form of play.

A game like Starcraft can achieve balance while allowing for asymmetry because it's updated constantly.  This works out because it's an electronic game that handles the calculations for the player, so the player(s) don't get stuck on older versions.  Obviously, this would not work for D&D because it's a print game.  The playtest will help in this facet some, but imagine if WoW never had any updates after the Beta.  It just doesn't work.  There are too many people playing the game, looking for ways to break it.  

A game like Dungeons and Dragons doesn't have to be perfectly balanced.  Play isn't competitive, it's cooperative.  Embrace the imbalance.  It makes the game feel more organic.  I'm not saying that quadratic casters and linear everyone else should be the way, that's obviously a problem.  

If a Fighter is 70% combat, 20% exploration, and 10% social, so what?  That doesn't stop a player playing a fighter from interacting in the social situations.    Even if it does stop you, don't you still need time to go to the bathroom?  In my groups, we certainly don't all go at once, holding hands.  Likewise, we don't all go look up a rule or answer the door when the pizza guy arrives as a team, either.

When the fighting begins, it's a turn-based combat.  No matter what, it's always going to be someone's time to shine, anyway.

Balance may be difficult, but since I know for a fact that its achievable, I will not accept 'Its too hard' as an answer. Every class can have its own unique approach to combat without stepping too hard on the Fighter's toes. Bards can inspire their allies and confuse their enemies, while stabbing a few guys or some such. Rogues can go slipping in and out cutting people down at the ankles and spewing out witty taunts, Clerics can go all Old Testament, Wizards can throw fireballs and recreate time or something extravagant, Monks know Kung-Fu, Paladins can stare into the Abyss and make that overrated jerk blink, and Barbarians can hulk-out and toss planets because that'd be totally cool.

None of that makes the Fighter insignificant or less of a combat master. He's still going to walk through the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil because he already massacred all the evil there and used their bones to club their souls.

In the same manner, the Fighter having the ability to be a well-spoken and educated man isn't going to make the Bard or the Wizard unnecessary. I'm not sure what his social and explorational niche should be, but I'm sure there are plenty of people with ideas to fit him in nicely. Or her, to be fair.

Apr 30, 2012 -- 1:42AM, M4kitsu wrote:

That's what I want classes to be. Specialists. Mr. "I hit people with things" that Mearls is describing is not a specialist.  

Yeah, and I want classes to be broad archetypes that can be customized to represent different specialties. I want to choose the role for my fighter, not be pushed into one not of my choosing.