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I agree. A famous last stand should come with a 100% chance that (the princess got away, your friends solved the riddle without getting mobbed, the macguffin was activated) with the consequence of "...but you died so that it could happen". D&D just isn't going to give that sort of narrative power to a non-caster player though.
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Aug 27, 2014 05:12
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Oh man, that rules sounds really cool. Better make it a Wizard spell. That way Fighters can ask their Wizard buddies to cast it on them.
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Aug 27, 2014 05:25
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AlphaDog posted:Once per campaign, make a Famous Last Stand (otherwise known as "Hold the bridge!" or "I'll stop them, you get out the back" or "you shall not pass"). Epic! Like Lancelot dragging himself along the shaft of Morden's spear to cut him down or Bleys on the steps of Kolvir.
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Aug 27, 2014 08:14
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FoliatedFold posted:Epic! Like Lancelot dragging himself along the shaft of Morden's spear to cut him down or Bleys on the steps of Kolvir. Yes. Or like Musashibo Benkei. Or the lone Viking on Stamford Bridge. Or the two Varangians at the siege of Constantinople.
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Aug 27, 2014 08:36
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But you can only use this once? In your entire career? Ever? And all of your examples end up with the people doing them failing in the end, which is an even lamer thing if I can only do it once ever. Combine that with the spell Wall of Force, which trivializes every bridge in all of those stories, and this is all pointless. Why even include it as a class feature at that point? Where is the fun in knowing that, if things ever get REALLY bad, you can use your oh-poo poo button once, but never again? I like the Bleys example much better: fighting up a staircase of hundreds of men, two at a time. It was bad luck that he lost (didn't even DIE). And that wasn't something he could do only once, but something it was suggested he had actually done more than once. If a level 20 wizard can walk the planes of reality and wish things into existence, a level 20 fighter should be able to fight up a thousand-foot staircase full of soldiers, and it shouldn't be any more limited or any harder.
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Aug 27, 2014 08:53
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QuantumNinja posted:... a level 20 fighter should be able to fight up a thousand-foot staircase full of soldiers, and it shouldn't be any more limited or any harder. I'm really not disagreeing, the Last Stand idea was more about fitting a superheroic warrior into the D&D Next vibe. Like, you can do this amazing thing, then you die! Fighters are good now! Also, sure, dial back wizards. But that's not happening, ever.
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Aug 27, 2014 09:07
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AlphaDog posted:Also, sure, dial back wizards. But that's not happening, ever. 4e 
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Aug 27, 2014 09:09
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Pffft, that's just a story to frighten children.
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Aug 27, 2014 09:29
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AlphaDog posted:I agree. I can just imagine that an early game could be broken to pieces by powergaming level 1 adventurers who declare last stands constantly and defeat everything, then immediately grab another character sheet out of their bag.
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Aug 27, 2014 11:42
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You can get better bonuses than last stand gives by being turned into a dragon. And as an added bonus you're not guaranteed to die. This is the thing. Caster supremacy is so insidious and pervasive that it influences the thinking even of people who are completely opposed to it. Even when you do your best to come up with something mythic and awesome for a Fighter to do, a lot of the time there is a spell - one of like 50 spells a Wizard will have at their disposal - that does the same thing better.
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Aug 27, 2014 12:45
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Jack the Lad posted:Even when you do your best to come up with something mythic and awesome for a Fighter to do, a lot of the time there is a spell - one of like 50 spells a Wizard will have at their disposal - that does the same thing better. I'm well aware of that, and I don't think my thinking was affected by pervasive wizard supremacy. The conversation was about making fighters better, not making wizards more in-line with everyone else. If you want to talk about de-powering casters, we can do that as well.
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Aug 27, 2014 13:06
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Jack the Lad posted:You can get better bonuses than last stand gives by being turned into a dragon. And as an added bonus you're not guaranteed to die. this is why the biggest part of fixing caster supremacy isn't buffing the Fighting Man, it's putting actual restrictions on a wizards phenomenal cosmic power. Which isn't to say there shouldn't be a wizard that can summon 108 skeletons (for exampe), but that should be what the Necromancer is all about, period. No Wishing, no Planar Traveling, if you want to do that kind of stuff you need to pick a different archetype. The fact you could (admittedly very cheesily) summon those skeletons and have full access to the entire repertoire of wizard spells for an entire day is the ridiculous part. Wizards have no defined role, they have no "purpose" beyond "do all the magic" and it's the worst part of their design. As someone once pointed out, Wizards represent every wizard in every book and movie ever created. They're Gandalf and Dumbledore and Ged and Dresden, but with none of those characters individual flaws or weaknesses. I know some people here dislike the 2e styled school restrictions but it's the simplest example of how to actually curb casting and present real ups and downs to the class. edit: hell even sorcerers suffer far less from this issue because they're stuck with whatever spells they choose until they have a chance to level. It doesn't fix the problem but it sure mitigates it a whole hell of a lot more than Wizards. treeboy fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Aug 27, 2014 |
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Aug 27, 2014 14:34
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Yeah, take 2es interrupting of spells and restricting schools, enforce needing materials (and make the materials for high level spells as difficult to get as magic items), and add 5es concentration feature to prevent stoneskin plus fly plus greater invis, and you've gone a long way. Granted, divination and travel spells probably need to just be removed entirely, but 2e plus 5e is a start.
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Aug 27, 2014 14:38
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Actually of all my examples Harry Dresden is probably the one that should be paid the most attention to. He's a really powerful character with lots of neat tricks who still can't just do everything. He sucks at, or flat out can't do, a ton of stuff seen in the series (healing, shapeshifting, invisibility, pretty much anything not fire or frost) and generally just burns things down really well, he's a stereotypical Evoker.
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Aug 27, 2014 14:42
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mastershakeman posted:Yeah, take 2es interrupting of spells and restricting schools, enforce needing materials (and make the materials for high level spells as difficult to get as magic items), and add 5es concentration feature to prevent stoneskin plus fly plus greater invis, and you've gone a long way.
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Aug 27, 2014 14:44
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Nihilarian posted:I agree with restricting the wizard's schools, but not enforcing materials. For the same reason I don't think you should have to keep track of arrows. It doesn't in any way effect the balance, it just makes it more boring to play. Depends on the material. If there's one that has rp effects it matters a whole lot. And not keeping track of arrows is weird too
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Aug 27, 2014 15:09
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mastershakeman posted:Depends on the material. If there's one that has rp effects it matters a whole lot. And not keeping track of arrows is weird too It's probably only worthwhile to keep track of things when you're actually making conservation of resources part of the game. Say, a Dark Sun sort of thing. If you have twelve arrows, and those are all the arrows ever that's a different game than if you're playing "an archer."
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Aug 27, 2014 15:48
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gently caress keeping track of mundane arrows. Magical sure but mundane regular old arrows? Everyone has as many as they want
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Aug 27, 2014 15:49
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treeboy posted:this is why the biggest part of fixing caster supremacy isn't buffing the Fighting Man, it's putting actual restrictions on a wizards phenomenal cosmic power. But this works fine for 4e wizards. The number of different colors of sparks a wizard can make when waving their hand isn't the problem. It's a basic issue of narrative assumptions and resolution mechanics.
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Aug 27, 2014 15:52
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Ferrinus posted:But this works fine for 4e wizards. The thing with 4E versus any other E is that...everyone interacts with everything using the same mechanics. That's the beginning and the end of the lack of caster supremacy &etc. There's a single unified framework and you can make any class as versatile or focused as you like and not screw with the balance of narrative agency. Spells in 5E are a completely different framework than any other part of the game and I don't think you can fix them without fixing that. E: beaten by edits.
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Aug 27, 2014 15:54
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Ferrinus posted:But this works fine for 4e wizards. That's because 4e gave wizards an actual role (controller, generally) to perform within the group other than general "problem solver extraordinaire!" I'm not talking about the variety of colors or sparks or whether they can deal fire *and* cold *and* acid damage. I'm suggesting the base conceit that "here is the width and breadth of narrative control given to players of which some classes have part, but the wizard has all" is flawed. If, for instance, planar travel is a thing, then have a wizard build centered around portals/teleporting. But at the same time don't allow the same caster to do everything else just as well. Allow his narrative to be constrained, much as the Fighter, Rogue, Ranger have their scopes constrained. This doesn't mean the Portal Wizard gets no offensive ability, but it shouldn't be the same kind of ability that a blaster Evoker can wield, and neither should be able to control the undead like a Necromancer (who likewise sucks at illusions and blowing things up) edit: Caster supremacy is not just a problem for fighters, it's a problem for wizards too. And that is where the majority of solutions arise which aren't silly reproductions of the same kind of ridiculous abilities to make the Fighter a little more like Daddy Wizard. 4e brought the wizard down far more than it raised the Fighter up. treeboy fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Aug 27, 2014 |
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Aug 27, 2014 16:05
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I've never quite been able to wrap my head around why being able to cast Burning Hands means you must also be able to cast Identify. I'd be much more in favor of simply limiting the schools you get: pick, say, two, and that's it.
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Aug 27, 2014 16:28
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Is having aparty without a healer viable in 5E? It was possible in 4E with creative work arounds. Asking because our group composition is; Warlock(Fae), Warlock(Star), Fighter, Wizard (Necromancer) and Monk. Our fighter is going Eldritch Knight and I am likely going Elemental Monk. Trying to guage our survivability for the precon.
Kortel fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Aug 27, 2014 |
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Aug 27, 2014 16:29
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treeboy posted:That's because 4e gave wizards an actual role (controller, generally) to perform within the group other than general "problem solver extraordinaire!" They actually were. The "controller" role was kind of bullshit; it pretty much meant you did basically whatever seemed useful at the time, though it was mostly to the enemy rather than to your allies. The thing is, all the best classes tended to bleed out from the edge of their roles - by the end of 4e, fighters, rogues, warlords, clerics, etc. all had incredibly versatile powersets and you could pretty much build a damage-dealing warlord or debuffing rogue or whatever. quote:I'm not talking about the variety of colors or sparks or whether they can deal fire *and* cold *and* acid damage. I'm suggesting the base conceit that "here is the width and breadth of narrative control given to players of which some classes have part, but the wizard has all" is flawed. I'm not talking about damage types either. If you can cast three spells per day, Fireball, Hypno Ray, and Teleport isn't more or less balanced than Fireball, Fireshield, and Firewall. "Well, if you can plane shift, ever, you can't disintegrate, ever" is a bad design philosophy and it's the same kind of logic that says it's okay for the rogue to be terrible in combat because it has such good social skills or okay for the fighter to be a fumbling moron because their DPR is so high.
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Aug 27, 2014 16:30
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Even setting aside balance concerns people in this thread are looking for ways to make Next's Fighter more interesting because Next's Fighter as it stands is pretty loving dull. All anybody has to say good about it is basically "but look at those numbers! Four attacks in one turn! Wow!" Like, yeah, class balance would be nice too and all but there are reasons someone could want a more exciting martial class beyond keeping up with the Potters.
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Aug 27, 2014 16:48
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Froghammer posted:I've never quite been able to wrap my head around why being able to cast Burning Hands means you must also be able to cast Identify. I'd be much more in favor of simply limiting the schools you get: pick, say, two, and that's it. This is why Dread Necromancers, Beguilers, and Warmages from 3.5 where actually good and pretty balanced. They were thematic and good at what they did, but they weren't able to do everything.
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Aug 27, 2014 16:59
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Ferrinus posted:I'm not talking about damage types either. If you can cast three spells per day, Fireball, Hypno Ray, and Teleport isn't more or less balanced than Fireball, Fireshield, and Firewall. "Well, if you can plane shift, ever, you can't disintegrate, ever" is a bad design philosophy and it's the same kind of logic that says it's okay for the rogue to be terrible in combat because it has such good social skills or okay for the fighter to be a fumbling moron because their DPR is so high. But niche protection and well-defined combat roles are good game design, though?
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Aug 27, 2014 17:01
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Piell posted:This is why Dread Necromancers, Beguilers, and Warmages from 3.5 where actually good and pretty balanced. They were thematic and good at what they did, but they weren't able to do everything. Also, they had some kind of thematic idea behind them. The Necromancer does stuff with skellies, the Beguiler does stuff with illusions, the Warmage does stuff with WAAAAUGH, the Wizard solves problems.
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Aug 27, 2014 17:05
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Boing posted:But niche protection and well-defined combat roles are good game design, though? A 3e, 4e, or 5e game featuring four wizards, would run great (putting tedium/accountancy issues aside for a minute here), despite the fact that everyone's got access to the same pool of powers. 4e wouldn't get worse to play (though it'd certainly be harder to make characters in) if all martial classes had access to all martial powers, rather than just the martial powers of their own class. Stopping a necromancer from teleporting or an evoker from mesmerizing would not fix 5e. Even if literally nothing existed but evocation spells, such that fighters and wizards did absolutely nothing but deplete enemy hit points, there'd be a basic problem of one character using at-will powers but another character using daily powers, of one character making declarations and another asking permission.
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Aug 27, 2014 17:11
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There's also the fact that burst damage is far, far more valuable than 'all day' damage. This is a big part of why Battle Master obsoletes Champion.
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Aug 27, 2014 17:16
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Jack the Lad posted:There's also the fact that burst damage is far, far more valuable than 'all day' damage. Hence why shotguns and rocket launchers are so popular in FPSes!
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Aug 27, 2014 17:31
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A Planeshifter shouldnt be able to disintigrate becaue they shouldnt be great at both planes magic and evocation. What they should be is a controller, dealing chaos or arcane damage while shifting and debuffing (get it) monsters and teleporting allies around. And when narrative wants for planes magic theyre raring to go. Id advocate Major and minor schools, you gain spells from both at same rate and minor school is capped at 4th/5th level spells. Rigged Death Trap fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Aug 27, 2014 |
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Aug 27, 2014 17:39
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Rigged Death Trap posted:A Planeshifter shouldnt be able to disintigrate becaue they shouldnt be great at both planes magic and evocation. What they should be is a controller, dealing chaos or arcane damage while shifting and debuffing (get it) monsters and teleporting allies around. this is exactly what i'm talking about and actually something i'd considered delving into. When choosing your school, you select two other schools that cap out at 4th or 5th level spells, and you cannot use any other spells from other schools (exceptions for scrolls since anyone can apparently use scrolls, but you'd be required to make the same int DC)
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Aug 27, 2014 18:03
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treeboy posted:this is exactly what i'm talking about and actually something i'd considered delving into. When choosing your school, you select two other schools that cap out at 4th or 5th level spells, and you cannot use any other spells from other schools (exceptions for scrolls since anyone can apparently use scrolls, but you'd be required to make the same int DC) This harkens back to the 2e Wizards who had specialized and opposed schools and its better than the current 5e Wizard even if it still has issues. The other thing that I'm not keen on is how easy it is to get spells. Maybe I'm just an old school grog but I always felt that the acquisition of spells and ability to switch around known spells has been too easy. I like the idea of the really powerful spells being epic items unto themselves. Sort of like a Paladin finding a Holy Avenger. Again, doesn't solve all the issues but does reign in the power of the Wizard which I agree is the better solution rather than trying to give martial characters more powers.
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Aug 27, 2014 18:29
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A wizard who could only cast odd-numbered spells from a single school of magic would still leave the fighter looking stupid because the problem! Isn't! The wizard's! Versatility!!!
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Aug 27, 2014 18:34
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Ferrinus posted:Stopping a necromancer from teleporting or an evoker from mesmerizing would not fix 5e. Even if literally nothing existed but evocation spells, such that fighters and wizards did absolutely nothing but deplete enemy hit points, there'd be a basic problem of one character using at-will powers but another character using daily powers, of one character making declarations and another asking permission. Yeah, creative use of spellcasting was the best part of 3.x and the solution to martial characters being boring is that everyone should have spellcasting and there should be no dedicated spellcasters. Every class would look like the Ranger/Paladin/Bard style of mixed abilities, or you could silo out spellcasting into a different template. Everyone gets on equal footing, everyone gets access to the most fun part of the game, and you mollify people who might authentically (if, perhaps, ridiculously) care about everything that is supernaturally extraordinary being diegetically "magical."
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Aug 27, 2014 18:45
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Isn't part of the problem with spells, that they "just always work" and bypass both the dice and the GM almost completely. Look at the dungeon world wizard. It does everything the DnD wizard does, spell lists, vancian casting, can do everything, etc. Basically just a perfect pastiche of a DnD wizard. But all of the spells and abilities that would break the game in DnD work because they all have explicit adjustment valves for the GM. Ritual does everything, but the GM can set the cost. Polymorph comes with GM caveats. Summon monster allows you to summon a monster with just the ability you need, but you don't get to decide what monster you're actually getting so it might have some unintended weaknesses. Perfect summons allows you to summon even gods, but you can't control what you summoned or send them back, so you'd better be ready to deal with whatever you summoned and so on. Everything that "just works" is about as powerful as what the other classes get and everything that could break the game doesn't "just work". Would it be possible to at least partially fix the DnD wizard while keeping "the feels" by just rewriting all the too powerful spells to have similar GM adjustment valves so that the wizard can't just declare that "this is what happens now".
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Aug 27, 2014 19:13
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Ferrinus posted:A wizard who could only cast odd-numbered spells from a single school of magic would still leave the fighter looking stupid because the problem! Isn't! The wizard's! Versatility!!! The fundamental problem is that a fighter's ability to change reality is only by applying his sword or his thews to it and hoping he is strong enough, and a wizard's ability to change reality is by picking one of his three dozen ways to rewrite how reality works, and watch it work. Playing a full caster in D&D is literally about managing a bag of absolutely game-breaking tricks. This problem crops up because the reality-rewriting wizard is a such a fundamental part of the genre that you have to address that problem to fix it. The three options, without modifying the fighter, are to (1) make the bag so small that they can't hope to get tons of use from it, (2) fill the bag with things that aren't game-breaking, or (3) make pulling things out of the bag cost a lot (which is sort of like 1). We also have (4), which is to give fighters the same amount of narrative power as the wizard. 4E fix the tricks in the bag while also bringing fighters up, rewriting wizards and fighters using the same mechanisms of shifts, pulls, pushes, and statuses, so both of their abilities rewrote reality in the same way. Edit: and then, obviously, balanced these moves with respect to each other since they were in a cohesive framework where that kind if thing was straight-forward. Dungeon World does this with a combination of the first three with the Cast a Spell move (though the first of the three choices should probably be removed), a hyper-limited prepared spell list (if you're casting a level 9 spell today, you only get to prepare a level 1 next to it), and removing all of the hyper-dumb spells. It also did the last, providing the fighter things like Bend Bars, Lift Gates and Through Death's Eyes, which allow them to rewrite reality in a way a wizard cannot. FATE beats on caster supremacy through limiting the bag to reasonable things and giving fighters the same high-level mechanics. Abstracting everything into aspects and stress tracks works because a wizard can't simply auto-win---there simply isn't a mechanical way to do that. Shadowrun, which matches up tolerably well with the Dresden Files in terms of how wizards are taxed by spellcasting, makes an effort to decrease the size of the bag and to make it cost a great deal. To cast a spell in Shadowrun you must (a) make a roll to successfully cast a spell and (b) resist damage from casting said spell. Wizards can get off four, maybe five decent spells, before they need serious healing (which they can't get except by sleeping it off), so they've got a few amazing tricks but they usually also carry a gun. (Incidentally, Shadowrun also lets you replace your fight man's muscles and nerve systems with roboparts for permanent Bear's Strength/Haste out of the gate, which helps a lot.) QuantumNinja fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Aug 28, 2014 |
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Aug 27, 2014 19:13
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Ferrinus posted:A wizard who could only cast odd-numbered spells from a single school of magic would still leave the fighter looking stupid because the problem! Isn't! The wizard's! Versatility!!! you're right, Wizard scope is not 100% of the problem, it is about 80-90% of the problem however. Fighters need more ability to affect the narrative, you are correct. They do not need (nor does any class really) the ability to literally dictate the events that will unfold for everyone else. 4e did not magically grant fighters narrative control powers to reshape the cosmos or obviate whatever they felt. It increased their bag of tricks, within the confines of the combat/skill system, and brought casters down to be on par with them. Ideally i would be rid of stupid spells like wish (outside of DM narrative objects like a literal D'jinn in a bottle that anyone could use which frankly does not need mechanical support), restrict the scope of wizard narrative control through scaling back of certain spells and limiting versatility. While buffing fighters to be more interesting within their sphere of influence (interesting daily/encounter-esque design/combat control while avoiding phenomenal cosmic power) edit: here i made a chart pre:Fighters Wizards |---------------o---|---------o---------| too lame ideal too awesome edit2: furthermore the assumption that 4e works simply because Wizards and Fighters work off the same basic mechanical concept of at-will/encounter/daily is the dumbest poo poo i've ever heard. It's perfectly possible for two classes within a game to have completely identical mechanical construction and yet be completely imbalanced within the game. Likewise it is not impossible to make mechanically divergent classes perform similarly to one another, which while more difficult, is also infinitely more interesting. I really enjoyed 4e, and the classes played very differently, but the similarity in class mechanics/progression was boring as gently caress. treeboy fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Aug 27, 2014 |
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Aug 27, 2014 21:52
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Don't fall into the fallacy of 'If I limit what the Wizard can do everywhere else or how he casts, its perfectly okay for him to fly off the rails and destroy everything with a spell! Balance!' It doesn't work. What you end up doing is either punishing the Wizard player when he exhausts his spells, and encourage more 15 minute work days, or punish him for existing at all. 5e's use of Cantrips has mitigated that to some degree, as has Concentration on spells, but its still a flimsy system. In short, gently caress them for not using the same kind of resource system idea that 4e had. Parity across the board or don't include caster classes like this at all. edit: Making the Wizard's dick explode whenever he casts a spell doesn't change the fact that the spell is still patently bullshit and breaks the game over his now-dick-blood-covered knee is what i'm getting at. You need to gut spells, not how they use them. Boing posted:But niche protection and well-defined combat roles are good game design, though? Not when your niche is 'I can do everything better than everyone else, including the people who specialize in that field' i.e. Wizard. Strength of Many fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Aug 27, 2014 |
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Aug 27, 2014 22:10
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