Why are high level wizards far more powerful than high level fighters?

Because low level Wizards are shit (and often consistently killable in one move) by low level Fighters. Plus Wizards manage a finite resource per day, and are next to useless without it.

Since this is a 3.5 thread ('cause lets be honest, while there is fighter/wizard imbalance in multiple games, we all know OP is talking about 3.5), here's my suggestion!

In my own games, I just have a very powerful "fighter" class, so the difference is not that great. Here's the recipe:

Start with a Warblade, from Tome of Battle. Increase skill points to 8+int mod, grant all skills as class skills, and have all three saves as good saves. Remove all class features except Weapon Aptitude and Stance Mastery, and in its place give the Swordsage's Sense Magic, Dual Boost, manoeuvres known, manoeuvres readied, and stances known, and access to the Swordsage's disciplines as well as the Warblade's (you still recover manoeuvres as a warblade). Change its proficiencies to the Fighter's (so yes to ranged weapons, heavy armour, and tower shields), and give it Basic Damage: same as the monk's Unarmed Damage, but can apply to any melee attack if the damage value is better. Now scratch out the "warblade" name and call it a Fighter.

This Fighter class is both useful and fun to play. He's as durable as anything, has loads of combat options, and thanks to his skills he is useful out of combat as well.

In the RPG I'm working on, anyone can potentially wear armor, use weapons, use magic wands, scrolls, and rituals.

The "wizard" is recast as the guy who gains progressive bonuses to the wizardy props, and the "fighter" is recast as the guy who gains progressive bonuses to the weapon and armor props.

As a result the fighter is something reminiscent of its 3.x and 4e incarnations, but the wizard is much closer to the 3.x artificer -- he enhances and uses magic items and rituals with greater faculty.

Both can vaguely do what the other can with some faculty (ie a wizard CAN hit someone with a stick, and a fighter CAN activate a portal or resurrection scroll, especially if someone's explained how), just with much less convenience.

Because of bad game design

Because you play bad systems.

Because the 3e devs hated how in AD&D Fighters could consistently fuck wizards at any stage of the game.

As an AD&D player, nah. That's not really true.

For one, caster supremacy is plenty alive in AD&D. Maybe not as bad as 3e, but still.

For another, its pretty clear that the 3e devs made the Fighter with alright intentions. They overestimated how much feats add to the game, because it was a new thing and they thought they were the best idea ever. Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity (or in this case, naivete).

Surviving to become a high level wizard was tough, so all that power was something you earned. Overtime wizard's were designed to be less squishy earlier on, but still retained the power imbalence.

Other factors include the design choice to limit fighters to be "close" to what is possible in real life and there's no real life wizard to compare the fictional game wizard to, so sky's the limit.

And that wizard's can cast from any school of magic under the sun instead of being more specialized where you would get universal spells and your chosen school spells, nothing else.

Finally the idea of wizard's having a finite resource pool gets thrown out at higher levels when scrolls and wands gets introduced.

A lot of it has to do with 3e being rushed as shit though.
You might remember during AD&D2e a few shitty rushed books came out, including one that had optional rules in how to strip classes of their major abilities and rehash them out via point-buy system where you could spend X points to acquire . Spells costing fuck loads of points, getting better at fighting usually only costing a few points.

The system was weird and mostly unusable, but its influence on 3e's design was clear. As a lot of the fighter feats were the same as ones fighters could 'buy' in that system. Unfortunately due to still wanting to be a class based system, they only went half-way with this sub-system, making it so fighters had to buy their own abilities, while spellcasters had most of their shit from the start.

Shouldn't they?
A man witht the power to conjure elements and bend reality on one side, a man with a metal stick on the other side.
Geee I wonder how it is possible..

This.

Wizards wield the powers that bend the very fabric of reality to their will.

Fighters wield sharp sticks.

Lets assume your talking in terms of narrative wise power, what makes a fighter less powreful? any level 20 is beyond exceptional and almost demi-godhood levels of power, the only reason you think fighters would only still be "i hit it with my sword" at this point is you/your groups lack of imagination.

Because you're assuming the fighter in unarmed and unarmored.

But unless they're one of those "I have all the magics from level 1" mages from the Federation, a good suit of power armor or even the right kinds of super drugs can make any man-at-arms far more useful in a fight than a magic-user class.

Because DnD and inspired games give casters too big toolbox of different spells and abilities to influence the world. Narrow specialization of magic users can be a lof of fun. Giving all martials chance to learn small magic tricks or divine magic (prayers) is good too.

Congratulations on never playing a game other than DnD.
How does it feel to be the equivalent of being someone who only eats at McDonald's?

>Why are high level wizards far more powerful than high level fighters?+ 0 post omitted.
Depends
On
The
Setting

>Level 20 Wizards wield the powers that bend the very fabric of reality to their will.
>Level 1 Fighters wield sharp sticks.
FTFY

>Level 20 Fighters wield the sharpest sticks
FTFY

What's the difference between a level 1 fighter and a level 20 fighter besides the fact that he has a bigger, sharper stick and stronger arms to wield it?

Explain to me how a muscleman with a sharp stick should be able to defeat a wizard who can bend reality to his will?

There is a simple rule - a bullet travels faster than you can notice it being shot at you. And knifing someone in the face takes less time than making magic gesture to disintegrate attacker.
Here goes your "power to bend the very fabric of reality"

>Explain to me how a muscleman with a sharp stick should be able to defeat a wizard who can bend reality to his will?
Because the muscleman's sharp stick can bend the wizard's reality to his owner will

By being faster than the wizard, just for starters.
By not being dependent on any outside power source and/or limited "fuel" to bend said reality, having reliable sharp stick.
By being combat ready and combat hardened, so keeping it cool when things get nasty.

And so on and forth. If you are basing your entire point on the fact that reality bending alone makes you invulnerable then you, dear sir, are retarded

Levels are a gauge of relative power. If a level 20 fighter and a level 20 wizard are not equivalently threatening to one another, they are not the same level of power and should not be considered the same level.

Shooting someone in the face in any decent and half-decent system is simply more effective. Or throwing a chair at them. Who cares if you can summon M'yigoi, the Demon Lord of 8th Circle, if you are dead before you can move?

U wot m8?

I know people love the whole underdog overcoming insurmountable odds thing but realistically (as much as the term can be used to describe a fantasy scenario) it makes no sense for a fighter to be able to defeat a wizard without some sort of magical or divine aid.

>it makes no sense for a fighter to be able to defeat a wizard without some sort of magical or divine aid.
Yes, because it totally makes no sense to be killed by catching a tomahawk with your face. Being a wizard makes you apparently invulnerable and immortal.

Aside of course just killing the wizard

I've got a clue for you and I seriously mean it. Go try other games than D&D to see how other systems handle magic. You will realise how absolutely retarded the whole "quadratic wizardy" is.

Why are wizards bending over reality? Wouldn't that cause all kinds of trouble, like blackholes and getting erased from existence?

A fireball is something real, or else it wouldn't work.

>time stop
>haste
>chain lightning, fireball + a bunch of other offensive spells in quick succesion
>fighter is now dead before he can blink

Fighters can never achieve the same heights of power that wizards can.

Fighters will also inevitably become less powerful as they age. The opposite is usually true for wizards.

Except any half decent wizard has prepared for that eventuality and is very difficult to surprise.

Killing a high level wizard, whilst possible, isn't as simple as walking up to them and shooting them in the face.

...

Explain to me how a parlor magician should be able to defeat Conan the Barbarian?

For that to happen, the wizard would have to act first, don't you think?
Oh, right - you didn't.

Seriously, this is NOTHING else than D&D having absolutely awful magic system design that is perpetuated over decades and literally THE ONLY RPG system that has this problem.

I guess we need to give martials some kind of inner-energy magic that draws power from their badassery. Ki or something

>isn't as simple as walking up to them and shooting them in the face.
>I play games where getting shot in the face is not lethal
Stop playing PT, please. Go try other games. They are fun.

But OP, there is bout a single game where it happens and why should you even play it? Everyone knows it's badly designed and there are numerous different, much better games around.

One of them can shape reality, the other one punches things really hard. Go figure out who's stronger.

The answer is that Fighters should built a shitload of anti magic abilities as they level, to contrast them to wizards.

While Wizards seek to tap magical depths, fighters seek to tap physical ones, and then causes them to develop a resistance, and eventual immunity, to magic.

A 20th level fighter should be able to enforce reality, rather than bend it. He can't control it in any way, but he can prevent others from doing so as well.

Want to time stop? No, time will keep moving.

Fireball? Can't exist for real, so it just disappears.

Fighters should be the anti-mage.

>HURRR
>Muh wisart is unkillable!
>DURRR
Flawless

This

Or at least the single fact all characters should have same extent of competence on the same level. If level 20 mage is absurdly powerful when compared with any other class, then the system is simply badly designed. There are dozens of games that don't have any issues with power progression whatsoever for different characters and yet DD is stuck with this shit.

But magic is as real as the laws of physics in fantasy settings. Just like the gods.

Being able to do 1000 pushups isn't going to prevent you from getting roasted by a fireball.

This is not a very good idea. Rather than making fighters nullify magic, it would be better to make them more suited to survive or shrug off magical attacks. And give them legendary abilities, like hercules and shit. The caster may shape reality but the high level fighter can throw a huge ass boulder in your face or absorb your faggot ass magic with his abs.

Seconding dis

Magic bends reality, that's commonly accepted.

Fighters simply prevent that bending from happening.

The trick is that their abilities need to prevent more than simple attacks. That way the Wizard can't take them out on a technicality.

Applying your logic - being able to cast fireballs won't help you when being split in half. It's just that simple.
Every decent, half-decent and semi-decent tabletop RPG got it as one of the basic rules of engagement. How about you try them out?

Because conceptually, Magic has both a wider scope and an effectively endless power cap. The concept of a "high level" Wizard can be a reality warping demigod, whereas a mundane Swordsman is capped at "Stabbing things really hard." and only competes when given plot-armor(aka GM-pity).

Non-mundane fighters have a much higher power cap and keep up much better with spellcasters, but the average neckbeard starts to whine about "Weaboo bullshit" the instant fighters start doing cool things and stop being the PC equivalent of a mook. If even try to emulate a powerful mythological fighter like the Celtic myth hero Cu Chulainn(solos an army, fights a three day long duel, cuts hills/mountains in half) you'd be call a powergaming faggot.

This is one of the solutions. Other is to give characters more skillpoints and cost in SP for acquiring and improving spells. Magic users spend skill points on magic, martials improve tactics, strategy, social and survival skills or try to become capable fighters/rogues like Conan.

How is a fighter supposed to "shrug off" being hit by a fireball?

It seems like the only way a fighter can defeat a wizard is if he is immune to everything the wizard does and the fight becomes a frail old man with a stick vs Conan the Destroyer.

Because the argument that every class and every spec should be equally powerful is the same reasoning that leads to idiots stating that a degree in trans african genderqueer polyarmory in fandom headcanons should pay the same as a degree in STEM.

>a Swordsman is capped at "Stabbing things really hard"
A gay way of saying "leading armies of angey high-level Warforged"

>high level fighter just becomes a management game
S A S U G A
A
S
U
G
A

>Magic bends reality
DOTS. In many settings only avatars of gods can wield this much power. Or it's completely inaccessible to mortals at all and wizard lighting a candle with his finger would be considered impressive feat.

I always remember the hilarious bullshit that was Sean K Reynolds attempt at a 'Feat Point' system.

The Two Weapon Fighting feats were some of the most expensive. Metamagics were dirt cheap.

He ended up deleting the page, although you can still find it archived, to hide the evidence of such dogshit game design.

Senpai, I'm pretty sure that any top sports player makes more more than any top scientist.

This depends on a setting.
In certain settings wizards can have some many counterspells and defensive spells cast at themselves constantly that yes, they can take a boulder to the face and shrug it off.

It feels like the trouble that most people have is that they can't into different settings.
There are certain settings where wizards are unbeatable reality warping God Kings that can defeat Conan in hand to hand combat, and there are settings where they are weaker of course.

Case in point, I can not imagine any type of a warrior who is not magical himself defeating an ultimate Archmage Mage from old World of Darkness, it just can't happen.

What are you talking about? There tons of systems where wizards are so powerful that they are a distinct splat that is recomended not to be played with rest of the characters.

What setting are you talking about? There are certain settings where immunity to magic just simply does not exist.
Why is so hard for people to realize that mage power levels depend on the setting.

Nigga, what does that have to do with anything? Where did I mention a 'top sports player'.

My analogy was aimed at 'you knew what was going to happen when you chose your class' hence the silly, made up degree.

But if you wanna go there: yeah the sports guy can run really fast and punch really hard, but can he outrun the gauss cannon the scientist is shooting him with from aboard his nuclear energy powered battleship?

is this some name or what? speak understandable language ya git

ごめん

if we're going to use the "but its logical a wizard should be stronger" then lets go logic all the way

wizards no longer get any hp increase from their class, after all they do not learn how to take hits but how to cast spells
speaking about learning, wizards depend entirely on the study of magic for their power, therefor they no longer gain experience from combat given it is not related in any way to the study of magic
as the study of magic is always characterized as being extremely difficult and time consuming to gain a level the wizard must now spend a minimum of 10 years of study

Because in original D&D the Fighter was meant to command a fucking army at max level.

No your level 20 Wizard isn't fighting one guy with a pointy piece of metal, he's fighting 5000 of them.

where is my thousandfold tinfoil fedora

There was always this strange tendency to overprice the shit out of anything that let martial characters do vaguely level appropriate things. See the general unwillingness to let melee fighters move and full-attack; full attacking was pretty much the only real form of damage scaling all martials(other than rogues with sneak attack) had, but they pretty much could never use it. And even then full attacking didn't scale all that well to begin with.

I am fine with that, you know perfectly that someone would still bitch about Wizards being stronger than everyone else at the end of the day though.
Unless you want to make them weaker too in addition to that, which is just retarded.

You should really write that up in a little pdf. Sounds really fun, wish I knew about it years ago.

I completely agree that fighters should be awesome and strong too.

I'm currently playing fantasy age and our unarmed rogue is stronger than either mage. It's great. There's also a mana system so we'll never be completely op

Because people who say that "this option is stronger in this game, so lets make it a complete drag to play or fine tune the other option to being a perfect counter" are retarded faggots. If you want to play D&D, that's fine. But you should recognize that the game likes magic. It likes it a great deal, in fact. If that's a problem for you, if you want magic to suck, or just don't really want to play a magic man, talk it over with your group to play a lower power campaign, or just play a different system entirely.

they still have their spells and all that but they're simply no longer suited as PC's due to the requirements
and if they run out of spells the average housecat kills a lv 20 wizard

>wizards no longer get any hp increase from their class, after all they do not learn how to take hits but how to cast spells
I don't really think this matters. Wizards shouldn't be getting hit in combat no matter what level they are.

>speaking about learning, wizards depend entirely on the study of magic for their power, therefor they no longer gain experience from combat given it is not related in any way to the study of magic
This makes sense. Although you could argue that using spells in a combat situation should count as experience. Wizard should get more experience from reading books and deciphering runes and scrolls.

>as the study of magic is always characterized as being extremely difficult and time consuming to gain a level the wizard must now spend a minimum of 10 years of study
It's difficult for the average person. Wizards have high INT which enables them to learn things faster.

So?

A high level wizard can just summon/gate an army of his own.

With AD&D, I thought caster "surpremacy" was actually done right. Wizards can't wear any armor except rings of protection, robes of magi and archmage (the book's not infront of me right now, so Imight get some of the items wrong sorry), and bracers of defense. They could only use a select types of weapons, and getting a wizard into melee, even one at 20th level, could mean the wizards death. Yes, wizards have amazing spells, but backstab them and they're going to fall, pin them into a corner with a fighter or two and they'll die, assassinations also work quite well against them. Also, don't get me started when a 20th level wizard thinks he's the biggest shit on the block and picks a fight with a god, that never ends well for anyone.

>and if they run out of spells the average housecat kills a lv 20 wizard
What makes people believe that? I mean by level 20 we are talking about a wizard that has tons of artifacts that permanently enchance his body and survivability. I was making cloaks that raise my dex and shit like that as soon as I could even on early levels because it's just a smart thing to do, same with defense spells.
If you want a naked tied up wizard, sure.

Even in old D&D, a fighter didn't have 5000 men under them. The fighter follower table was had a max of 200 level 0 men, with 50 level 1 elite guards, and a single higher level bodyguard.

The only way to get up to 5000 men was to use the henchmen rules, but you could just buy them, and Wizards could do that as well.

if it was merely difficult for the average person instead of impossible that 16 int fighter should also get magical abilities
therefor its only logical the study of magic is so intensive it takes at least a decade to gain the equivalent of 1 level

>the hilarious bullshit that was Sean K Reynolds attempt at a 'Feat Point' system
web.archive.org/web/20140202043441/http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/misc/featpointsystem.html
Is that page you are talking about? I've seen his post about deletion but I don't know if it's the original page or rework.

A 16 INT fighter could learn spells but at that point he would no longer be a simple figher would he?

He would now be a dualclassed fighter/wizard.

spell list is kinda broken, and metamagic feats are a magnitude more powerful in terms of feats than anything martials get - it'd be like if Fighters could get feats around lvl 10 that allowed them to get AC bonuses from their STR BAB AND their DEX and ignore the penalty to their dodge AC from wearing heavy armor and the AC bonus from shields was now cumulative and you can duel weild tower shields AND weild weapons in each hand and use them each round AND still move that round.

A thought, is there a game or setting where fighter levels cap relatively early but magic user ones just keep going? Or weaker classes level faster?

A level is supposed to be an abstraction of power. A level X fighter should be about as good as a level X wizard. But at the same time, a max level fighter would not be as good as a max level wizard because of the whole... one is a strong guy and the other is a font of primal power 'thing'.

The entire spectrum of a wizard's progression from 'scholar with cantrips' to barcane deity' shouldn't scale directly to 'novice warrior' up to 'master swordsman'.
It doesn't make sense and it causes this problem.

Sounds fun

Decade for level 1 is taking it too far.
5 years is enough for level 1, that being said I would imagine most of the wizards start studies in the early age.
In general experience system is retarded too, after a certain point experience and study of anything should become easier but specialization should become harder.
Getting higher on levels for wizard who already went through basic study should be like school I guess, obviously harder but still. Becoming arch-pyromancer or something like that should take dedication and grinding of that one skill.

Same goes for Fighters too though, people don't just magically know how to use all weapons and all fighting styles.

>Punch something really hard

vs

>Tear through the veils of perception and manipulate the very nature of reality itself

geeeeeee I dunno faggot what do you think ?

>The entire spectrum of a wizard's progression from 'scholar with cantrips' to barcane deity' shouldn't scale directly to 'novice warrior' up to 'master swordsman'.

What about 'Scholar with cantrips' to 'Arcane deity' vs 'Novice warrior' to 'God of War and Death'?

This is where peoples buttmad comes in, he would essentially become a wizard.

Fighter players are also biased, they want to be as strong as the wizard without any mythical or magical powers what so ever, just by doing pure pushups and sit-ups, that's not how it works.
If fighter fags will finally come out of the closet and admit that they have to become at least partially super powered, everything will be simpler for everyone.

>What about 'Scholar with cantrips' to 'Arcane deity' vs 'Novice warrior' to 'God of War and Death'?
D&D 4e solution is best solution

>posts image of Elder Scrolls
This is one setting where being a pure fighter has no excuse.
Everything is made out of creatia, fucking magic is basis of existence and everyone can learn it. Most important of all no matter what you do you can never become as powerful as guys with spirit magic, tonal magic or just overpowered magic by just getting "stronk".

Fighter fags are insecure and they don't want to be super powered, they want all the benefits of being more than just a fighter but they don't want anything in fluff to tell them that they achieved it by more than just push-ups.

That God of war and death would be supernatural however. Because after a while you cap out at what a mundane fighter can do.
Not that that's a bad thing, a setting which had weeaboo fightan magic baked into hibernation level Martials makes sense.

I guess there are a few ways about that, you could have secondary classes that require you to have reached a minimum mundane fighter class level to take, with those secondary classes granting supernatural or arcane benefits and skills.
Meanwhile the wizard has just levelled to the intermediate rank and can't start hurling some firebolts around regularly.

>hibernation
Goddamn I hate virtual keyboards at times. Meant "higher". I don't even know how autocorrect thought I meant that.

It is. A wizard could easy kill someone if they plan ahead (such as having the components ready and such), but at the same time a couple of good hits and there down for the count. The same can be said with all the classes in AD&D, they have there pro's and cons. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I prefer AD&D 1st and 2nd edition, than the other editions of D&D (and I've only played pathfinder once, and I did not have a good time).

>But if you wanna go there: yeah the sports guy can run really fast and punch really hard, but can he outrun the gauss cannon the scientist is shooting him with from aboard his nuclear energy powered battleship?
Yes, by virtue of the fact that no scientist ever has the resources to do that without the backing of an entire fucking nation.