Five editions in

>$current_year
>it's still "martial vs. casters" false dichotomy
The problem isn't that martials are weaker than wizards - that's just a symptom of it.

The problem is that the level system is completely broken.
Two characters of the same level, regardless of whether they are PC or NPC or they got shafted by "3d6 down the line lottery", regardless of their choice of class or starting equipment, should be roughly equivalent in power, otherwise the level system isn't working as intended.

Making D&D like anime would solve a lot of problems, now that you mention it.
>Martials are on par with magic users because fighting spirit inherited will of all the victims of evil or some bullshit
>Martials get useful out of combat abilities like sensing killing intent or sensing power levels
>Often they have an in-world explanation for the stupidly high power levels D&D tends to reach
>Battle academies of various kinds are a thing, which in-universe justifies different classes (you unironically have mage academies, knight academies, rogue academies etc.)

I mean just make the memeloving fucks we call martials be able to jump, they don't need to wrestle a dragon, just let them jump high and do other cool shit to be quite literally on par with zards.

Magic is imaginary and only has to obey the rules you invent for your game/setting. If you're having trouble balancing magic with non-magic, consider revising the rules of magic to bring them more in line with what you want.

It's only a big issue in one of those editions. The others have a much smaller gap, or nonexistent ones.

Even that only accounts for the top-level casters as well. 3.5 had a bunch of caster classes that weren't nearly as strong as Wizards were.

Pretty much. But then you'd get people going "but then it's just MAGIC." Well, so what if it is? Give different classes different magic schools they can get or specialize in. Thieves can get illusion spells and misdirect people and turn invisible. Fighters could start summoning combat powers that harden armor and cause weapons to bite more or impact harder. Imagine a bard with enough charisma to be able to charm probability itself to give himself and his buddies better chances.

>dndfags stopped posting years ago
>this faggot had to make a thread
Little obsessed there, mate.

Again, this only happens if you look at the rules and NEVER PLAY THE GAME.
In practice, as long as the party doesn't start at level 8 or something Wizards don't get that powerful until WAY later. Most people in here can barely manage to keep a group together for longer then three months at the most, and realistically unless you were playing EVERY SINGLE DAY it would take a long-ass time to even get to that level.

Leveling up was a fucking ORDEAL for everyone in older editions. You weren't guaranteed a level up every few sessions.
And further the more powerful spells had casting times and of the Wizard was hit ONCE in raw they lost the spell, no save.

OP, I believe you do not play D&D at all. In fact, your post reeks of one whose sole experience with RPGs is taking about it on Veeky Forums. Everybody who plays D&D knows that magic does as much and as little as the authors decide. Even edition with the biggest imbalance, by all accounts, has "magical" classes that are considered as weak or weaker than a Fighter, and "martial" classes that are considered more powerful than the majority of spellcasting classes. See: the Truenamer, the Healer, the Warlock, and the Dragonfire Adept, and compare to a Warblade.

In short: OP is a faggot and sucks so many dicks that he has no time to play any games.

The strongest character in my group's AD&D party is the Paladin who rolled well on exceptional Strength. The second is the barbarian style Fighter who is using a greatsword.

The casters in the group are often best off using healing spells as the cleric or minor utility or AoE spells to clear rooms of really weak enemies. In an actual fight, the Fighters do all the heavy lifting, while Casters tend to be too limited to contribute a lot.

>Problems inherent in the rules magically go away once you start putting them into practice.

Yeah, no.

> Warlock
> Weak
Are you insane? It's by no means wizard, but it's not healer tier by far.

>mfw ask to use stuff from Tome of Battle and get told to get my animu bullshit away from his table, and rest of the party is a Ninja/Monk, a Samurai and a Shugenja.

I think you just need to accept that your years of screaming not to like what you do not like are at an end and move on

People have migrated out and tried your pet system and are now going back to dnd.

When has this ever happened with a dm who was not already a complete shitfuck to begin with?

This. Why can thieves become invisible but fighters don't get a single little utility spell?

I was listing magical classes as weak or weaker than a Fighter, not weak magical classes equal to each other in power level. Yes, a Warlock is stronger than a Healer, and for that matter a Healer is stronger than a Truenamer. All three, however, are weak.

half of those aren't anime they're just the sort of things warriors did in mythology and folklore that got nerfed because LotR is a low magic setting that somehow got confused with actual folklore

if gygax and pals went with actual myth instead of trying to balance the party of normals with the single doctor manhattan style demigod in the story we'd be taking dudes who can duel armies and split mountains with a single sword swing for granted

The way I see it, there are two possible solutions to the Martials/Caster imbalance:

>Let martials go full-on mythological hero
>Cripple the fuck out of casters

If you want to homebrew your own solution, or play a different game, or even make your own game, go for one of these.

Additionally, I suggest stop making this thread every 10 minutes. It won't help the game's imbalance, but I'd prefer it if we didn't have this fucking thread every goddamn day Jesus fucking Christ.

Not even the guy you're arguing with, just pointing out your argument is stupid.

By all means, play any system you enjoy. Just acknowledge that it has inherent flaws, and don't try to bullshit people by saying that they go away once you start playing.

...

>Additionally, I suggest stop making this thread every 10 minutes. It won't help the game's imbalance, but I'd prefer it if we didn't have this fucking thread every goddamn day Jesus fucking Christ.

This. Seriously, we've been having this bait up
for a week now.

A GM that I occasionally play one-shots with is rather reasonable most of the time, but rages harder than tumblr feminists when he thinks someone is trying to sneak "animubullshit" into his games.

Martials got shafted in one edition, user.

5e works as a team game quite well, 4e worked as an ensemble of superheroes extremely well, and 2e and basic pretty much required martials for rocket tag at any level versus difficult enemies.

Yeah, because that's exactly what I said.
NO, fuckwit. I'm saying that higher-level play was much less common.
It was indeed a flaw (there ARE no flawless systems), but frequently a flaw that didn't come up in actual play.
Compare it to this; say there's a game with a class or career or path that is sub-par, which is widely known by everyone so very few people play it. Within this sub-class however is an ability that is pretty broken but extremely situational and only comes up when that situation happens so in practice most people never even ran into it.
That's what the caster flaw was in old editions; a limited condition that only came up in very specific situations that frequently rarely came up in practical play because most of the situational circumstances never come up for most people.

But really; you're not here to argue, are you? You're here to troll. You won't cite instances of actual play with details in the rules, you won't cite the rules themselves, you won't talk about the rules, you won't support your argument, you'll use generalized and meaningless statements that could apply not just to D&D but every traditional game in existence when applied correctly.
You don't HAVE an actual group to play with so you come on here and bitch about rules because it's literally the closest thing you can get to playing a Veeky Forums related P&P game.

And you know what? There's nothing wrong with that. It's HARD to get four to five guys together for two to three hours these days, and then they all need to be into this increasingly niche hobby that isn't exactly welcoming and isn't exactly easy to get into.

>Truenamer
True, though that's because the class is literally broken, in the sense that it doesn't work at all.

>Healer
Do you even prestige class?

>Warlock
>Bad

>Dragonfire adept
They don't even have spells, but dragon invocations that are spelllike effects and very limited in number.

>Compare to Warblade
You mean that one class that was tacked on in the last book that everyone hates because it's the book of Weeaboo Fightan Magic? I'll give credit where it's due: if all martials went the route of ToB the imbalance would be a lot lighter.

How about:

>reduce range of spells
>reduce damage of spells
>make all spells full round actions

How did that fighter make cracks in the floor? Concrete blocks have over 300 hp per cubic meter so that one must be doing over 600 damage per swing. Fighters OP pls nerf.

Or, let Martials Full Attack as a Standard Action. Spellcasters get spells that deal multiple die worth of damage as a standard action, so Fighters should be able to dump all their attacks in a Standard Action also.

They're magical floorboards made extra weak (but still able to carry a fighter's bodyweight and armor without cracking) purely to mock the fighter. It's supposed to confer the message "Look how strong you are! Such a shame you can't hit me!".

Casters win once again.

>You mean that one class that was tacked on in the last book that everyone hates because it's the book of Weeaboo Fightan Magic?
First off, I believe this is a myth. I have yet to meet a person who hates Tome of Battle, and online it seems like people talk about how other people dislike the book, but no-one claims to dislike the book himself.

Second, whether people are fans of it or not does not negate the fact of its existence, which is a perfect counter to the OP's faggotry.

Well, the fact that it was tacked on in the end and barely carried over to fifth edition does prove that as a trend, martials get shafted. If the ToB style was carried over to 5th edition, it'd be close to perfect.

You mean, like they can in 5e?

Goddamn, you are primo mad about someone poking a hole in your dumb argument.

No, I'm nope going to argue with you, mainly because you've already shut out anything I've got to say, legit or not, because I dared to pick on your precious little system.

Better anons than I have torn apart D&D on every level imaginable, but the fans are on such a level of denial that it could have scorpions in the book and they'd defend it.

Keep being a salty little bitch. It's fucking delicious.

I'm pretty sure it does have scorpions in the book. Or, at least the MM does.

This episode made me laugh but it still hurt.

>but frequently a flaw that didn't come up in actual play.
Except it does come into play, very frequently. The biggest example of this is D&D 3.5e. Let's take the Druid and the Fighter.

The Druid is a decent melee combatant, has spells, and an animal companion. If this animal companion is a wolf or one of the other objectively superior choices, he gets an animal companion that trumps the fighter, and will continue to trump him for quite a few levels. By the time the fighter catches up to the animal companion (that grows progressively stronger along with the druid so this might take a while), the druid's repetoire of spells has gotten so powerful, so diverse and so numerous that he can easily solo encounters.

The fighter isn't just weaker than the druid, he's useless. He is entirely replaced by a druid's CLASS FEATURE. And that's not even touching the cleric, who with a handful of spells can make himself a better fighter than the fighter. Of course he could also use his buffs on the fighter buuuuut
1. Some buffs like divine power are personal only
2. Why? He could easily assume the role of frontline fighter, freeing up a party slot for a druid or a wizard or another powerful class that isn't dependent on magical handouts.

The problem isn't who can beat who, the problem is that martials have become literally useless. A waste of space, no better than a fucking pack donkey.

>Except it does come into play, very frequently
You quote a 3.5 example.
I'm taking about 2e/AD&D.
My entire post and conversation was about that, actually.

Dude, ALL systems of D&D are flawed.
What are you, fucking new?

You realize that at no point in either of your post did you specify that

Can someone PLEASE FUCKING DELETE THESE FUCKING TROLL THREADS ALREADY?!
God DAMN.

...

>magic cannot be balanced against not-magic?
This is only the case when you're taking your inspiration for magic users from bullshit legendary fiction, but taking your inspiration for martials from what's "realistic".

Especially when your definition of "realistic" is "my fat cheeto-devouring hands couldn't catch a mouse after I tied the cord around my wrist, so clearly a trained soldier with the maximum possible human dexterity couldn't do the same with a sword hilt".

Hrm. Apologies.
I was saying that while casters have always been more powerful at higher levels (especially in 3.X which was actually designed to be unbalanced from the ground-up), the higher levels were vastly harder to get to in 2e/AD&D.

To some degree saves working differently and the harsh nature of casting times were also pretty severe limitations as well.

>if gygax and pals went with actual myth instead of trying to balance the party of normals with the single doctor manhattan style demigod in the story we'd be taking dudes who can duel armies and split mountains with a single sword swing for granted

Don't blame Gygax, he was strictly against taking the brakes off wizards and letting things become, and I quote, "a weird wizard show."

...

>The irony of accompanying this post with a picture of a caster who can cast literally one spell, and then passes out and becomes utterly useless for the rest of the day
This was deliberate, right?

I've never encountered someone who disliked tome of battle unless he was some kind of "Muh anime cancer boogeyman" faggot grognard not worth dealing with anyways.

And all those people were probably trolls on the internet.

5e lets fighters do that power level thing in a way, though.

While that's different from 3.X and onward, that's not a good solution. What you're basically saying to the fighter and the wizard is "You get to have fun and be useful now, you get to have fun and be useful later". That's probably a large part of why casters were buffed in later editions, but they went too far and it backfired.

Not that guy, but

and were the start of the conversation, which was clearly about 2e to begin with.

>How long will it take WotC to realize that magic cannot be balanced against not-magic?

But it can, though. Casters that can do everything because lolmagic and martials that can't do anything that would be "unrealistic" can't be balanced in the same game. Learn the difference.

Full anime fighters are the future of D&D

They can balance them, they just need to make it clear you aren't just joe shmoe with a sword. Martials should be demigods and heroes capable of feats beyond that of mortal. Think Hercules and Perseus. Beowulf and Thor.

I actually agree in all honesty.
It was just a much easier problem to fix back then then it was now, especially since the way THAC0 and AC worked meant even WITH spells and stuff Wizards tended to have relatively low AC and were fairly easy to hit, and their extremely low HP was never NOT a problem.
Also the lack of a poorly thought out pseudo-tactical battle map style of moment and the implicit ability of GM's to adjudicate rules based on the needs of their group rather then a giant mess of core rules rules that tries to apply hard rulings to everything and fails miserably meant a GM could use simple things like numbers against Wizards and booby-traps against them pretty well.
Wizards in AD&D were arguably even more dangerous then 3.X given how much frailer everyone was compared to later editions, but even MORE emphasis was placed on perpetration and so they were most useful in situations that they had already planned for but could quite literally be useless outside of them.

I would say it was actually Clerics who were the better class; they leveled up faster, could equip better armor an weapons (equipping better armor being 90% of what made characters stay alive at any level) and has spells which while not necessarily as good at ENDING the fight they were more generally useful and better at helping you SURVIVE the fight.
In addition a belt of ogre's strength could let them be reasonably good damage-dealers on top of it because their weapons were at least doing d6's and their better armor and shields meant they could stand up front and not immediately die.

Yeah, but Paladins be default basically had to have the most awesome stats in the entire party almost.

Megumin is mai waifu.

Yeah, but he was only a Paladin because he rolled awesome stats in the first place. If he hadn't rolled great charisma and was just a Fighter instead? He'd still be doing fairly well.

Both he and the Fighter consistently survive fights and kill enemies in droves. Any casters that get played have either died really easily or had to sit back and hide while occasionally picking things off with darts.

Low AC and low hitpoints leaves them extremely vulnerable.

True that.
Somebody on Veeky Forums once said why Paladins were always the more superheroic of characters in older D&D stuff, and that's usually because in older D&D Paladins were basically all examples of superior human beings.

Yeah. The group always jokes that he's actually from Krypton. It's a mix of having solid class features on top of the already good Fighter baseline, along with needing to have really high stats to be one at all.

If we're looking back at the influences for each class type, wizards were scholars, thieves were specialists from the peasant classes, and fighters were knights.

What does that bring to the table other than having a coat of arms and the title of "Sir"?

She's only 13 you sick fuck.

>What does that bring to the table other than having a coat of arms and the title of "Sir"?
The time, nutrition, equipment, and support staff to train into a murder machine.

Just don't play D&D
The thread should never have moved beyond these golden words of advice, of course the game designers at WotC are terrible.

People who thought they could work magic in real life weren't flying about throwing fireballs and shooting lightning and *teleporting behind u* though.
They thought they were doing shit like cursing someone and all of their descendants, blessing dwellings to keep out evil spirits, curing and inflicting disease, interpreting omens, having visions, entering the spirit world to commune with their dead ancestors and shit.

In a game where that's what's meant by "magic" surely there'd be plenty of room for characters who are just good at stabbing things? Although that's not really a solution you can apply to D&D at this point, obviously. Point is it's not impossible for casters to be balanced with fighters.

That's legal in Japan.

>Priest was already half dead, almost asleep by default, doesn't even try
>1HKs the archer with a single save or die spell
>Wizard just flies and casts similar bullshit, giving the knight similar chances
The most unfortunate thing that happened to the girls was that they were forced to play 3.5

Ok guys, frame the argument.

The traditional martial/caster disparity argument is not about every class being able to function independently, it's about martial classes losing their niche entirely. That was the discussion for 3.5, which shits all over that with CODzilla stuff and polymorph and summoning. This is solely 3.pf issues.

The newish CMD seems to be on a different trend framing the debate as "a martial character should be able to counter magic or disadvantages like flying creatures or resistance without equipment, a wizard buddy, or fiat." That's different because it goes beyond genre conventions and filling a niche. This is a more pervasive problem but isn't experienced by most players.

Finally there is a small percentage that want fighters to go above and beyond and have the utility and the combat supremacy and casters to be shitty 3.5 demigods still. This I will just never understand, and they should just play the one game catering to them instead of Pathfinder (Fantasy Craft).

>How long will it take WotC to realize that magic cannot be balanced against not-magic?
No, it actually can, they're just not really willing to do what it would take to make that happen.

>Don't blame Gygax, he was strictly against taking the brakes off wizards and letting things become, and I quote, "a weird wizard show."
He could have saved us. We should have listened.

On a federal level. However, all prefectures have their own laws raising it above that, making it not 13 by any effective measure.

And still: she's only 13, you sick fuck.

In some areas of Mexico age of consent is 12

There's levels to it. It's basically a matter of martials being unable to really do anything, and casters being able to do everything, including be better martials.

The basic way to fix this is to at least remove the ability for casters to be better martials. That at least gives martials some niche, but casters are still going to be better in almost every other way, and since you can win a fight without being a martial, it still makes their niche rather pointless.

Countering magic or disadvantages assumes a competitive game rather than a cooperative one, though martials are still reliant on magic for taking out things like dragons that can fly. Allowing high level martials to jump very well would help fix this.

Then there's the people who see it that if casters are allowed to do everything, martials should also be allowed to do everything.

I see it as something that needs to just be evened out. Martials need to be given things they can do to contribute meaningfully in a variety of ways, even if those ways are mundane, and casters need to be more limited so that while casters as a whole might be able to do a lot of stuff, a single class or character will be much more limited and narrow in their focus, preventing them from simply solving all of the party's problems.

That explains why all anime girls give birth to latin half breeds

5e attempted to solve a lot of the problems in ways notably different than I would have liked them solved. See, magic at it's core should have versatility. I liked that abut 3.5. What I didn't like is how pathetic every non-magic person was in comparison. If you're trying to make a game for everyone, you can't say "But you can't become legendary in your abilities and do near-impossible things because that's not realistic!" When their friends are causing earthquakes and summoning armies at high levels. 5e seemed to want to solve the problem by nerfing magic to make it less "broken" and exploitable to do crazy creative things, so they would be more on-par with the non-magics. But I'm a little sad that that's how they chose to do it. The way I see it, the "unbalance" problem is really an "outpacing" problem that shouldn't happen if we were deriving from actual fantasy stories. Magic is supposed to be able to do wondrous things in most of them, but take years to learn and master, to the point that powerful wizards are old men. If that were the case in D&D, there would be no problems, because it all comes from wanting the wizards to have access to incredible powers faster.

The real problem isn't that Fighters are not good at what they do, the problem is that DnD magic has NO DOWNSIDES, and you can easily pick spells that are very effective with no risk of failure. You don't even have to give your opponent a saving through, you can just drop a forcecage and say "I spent my round to do a thing, you are now out of the fight. I didn't have to roll for it, there was no chance of failure, and there is nothing you can do to stop me unless you are a wizard too and prepared a counterspell or a teleport. Have fun."

Meanwhile, every level of fighter has at least a 1 in 20 chance of missing their opponent, and against an equal enemy will have to land multiple hits in order to bring an enemy down.

So one of two things needs to happen. Either Fighters need to be able to RAW DAMAGE an enemy to death in a single turn, making fights into rocket tag, or wizards need to have either less effective spells, all spells need to have a significant chance of failure, or using magic consistently has some kind of payback or downside.

Like, even something as simple as all spells costing, in addition to everything else, an amount of hp equal to the spell level would be a step in the right direction. That turns casting spells into a potentially dangerous decision even at higher levels, given that spellcasters general don't have the largest HP pools.

I like how WHFRP did it. Each spells has a chance of going very wrong, potentially maiming casters making magic much more incidental. It probably isn't the answer for D&D (What you said is more in line), but it it another way other systems handle magic.

Correction, I was wrong to say "no problems". I actually see why they didn't do it this way, because it would nerf the mages' combat ability heavily. I think that might be what is required for true balance though. It would just make it less fun for wizards when they're in fights.

>Each spells has a chance of going very wrong, potentially maiming casters making magic much more incidental.
Can anyone tell me about more systems like this? I like fickle, dangerous magic in fantasy.

I have to agree.
Magic power isn't only a problem of balance it's a problem of having demi-gods in an RPG and trying to do anything without them destroying it with "I cast x"

Exactly. DH has the same approach with psykers: very powerful abilities, but its so dangerous that only and idiot would use it carelessly.

The downside to that system, though, was that the Psyker was as much a liability to the rest of the party as to themselves. Nothing is more infuriating than the Psyker deciding to cast Light in order to see better in a dim hallway and suddenly going full demonhost, derailing the adventure and killing the entire party.

Its only something like a 1 in 500 chance to happen, but eventually its gonna and the game is basically over unless you are speced out in heavy specialty weapons.

Education, wealth, influence, connections, property, and more.

Various Warhammer RPGs

I thought I heard of one called "Legend"? "Fable" maybe? It was supposed to be Sword and Sorcery, sort of Conan-like. Where magic can corrupt the caster.

Exactly.

Like, you could spend hours coming up with the number of puzzles and traps that totally cease to matter as soon as any spellcaster in the pilot hits level 5 and can cast Fly.

You want to base an adventure around a character being cursed somehow, or including a land plagued by disease? Better do it before the spells that remove those conditions unlock, because unless you can make that curse/disease relevant in the next 8 hours its "-1 spell tomorrow, -1 adventure today".

Magic just has a lot of silver bullets to problems that are 100% effective. And there isnt any normally included wigle room that dampens spellcasting without the GM bullshiting something themselves (the throne room weakens the magic of those not in the employ of the king!) which players are going to feel cheated if you use specifically because they have come to take it for granted that magic Just Works (tm). Once you get to a certain level, a whole bunch of potential plots just sort of dry up as a result.

I like how Vistiani curses from Curse of Strahd work, and I think that's kind of how my ideal magic system would be based on.
>Potent and varied, but never direct-damage
>Has psychic backlash when dispelled, the bigger the effect the worse the backlash
>Only one effect up at a time
Based on curses and blessings or invocations rather than on spell scrolls.
I mean, generally, isn't magic supposed to be either beyond the reach of mortals or anyone can use it? Weren't deals with demons or spirits considered the go-to for magic in myth?
A peasant wouldn't curse his enemy or ask for a magic favor because the repercussions could be huge. Say some demon showed up to give him a harvest to surpass all harvests so he could impress that girl in exchange for some innocuous favor. But then it turns out that the harvest itself is a curse after he gets robbed blind and beaten by his jealous neighbors for the secret and can't marry the girl because now he's gone from normal but less than glorious to flat broke.
Only a player character or villain would be crazy enough to broker deals with the masters of arcane power, and clerics would probably be tasked with making sure that humanity didn't blow itself up making deals with devils and that they actually learn to be people that can take care of themselves.

>cheated if you use specifically because they have come to take it for granted that magic Just Works (tm). Once you get to a certain level, a whole bunch of potential plots just sort of dry up as a result.
Not just that but the game starts it hit points where removing magic completely fucks over the party as well.

But the DM having to play "Beat Batman. Starts to get really old and annoying and a lot of them start to run out of ideas that batman can't instantly win but are still fun very quickly.

ruleofcool.com/
Check out Legend fighters can do alot of cool shit
free download on the site

>Megumin
>winning

That doesn't sound right.

5 editions in and I still don't have a problem with this. And I play martials. I know I'm going to be outstripped by the wizard eventually but without me meat shielding him he'll never make it that far.