So why exactly should people with superpowers who can shape the reality with their mind be "balanced" with dudes who...

>The type of magic I like is super-powered magic on crack with no repercussion at all
>The type of fighters are like are mooks
Just play a wizards centric rpg. It's better for your type.

lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Maiar

We're talking about D&D, right?
Then the answer is because it's a system with levels indicative of personal power. Characters of equal level should be of roughly equal ability, differing only into how those abilities take shape. This comes before classes and features enter into it at all.

Boromir complained whenever Gandalf cast fireball, remember?

Bingo.

The purpose of levels was to advance a lot of class features at once and cut down on granularity in character advancement. That's it. They weren't originally meant to represent a certain stage of power or be equivalent across classes, and the idea that they should is a latter-day innovation that has never fucking worked.

Jhereg:

Ordinary human kills wizards, sorcerers, duelists, and others hundreds of years older than he is.

Usually with a knife.

No one is immune to assassination.

Being useless sure is fun, right guys?!

>with their mind

Psionics aren't exactly what most people are complaining about, OP.

If you're talking about wizards, sorcerors, etc. you're not 'shaping reality', you're using proven methods of adjusting one substance in order to effect larger change on reality.

Tell me, OP, why should we consider combat engineers to be balanced against riflemen? After all, the former can make a bridge appear where none was before; a rifleman can just shoot somebody.

Why do you want to ruin the balance of a game?
>Hurdur fighters should only be useful at low levels that's how it balances.

This is only true on 3.0 on. In AD&D the levels were not on the same scales. Casters went up incredibly slowly, and couldn't cast spells instantly.

A fighter could, and did, kill casters with ease, and actually got BETTER at it at higher levels instead of worse.

>Jhereg
>Not God-Tier Dragon

Do you even lizard DNA?

The book, not the caste.

Hey, I didn't tell you to bring James Sunderland from Silent Hill 2 to our party of Dante, Bayonetta and Asura. You made your bed, now lie in it, and thus keep out of our way while we juggle kaiju with lightning bolts.

Just play something that's not D&D if you don't want to deal with this problem.

Personally I think it would be cool if fighters and other shitty martial classes were like half-levels or something, sou you could get two sets of mediocre class features for 1 level's worth if XP. It'd also be cool if they just had faster progression or sonething.

I don't really like D&D or class based systems though.

...

No, you didn't. But this is one of the pregen sheet you gave to the noob group.
Someone had to pick it up.

Why was James presented as an equally viable option in the first place then?

Therein lies the problem. Everything is presented as equally viable when it's not. It's lying to the player and then punishing them when they fall for it.

>Personally I think it would be cool if fighters and other shitty martial classes were like half-levels or something,
I've seen it suggested before that classes of tier 4 and lower be allowed to Gestalt with another class of tier 4 and lower. It still doesn't solve the problem, but it helps.

Kratos was the other option than James. The other three got picked, it came down to James or Kratos, and you said "I'mma nudge things with my wooden stick".

Why did you do that?

because levels are literally a measurement of power,
boromir didn't whine because he's a level 10 while gandalf is level 20

>Because "bends the fabric of reality with their mind" represents a *type* of power, not the *scale* of that power, and there's no reason the scale of what it allows has to completely eclipse mundane means.

Basically the best answer to this retarded meme ever.

I mean, that is exactly what I always thought but I couldn't shape it into so well spoken form.

Because I don't know what Kratos, Asura, Bayonetta, Dante or James do. It's new to me.
I assumed there wasn't a trap, since it would be a big dick move.

But it makes no sense really.

Should a rogue be perfectly balanced in combat vs warriors? Or a clown?

A lvl 20 rogue against a lvl 20 warrior should have the same amount of utility in a party.

A rogue isn't exactly a combat-centric class.

Combat engineers having casting times that require riflemen to secure the position before they can safely make bridges.

Casting times are largely irrelevant or not present in modern DnD.

Combat Engineers are old school DnD, where the classes were actually close to balanced.

>So why exactly should people with superpowers who can shape the reality with their mind be "balanced" with dudes who can swing a sword really hard?

If you cant imagine what a godlike, super-powered warrior could do to shape reality with their art beyond 'i hit mans widd surd' you are a lost cause.

Your blatant immunity to inspiration and crippled imagination is a cancer on the hobby you keep polluting by trying to force others to participate in your own stale and lifeless take on it. All with the justification that the most blatant flaws of an old and dated game's design support your shitshow of a game.

To further reiterate this point, a modern day wizard with acess to something like tensers transformation (or a couple of other spells that just turn the wizard into a better fighter, not even to mention druid/cleric shenanigans) is the equivalent of a combat engineer that runs around in a giant mech that outclasses every soldier easily.

The important thing to note is that in settings where people run around with giant mechs, there usually are no normal soldiers anymore, BECAUSE THEY'RE COMPLETELY POINTLESS.

But it's so much simpler to just whine about anime and throw a fit!

Or if they're there, they're not presented as a PC option.

>godlike, super-powered warrior

And how does he do it without magic or being a half-god?

Aragorn sure as fuck never had superpowers.

While we are at it, what exactly is stopping a wizard from training sword-fighting and making spells that turn him into an amazing sword fighter?

By the power of skill and stronk.
Beowulf is a good example. Ripping limbs left and right because stronk and that's it.

They shouldn't, unless it's in a game where people will be playing both kinds of characters.

There's a reason that games don't usually translate well to actual stories, user.

Force of will? Warrior's spirit? Some vague explanation that is equally question-dodging as "muh magic"?

Replace martial with Saitama.

Or staying underwater for days at a time, or swimming the ocean in full armor with no problem or...

>And how does he do it without magic
Who's saying it has to be without magic? My martial could be just as magical as your caster, he just expresses it with his muscles instead of his mind

Beowulf, Siegfried, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Rostam, Sundiata, Bhishma, Eklavya, etc.

Examples of high powered martials who are not Divine or Magical.

Beowulf had pretty fucking great Con and Str score.

>HURR I'M GONNA START ANOTHER SHITTHREAD ON A TOPIC THAT'S BEEN ADDRESSED AND FINISHED A LONG FUCKING TIME AGO

/thread

Veeky Forums today is flooded with bait

boromir was not a player character. tolkien didn't have to worry about him getting bored. in any case, if gandalf had simply outshined the rest of the fellowship by putting them all in a magic bubble and floating them to mount doom it would probably have been a very boring book. as it stands, most of what gandalf accomplishes could have also been done by glorfindel or some other sufficiently wise and powerful elf warrior (up to and including defeating the balrog).

the vast majority of games place fixed limits on character creation and advancement so that players start the game on a roughly even playing field and advance at a similar rate. that's why most games tell you to pick from a certain set of races and classes, or give you a budget of character points. you don't HAVE to do that. if balance is literally irrelevant to you, just throw away those limits, and tell players they can make whatever they want - whatever level, race, stats or abilities are appropriate for their character. but if you do have those limits, people expect them to mean something.

You know most spell casters weren't mere mortals either historically?

Merlin and co. were all half demons. Normal humans with no demon/god/supernatural stuff beeing involved beeing able to do magic is pretty new age, dare I say, weeb-bullshit itself..

Holy fucking god this.

I think this is the main thing that keeps this fucking arguement going ad infintiium because of some perceived notion that a dude who swings a sword can't use magic of any sort in a setting that is literally magic in about everything. But the idea of a swordsmen who's magic is expressed by his aura allowing him to pick up a stick and cut a shield in half because he's that badass of a fighter is to "anime" for people.

People who use "anime" as a pejorative for anything that isn't a mook who can do more then swing a metal stick should all be gassed.

martial/dnd players can't handle the bants

The spergs who play martial classes want it to be done without magic. This is why the book of weeaboo fightan magic was largely panned, despite being exactly what 3.pf needed.

>HURR

How abut some feats that lets you to become a super-martial? Say, inreased size (with maxed str and con you're already a big guy, why not become even bigger in this high-fantasy place), blinding speed, iron guts, unnatural stamina...

>And how does he do it without magic or being a half-god?

They are half-gods and/or magical by any 'realistic' measure, you're just arbitrarily limiting them below skinny mr. genious cause you're an imaginationless cunt who has to lord your so called system mastery over people at their expense.

That or you'd be playing a game with the explicit premise that wizards are the bestest and everyone plays one. That would have been fine.

>Aragorn sure as fuck never had superpowers.

Its like you missed that whole comic that humorously explained why LotR would have been a fucking garbage campaign.

All good ideas. I honestly would have preferred if in 5e, every martial class got some skill monkey type features that gave them super human abilities in a narrow subclass of skills.

So a barbarian could eventually get extreme constitution abilities, like holding his breath for days underwater while fighting in full armor against krakens.

A fighter might get incredible feats of dexterity or strength, etc.

You are welcome.

Because games are not movies or novels you twit.

That's horseshit. D&D invented levels in TTRPGs and every other system in response abandoned them immediately because they were an inorganic mess.

It's not like 1e didn't have levels and they were added later.

Whats up with the bait today?

You can make it all "balanced" but you can't make it as fun.
Pretty much no matter what you do, in tabletop rpgs you can't make swinging a slab of iron on a stick as fun as warping the fabric of reality and channeling the will of the gods that reside above. Magic will always be more versatile, unless you turn it into shooting fireballs exclusively, a which point you might as well call em archers.

An angel, same with Saruman and Radagast.

And sort of the same as Sauron.

>I don't remember Boromir crying about Gandalf being too OP.
Gandalf was a GMPC guardian angel designed to keep the party on track without being too disruptive. Plus he disappeared for a while to give other characters a chance to shine.

In cooperative games, balance is important. If you want your caster to have access to encounter ending power, they need to become a glass cannon forced to depend on the protection of others. Those powers need to take time to come into play, and during that time they should be restricted in their options. Like only one other, non-casting, action per round. Also none of this quickened meta magic perks. Not unless martials are going to get quickened attack meta martial maneuvers that allow them to full attack as a free action. But wait. That's weaboo.
You know what's nice about building encounters for a balanced party of intelligent players? I'm force to be intelligent as well. I don't just shut down the casters and start chugging martial tears. I actually have to build encounters around the entire party and what they each bring to the table.

It's great.

It's a matter of scale in a game. Player characters should have fairly similar scales.

If magic-users acquire PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER that lets them open gates into heaven and shit lightning and part the seas with a wave of their hand, warriors of equal level in that setting should be the kind of epic heroes that cut mountains in half and take seven-league leaps and swim across the ocean in full armor fighting sea monsters. That kind of shit.

If the warrior classes' abilities are roughly limited to what a normal human being with a sword could actually do, then magic classes should be similarly limited, which means at high levels they're about one step up from chanting around a fire for three days and nights to make someone fall down the stairs one day maybe.

Levels by themselves are not a horrible concept. Some games do them right.

But not D&D.

>Martials can only attack and nothing else
>Casters can do every kind of magic they want

I think we've identified a problem

>Implying a game with a good combat system can't make combat fun
>Implying the 'fun' in a RPG is choosing the right insta-win button from your spell list
>Implying there's nothing more 'fun' in RPGs than stupid power fantasies

It's fine user, you can stay in your magical wizards-only hugbox playing out your Harry Potter fantasies.

You won't be missed.

Leave it to wordswordswords to break it down in simple terms.

Except everything Roy can do a Wizard can do better. And a Druid. And a Cleric. And a Summoner. And an Alchemist. And a Bard. And a Warlock. And a Magus. And a Sorcerer. And an Oracle.

>It's fine user, you can stay in your magical wizards-only hugbox playing out your Harry Potter fantasies.

If that kind of player was playing a wizards-only Harry Potter battle royale that'd be fine, but they insist some poor fuckers have to hang around and play muggles for them to lord over.

I playtested my homebrew system with a couple of friends yesterday. One played a martial character, the other a magic-user. The martial player did more in combat & had more fun.

So apparently you can "make swinging a slab of iron on a stick as fun as warping the fabric of reality", so easily in fact that I did it by accident.

Wait, I'm not sure about Bayonetta, but Dante and Asura are both martials.

And kicked the ass of the devil and god respectively, with fucking anger and nothing else.

>Levels must indicate combat prowess
My sweet summer child

>b-but I can aim for his legs and i-it's sorta like that slow spell and acrobatics and, and, and!
Even if you go for a more obscure magic system based of goetia or santeria or whatever the fuck you want, even if you make everything very "grounded", even if it's all balanced, it's still going to be more interesting than martial arts. Why? Because magic is not real, while martial arts are real. Guess which people are going to favour more when it comes to medium that's all about escapism and playting roles? Since the dawn of times people been "roleplaying" with "magic", performing various rituals they made up, offering prayers to different gods they made up, and you're saying that, given the opportunity that even the modicum of that was real, people would pick swinging stuff at each other over that? Or state that "yah they're both more or less equally gud"? I don't think so.
Besides, magic simply offers more options than just dealing lethal/non lethal damage and various stungs, such as divinaion, evocations, love spells, illusions, making charms etc.
Feeble cursed one.

>IT DOESN'T COUNT DANTE IS DEMONIC SPAWN
like merlin but d&d shitters don't care

But it should

What else are levels supposed to be?

Muggles have objectively superior magic.

If supernatural is supposed to be way better than mundane, then why do monks in 3.X and Pathfinder suck ass, even more than the mundane fighter?

4e monk is best monk. 5e monk can go cry.

Yeah, from what I recall Rowling even mentioned a fairly major part of the whole "wizards still live in secrecy" thing is that a wizard, even a really powerful one, would lose and lose hard to a normal muggle with a gun.

What defines a martial?

balancing is a poor idea in most roleplaying games. if you have players who don't mercilessly exploit every loophole, you dont have good players. Wizards are supposed to be able to fuck shit up from across the map, fighters are meant to protect them, rogues are meant to fuck up the opposing wizard with sneak and clerics are meant to keep them all alive. they are all op, but within the realms of common sense. a 20th level fighter (if he makes it past the wards and minions) should be all but able to pretty much OHKO a frail wizard.

The Tales series is shit

Are you not eager for Tales of Ber/ss/eria?

>balancing is a poor idea in most roleplaying games
>proceeds to describe a balanced game

Gandalf also never used any significant amount of his power, not even as the White since the Ainur are not really allowed to do that anymore after what happened to Beleriand. Nobody complained about him because everyone knew he was essentially a fucking god except for the hobbits. After being resurrected even Aragorn (who as the last descendant of the kings of Numenor is technically the divinely appointed king of all mankind) immediately bow down to him. He also assures everyone that none of their weapons could possibly hurt him

Your analogy doesn't really make sense when you take into account how different Tolkien was to most fantasy settings

doujin where?

I don't remember Gandalf shaping reality with his mind. I remember Gandalf casting Light a couple of times, and Magic Missile once.

Can I get a source on that comic? Genuinely interested

Sounds like DM of the Rings. shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=612

not balanced because the wizard gets to fuck everything 90% of the time and the fighter/rogue get's to maybe stab at the 50 AC wizard once only to fail and get save or dead as a reaction casting by the wizard.

mean while their wizard and cleric have already teleported out and left them for dead.

Which makes me ask, why don't wizards use guns too?
If muggle clocks can work at HSogwarts there's no reason a much simplier tech like firearms wouldn't.

Because wizards are fucking morons.

>Aragorn sure as fuck never had superpowers.
He's able to overwhelm Sauron's will and force his image into his mind with a Palantir. He can heal fucking everything with a bit of athelas. As a Dúnedain he can easily live for several hundred years, and his lifespan of 210 was abnormally short for royalty.

They appear to have a very shaky understanding of how most forms of technology work. The fact the news needs to explain what a gun IS when Sirius Black is on the loose suggests the thought flat-out doesn't occur to most wizards and the death eaters would consider it beneath them because they'd be admitting "Magic is Might" is a load of shit compared to a glock.

Not to mention it's set in the UK, so it's probably more difficult to get guns there.