Martial Abilities

But wizards can't do anything. So your premise is false and your thread is nonsense.

Even without classes, magical abilities would need to be more limited so that martial abilities would have a point to them.

With or without classes, a system needs to be balanced or it generally just sucks. Sure, you can do anything with all these options available to you, but what's the point if some choices absolutely eclipse others? If people do not purposefully limit themselves based on power level to ensure an equal playing field for the game, then why would anyone choose anything outside of the most powerful options?

Balance is usually the job of the system to ensure a level playing field and a fun game, and when ensuring balance is shunted onto the responsibilities of the player, well, you're now running a game based on an honor system without system limitations. And when these abilities basically let you do basically anything... Well, you might as well be playing a narrative-driven story game because of how little a role the game mechanical actually play anymore. You're playing with dozens of pages of pointless bookkeeping that basically give you free reign, or free form, over everything.

Fair enough, I meant to say that magic is easily fluffed as doing everything.

Not the guy you're replying to, but yes. I agree. Now, assume I have a system I'm working on, and that I want to balance magic and martial stuff. There are no particular limits on what martials could accomplish, realism isn't necessary - what would be some cool and flavourful abilities martial characters could have?

It's hardly that I don't want the system to be balanced. I just find the idea of highly controlled roles to be stupid especially when they can't fit a concept you want within said role which is one of my gripes with systems like D&D.

"Oh, you want to be a fighter who can shape shift into a bear? You have to multiclass fighter and and druid!"

Or something stupid like that. For what it's worth, I appreciate the thought behind the concept of archetypes, i just wish they would make more options available that take bits and pieces from the other classes to give you a decent hybrid without having literally go outside your class to get things.

>"Oh, you want to be a fighter who can shape shift into a bear? You have to multiclass fighter and and druid!"
Or.... Or... maybe... you could play a werebear instead?

This
But also thisIf you want Martials to be cool and compete/keep up with the Super powered Demi-Gods that are the D&D Casters you need to either bring down casters or buff up martials to equally weeb levels of bull shit

Lets face it every time someone suggests martial do more than swing a sword with all the force a limp wristed neckbeard could muster someone comes out of the woodwork to call it WEEB forgetting entirely that the Wizard is basically Madara Uchiha from Naruto casting illusions, save or dies, save or suck, meteor storm as well as being able to buff themselves to be better fighters than fighters and at high enough level might even be a fucking Lich

If you want martial to be better let them do cool shit people shit on Tome of Battle but it helped to lessen the Martial Caster divide

Why? Why can't I have an archetype that's a druid/fighter hybrid?

It's stuff like this thread that make me think to myself "I wish more people played Mutants and Masterminds 3e".

Then beat up whoever's fluffing wizards and get that asshat to either issue a public apology or start fluffing martials the same way.

A starting point might be replacing all class skills with wizard-quality do-everything bullshit class options. , you might also be interested in this.

Barbarian:
Climb > Wall Run at low levels, subjective personal gravity at high levels
Craft > shape armor and weapons out of the Rage Force (it's like the Speed Force), plusses scaling with level, sorta like soulknives
Handle Animal > Speak with Animals at low levels, gradually upgrading through Charm to Leadership-but-for-animals where a cohort and a horde of animal followers support you
Intimidate > Fear immunity, fear aura, frightful presence
Jump > Anime Jump, now gets a distance of 50ft base + 10ft per class level + 10ft per rank, ignoring movement speed limits. Wizard puts up a wall of force? Jump over it. Wizard is flying? Jump up and stab him (also hang time). Reflex save buffs, possibly even Evasion.
Listen > Instead of checking to sense, you automatically sense and check to identify. Pierces invisibility for corporeal creatures. Greatly increased range.
Ride > Give the epic usages of ride as free permanent effects, for starters. Constant mount cover. Control while unconscious. Ride anything. Tame anything. Raise mount speed and durability.
Survival > Make it a combat skill while in the outdoors, fluffed as knowing the terrain well enough to lead your enemies into traps and bad conditions that you were able to predict. Mechanically, spawn pits and avalanches and snowstorms and stuff. Give elemental resistances.
Swim > Water breathing, swim speed, fishmorph, speak with aquatic creatures (overlapping with Handle Animal, but hey, not everyone has both), cold resistance/immunity.

>Madara as a wizard

You know what? That makes more sense then it has any right to. Worst still being he fights the uber martial of the setting (8 Gates Guy) and still beats him because of his bullshit immunities.

God damnit, it's like BMX man and Angel Summoner

But then you have that problem where there's no balance, and you could easily make a broken character even by accident.

Of course, DnD already has that problem, but there are other systems out there.

Where is that webm from?

Maybe.... Maybe.... because every class isn't meant to be able to do anything?

Maybe.... Maybe.... because any sane GM would see you go "I want X class, but I also want Y class feature without multiclassing." as you wanting to be a special little snow flake.

Maybe.... Maybe.... Instead of playing pathfinder, you could play the D&D 4E game I've been wanting to run for a while and convince me why your character absolutely has to have the Werebear Theme from one of the Dragon Magazines?

Maybe.... Maybe.... Fighters aren't spellcasters and thus can't shape shift without the special training that comes with multiclassing?

Maybe... Maybe... if you agree to behave we might allow you to use the Variant Multiclass option to trade a few of your feats from some stuff progression and swap Wild Shape/Improved Wild Shape and Companion/Improved Companion so you can shape shift into a bear at level 7 after actually earning it in game?

Then you'd have to have an archetype for everything.

isn't meant to be able to do everything*

Accidentally placed an a instead of an e.

Animatrix. Pretty good anthology movie, although I admit that last time I saw it was back in VHS times.

>But then you have that problem where there's no balance, and you could easily make a broken character even by accident.
If your GM doesn't pay any attention to character creation and lets the players show up with whatever broken nonsense their grognard munchkin brains could come up with

Pretentious much?

It doesn't mean anything on a message board about games of pretend.

>asks why he can't play a shape shifting fighter dude.
>gets given a few reasons why and even a few suggestions as to how he might be able to.
>calls the person responding to him pretentious.
>mfw

Fucking this

With Mutants and Masterminds, it's very easy to find when someone's going to break the system. That's what a GM is for.

The point is that every system can be broken in some way. It's what the system does right is what matters. And my argument is that Mutants and Masterminds 3e allows people who use martial stuff to have fun and do things besides "I hit the goblin again".

Watch anime and go from there
Veeky Forums hates any mention of anime influencing games but if there is one thing anime does it's cool martials

For something more
Increase base move for martials scales with level
Increase jump distance scales with level
Danger sense at mid level
Intimidation boost at low level Aura of Fear at high
Natural AC or Damage Reduction starting somewhere around level 3-5 and increasing at certain intervals
Climb becomes Wuxia style lightfoot at some point
Natural increase in unarmed damage
Combat Styles with unique moves basically what Tome of Battle tried to do
And finally assume everything is magical in your magical fantasy world don't limit yourself to real world physics

Man I loved Katanagatari and this still pisses me off.

The fight or that anons suggestions

The fight, yes.
Or rather, the teaser of the fight and then the utter lack of it in the actual episode.

>What sort of utility powers could a martial character have?
Nothing, because I am fat, lazy, and uncoordinated.

-Skip Williams and the 3.5 Crew

The way classes create manageable design-chunks you can balance individually compared to each other, makes it significantly easier to balance them as a whole, compared to more granular approaches where more individual chunks of content have to be balanced against each other in every possible combination

The fact that no D&D design team in history has heard of an excel sheet and a bit of self-restraint and careful wording when writing spells, has nothing to do with whether it's harder or easier to balance a class-based system compared to something else.

I really, REALLY like this idea.

That's because Naruto is a comic about wizards. Fireballs, summoning, turning into a snake, straight up motherfucking necromancy, I bet you could find a spell in D&D for every single thing ninja's do in that series and you wouldn't even have to re-fluff most of them.

Wizards are the weebiest fucking class.

That gives me an idea

>The perception is that magic can do literally anything from wiping your ass to literally just creating a minion who can outfight the fighter PC.

So change that. Make all the different fields of magic into things wizard players need to specialise in to get the most out of, rather than just being handed a cosmic swiss army knife every time they level up.

If a wizard wants to create a minion that can outfight the fighter PC, then that's something they need to work up to, developing their minion-crafting skills over time, and building better and better minions as their skill grows. They can start out imbuing pebbles with simple decision-making and self-propulsion abilities, then gradually work up to larger and more complex stone-critters. By the time they've achieved mastery of minion-crafting, they'd be creating fully-sapient stone manservants and bodyguards, or even beings that surpass themselves in intelligence.

A master minion-crafter couldn't conjure a flame to save their life, but they wouldn't need to, because they can bury their enemy in masterfully-crafted golems.

The problems with the Martial/Caster discrepancy is ultimately because people--whether it be game designers, adventure writers, GMs, or whoever--just assume magic can do anything and everything, all the time, forever, in all settings and as easy as anything.

Long story short they're shitty writers.
Bring back the mysticism, the arcana, the esoterica, and do away with this push-button bullshit magic that doesn't mean anything to the players and sure as fuck means nothing to the setting.

Kind of like Naruto.

There's actually a line in the 3.5 PHB description of the rogue that says

>Experienced rogues develop mystical powers and skills as they master the arts of stealth, evasion, and sneak attacks.

So I get the impression they were intended to become mystical ninja at high levels, or something. And if the rogue can develop "mystical powers and skills" there's no reason the same couldn't apply to fighters or anyone else. They didn't really put that into practice though.

Worst case scenario: it's a very stupid attempt at defining Use Magic Device.

Nah, that's mentioned seperately in the same paragraph.

>Rogues have a sixth sense when it comes to avoiding danger. Experienced rogues develop mystical powers and skills as they master the arts of stealth, evasion, and sneak attacks. In addition, while not capable of casting spells on their own, rogues can “fake it” well enough to cast spells from scrolls, activate wands, and use just about any other magic item.

UMD is "in addition" to their supposed mystical powers and skills.

Conversations like this are why I'm surprised Fantasy Craft isn't more popular. Distinct and powerful martials is what the game does best.

As a matter of fact I've seen complaints that casters are unduly weaker and don't get as many fun options compared to martials.

In that case, that IS weird.

Because that archetype is reserved for barbarians as they are less likely to get armor stuck in their now growing fur. 3.5, Complete Warrior, Bear Warrior if you want to look it up. Also ranger wilds have variant.

Rule Of Cool's now-defunct Legend system can do stuff like this.
Higher-end skill DCs are for extremely mythic stuff like running on snowflakes in a blizzard.

It has a lot of very interesting mechanics and subsystems, and some really interesting feat design.
There's a thing where you gain magic items as part of advancement, but some of those 'items' can be experiences in places of power which strenghtened or otherwise help define your character. One is that you mysteriously managed to survive falling hundreds of feet--and you literally take no fall damage.

Never actually played it, but like I said, it's pretty interesting.

Sorry, meant wildshape. Phone posting, you know how it is

It is odd
I mean the DMG and PH of every edition since 3rd talk about all the things players are supposed to be doing at different levels but they seem to only pay attention to that when it comes to wizards

Personally I want to see a focus on BECMI when it comes to design sure Basic 1-5 level fighters might not have as much as the wizard but once they hit Expert levels 6-10 that gap begins to close until you hit Immortal and a peasant wouldn't be able to tell the difference

>now-defunct
Eh? What have them folks been up to? Last I heard it was about to be the new hotness but then 4e was released.

Also keep in mind the dude in that picture is a Fighter as the cover to all the BECMI books depict a warrior and a dragon

Team fell apart, released their notes, homebrew section of forum still active.

The system as it is now is perfectly useable, there is just a distinct lack of Monster Manual.

Man, it was in development for that long?

It was declared officially dead on their forums not too long ago.
It's still totally playable as-is and the free download link is still up, but they're no longer working on the core game and there's no longer a bestiary on the way. Between things other people have made and certain promotional materials with monsters even that's not a big deal, but you'd have to poke around the forums for those PDFs.

I happen to have a good selection for it on my Mega, so may as well post it for interested parties.
mega.nz/#F!TE1GiKJZ!oQFa3zABVGQi0MNO1MraMA

>Team fell apart
Oh. Yeah, honestly that was probably inevitable all along.

Yeah, I remember people being bummed at the 4e announcement because it would cut into marketshare. I don't know about development though, from the sound of things, it's still in pretty much the same state that it was in back in those days.

>there is just a distinct lack of Monster Manual.
Which is a problem because it takes awhile to generate monsters.

Still preferable to those games whose bestiary consists of some vaguely eyeballed shit with no indication of strength and no guidelines for making stuff up on your own.
I remember the people on the forum working on a bestiary. Maybe they have something to show for it by now.

If anything it should go to show there shouldn't be an arbitrary distinction between "casters" and "martials" seeing as how they can all use weapons and fight with their barehands and use ninja magic to various degrees with the exception that some specialize in certain types of ninja magic versus others such as someone who primarily makes use of Genjutsu; they would obviously be better physically then any normal person but they wouldn't hold a candle in close quarters to someone who specializes in unarmed combat augmented by their ninja magic.

Or the classic case, Temari versus Tayuya

Definitely, but that doesn't change that GMing Legend is pretty damn time consuming. It's the main reason my GM called it quits.

I would hate it more but I actually rather enjoyed the episode of his sister that replaced it.

Yeah, it's not as if the episode was bad, just incredibly annoying that we didn't get to see the fight properly.

Martial characters are just as good as casters in Anima. Just do what they did

>campaign I bulshitted onto paper in a week.

One of the things I've seen brought up in Martial vs Caster threads in the past is the idea of giving Martials access to the same or similar abilities that the Caster gets at the same level
For example a caster gets Area Effect attacks like fireball the the martial gets AoE attacks
Caster gets flight Martial gets similar mobility
Teleport=Teleport
Save or Die=Save or Die
The only difference would be range and damage types as well as Casters having an advantage against certain monsters though this can be mitigated through the use of magic items

It might not be a perfect fix but it is an interesting idea

Nah, Naruto and crew are psionic characters.

what did anima do?

Just give martials the power to tap into their life force/ki/prana/inner power to perform superhuman feats.

Basically, fucking Psionics.

4E got one thing right in making monks' power psionic rather than just magic-but-not-spellcasting. IIRC even old 2e psionics required a strong constitution to properly channel psionic power. Sure you might not want your fighter reading minds or levitating objects, but if you're training to put the pointy end of a sword into someone else you're going to train in abilities to better facilitate that like enhanced speed and physical strengthening. Sure you could learn to set fires with your mind, but you'd lose to the guy who suddenly appears behind you and shoves his katana through your spine before tipping his fedora.

Well, that's sort of what 4e strove for. Strike's meant as a followup to that, but it needs a revised edition to unfuck its noncombat section.

The combat rules are good. Just lop off the noncombat mechanics and replace it with a lighter game exclusively for noncombat interactions. Like Risus or Lasers & Feelings, or Fate Accelerated for something leaning heavier.

>distinct martials

nah

Games that aren't shit let your nonmagical characters have access to other sources of incredible power, including technology, good genetics, mutations, objects of power, etc. that allow them to do things that are also impossible in more ridiculous means than 'can jump good', but they also tend to include a way of getting more movement on a reliable basis.

This guy gets it
Hell Green Ronin already has a fantasy supplement for M&M not to mention all their 3e D&D stuff

Plus you aren't limited to Tolkien derivatives and Forgotten Realms Super DMPC bullshit for settings
last mutants and masterminds game I played was basically Eternia mixed with Green Ronins Freeport setting ancient magitech superscience serpent men airships all sorts of bullshit

too bad M&M is really shitty otherwise

As a comic book fan, they could not have fucked up DC's Martial artists harder if they tried.

>piledriving someone and the pro wrestler glitziness stuns enemies who saw it happen
>not distinct

...

...

Well, yes, they are in fact wizards.

Fun fact: Kishimoto actually wanted to make a manga about wizards. He had an idea for a manga about wizards. But then his editor came in and went "nah, we have to do ninjas, that shit is super in right now".

So Kishimoto made a comic about ninjas that were wizards, because fuck you he wanted his wizards.

I very much dislike the implication that high level fighters should be made as good as wizards in a utility sense. Instead, make wizards not as powerful in combat so the warriors can shine.

At highest level; Warriors can rip through enemies both single and hoards with ease. None of this 'le use my sword to cut through dimensions and teleport lmao', that undermines the very concept of a warrior.

But a high level warriors best combat ability is probable something like turning into a grizzly bear or a fireball as strong as a grenade, which the high level warrior could defeat easily.

Make magic users good at illusions, transformations, mind fuckery, and all kinds of great and powerful utility but limit their combat effectiveness.

Why are so many of these posts just people complaining about caster supremacy instead of constructively answering OP's question?

Well there are a few anons who have offered suggestions but short of switching to a new system and all the 3.1415926 grognards taking their wizard loving heads out of their collective asses there isn't much you can do to fix D&Ds and its always D&D that is brought up talking about this caster problems without overhauling the entire system from the ground up due to how deep the bias runs throughout every edition even if it is less noticeable in 5e

>so any posts complaining about not having monk abilities
>so many people inept at playing eldritch knights

You have your magic fightang man archetypes, now use them.

That's sort of what the Solar Exalted are about. Taking a real skill and exaggerating it is their theme.

Almost all of those points are Exalted 3e Solar charms. Really, everything except turning into a fish, and not that mostly because it intrudes on the Lunar Exalted theme.

> there isn't much you can do to fix D&D
4e

If ever there were a place more appropriate for *teleports behind you* it's a world where reading books makes you stronger than those big dumb ogres that constantly steal all the women 'cause you're too much of a nice guy.

None. Martial characters who wanted to have utility powers beyond what a mortal man could have had, needed to get out and learn some motherfucking magic until DnD started to exist on an artificial divide between fighters and wizards.

If you stop thinking purely in terms of butthurt experienced by players who found that their is concept is objectively worthless due to being an arbitrarily restricted baggage of times when elves were a character class, demanding martial characters to keep up with magic makes as much sense as demanding from them to keep up with nukes and starships.

Low energy bait

Just play Karsa Orlong and be done with it.

I like how half of the "solutions" to this problem are "nobody's underpowered if everyone's a wizard".

Which is missing the point entirely.

There is no other solution. Unless you know something better.

The actual question was what kind of interesting utility powers a martial character might have. Post with suggestions on those are in the minority, to say the least.

Try a system where wizards aren't practically gods?
Try a system where classes are balanced?
Try a system without classes that keeps not having magic in mind within the magic rules?
Play a system where casting takes a bit longer or isn't directly combat effective so both the martial and the mage have their own niches?

As others have said, the wizard is only as broken as the system you're playing has made them. Try playing something that keeps balance and/or spotlight time in mind during development.

Make wizards be wizards instead of gods, and give martial characters access to other stuff that's appropriate to their powers.

Martials can do shit like teleport and fly, shoot energy blasts with ki, and use weapon techniques like Gate of Babylon. They're completely on par with mages and psychics.

>Craft > shape armor and weapons out of the Rage Force (it's like the Speed Force), plusses scaling with level, sorta like soulknives

This is the stupidest fucking shit I've ever read.

Skills like this would make more sense if structured as feats then, or FATE-style aspects, not as the "everyone has some number for each of these" things that d20 assumes.

>give martial characters access to other stuff that's appropriate to their powers.
Like what, motherfucker? That's the premise of this entire thread.

It fucking depends, doesn't it? "Martials" is a pretty broad category.

Welcome to the Speed Force, enjoy the stupid.