Caster Supremacy

The point is that it's in keeping with the fantasy tradition that casters > martials.

There is. Even after I tell my players that wizards are far more powerful than fighters some still choose to play fighters because they like the appeal of a martial class. People don't just play a class because they think it's the strongest in terms of gameplay mechanics.

Because two characters of the same level should be about equal in terms of power. If not then it should be exponentially harder for the more powerful class to level up than the weaker class. Let's say 10x exp requirements

>Because two characters of the same level should be about equal in terms of power.

That's just like your opinion man.

>everything is about utility
What's the point of ever playing anything but a minmaxed broken as fuck character?

Because some people realize the point of the game is not to steamroll through everything, but to have fun, lots of people have fun playing as a non-wizard even if they aren't the best mechanically.

Ugh, this shit again. Why did we think getting rid of Quests was a good thing? Sure it filled up the first page, but it kept the real SHIT down at the second while the Generals and the truly noteworthy threads stayed at the top.

Why have the level system in place at all if it isn't an accurate measurement of power in any case involving two characters of difference classes?

Then why act as if it's better to play them?

That's just like, proper game balance and design, man.

Then why play casters if the point is to not steam-roll everything? You can't have it both ways.

>Yeah and who the hell is going to want to play a fortune teller or a soothsayer character whose only skill is herbal medicine and reading the bones?
I'm going to let you think about how that relates to wizards and fighters.
>So what's stopping you?
I'm waiting out my current campaign to pitch one for Barbarians of Lemuria or whatever it takes to get a no-magic fantasy setting.

>Play wizard
>Steamroll through all encounters due to spells being OP.
>Never get challenged
>Don't have fun
>Play fighter
>Get challenged
>Have fun

>The point is that it's in keeping with the fantasy tradition that casters > martials.
That's just patently false for the following reason:

>There is. Even after I tell my players that wizards are far more powerful than fighters some still choose to play fighters because they like the appeal of a martial class. People don't just play a class because they think it's the strongest in terms of gameplay mechanics.
It doesn't matter if they can bind demons to their will, at the end of the day the wizard is just some faggot in a bath robe. Every story worth a damn is a tale of warriors, not wizards. Every hero of legend, a powerful WARRIOR who wins with a mixture of cunning, strength, and possibly divine intervention.

Because it's an accurate measurement of power in any case involving two character of the same class.

Balanced = boring. Some classes will always be better than others.

You want a balanced game? Everyone is a >male human fighter. Happy now?

Because magic is fun, being able to mess around with it to solve problems is fun, not because it's good for fighting monsters (the most boring part of the game).

>The point is that it's in keeping with the fantasy tradition that casters > martials.
The fantasy tradition usually has powerful wizards as old and experience, which indicates magic is not an easy path that you can complete faster than a man with a sword can get good with a sword. Conan the Barbarian took down his share of mages as well. I don't think the D&D caster supremacy is actually as widespread in fantasy fiction as you think it is.

But besides that, can you find confirmation from anyone at wizards that they were actually trying to have casters outpace martials? I'm not convinced it wasn't just a mistake.

Or you can actually try to make a game that has reasonable trade-offs in exchange for power. You know, like someone with a brain would.

>You want a balanced game? Everyone is a >male human fighter.
Yeah, or you could have a game made by smart people.

>But besides that, can you find confirmation from anyone at wizards that they were actually trying to have casters outpace martials? I'm not convinced it wasn't just a mistake.
Aside from OP being a dick snorkeling retard, it's a known fact that Monte Cook had a hardon for casters so hard that he thought the 3.5 fighter needed nerfs and the wizard needed buffs. Suddenly, all becomes clear.

As an aside, wizards will always be better in D&D as long as they make magic as retard proof as it has been.

Then play a bard

You have enough magic to have it's use be fun, but not enough to solve every possible problem with it

Warriors might make better protagonists in literature since they are the underdogs (i.e. they are inherently less powerful than wizards) and they are more relateable to the reader since they cannot solve problems and defeat enemies by casting spells.

Having said that there are plenty of works of fantasy wherein wizards are the protagonists. From Earthsea to Harry Potter.

To be honest this. Power isnt fun for some people. They rather struggle. I prefer Shadowrun magic.

>Warriors might make better protagonists in literature since they are the underdogs (i.e. they are inherently less powerful than wizards) and they are more relateable to the reader since they cannot solve problems and defeat enemies by casting spells.
Casters are generally not that powerful compared to a warrior, given that in literature spellcasting usually either has actual drawbacks, or requires insane expertise to pull off consistently (and at that level, a warrior with comparable training would be a fucking god), so the minute ye olde armored knight steps up in your shit you're stuck hucking fireballs rather than gallavanting about searching for minions on other planes.

I'll take this shit over quality threads once in a blue moon getting slid to page 10 by shinigami quest, two Naruto quests, and thirty other shitty awful garbage quest threads.

This thread as a whole is shit and it's only about to get shittier. I'm with On this.

Except it's not just 3.5

Every edition of D&D except for 4e (which, let's be honest, isn't really D&D) has casters reign supreme over martials.

It's not an accident. It's intentional. Casters are meant to be more powerful and versatile which indicates that although training with a sword will get you faster results, studying magic yields stronger results in the long term.

I don't see a problem with this. Martials tend to shine in the early game whereas caster shine in the late game. How is that unfair?

But bard magic is only useful for date raping and doing drugs while inventing rock and roll.

If supernatural powers are supposed to be better than mundane powers, then why is the monk way worse than the fighter?

Threadly reminder to butthurt questfags (who probably made this thread in the first place to slake their thirst for shitposting) will never ever NEVER get quests back no matter how much they whine.

u fookin' wot m8?

Aren't 3.5 monks retardedly OP?

Honestly, all we needed was a ban on Anime Franchise Quests. Or just Franchise quests in general, excluding Veeky Forums-related properties. I could handle a JoJo Quest every now and then, and a 40k quest couldn't hurt.

Because monks only get supernatural powers once they die and reach enlightenment/god/whatever, untill then they are just men hitting things with their fists, bakabaka.

This guy gets it.

Also I like Shadowrun too, even if magic is better than everything else there too. Fortunately the difference isn't enough to matter and the mage will get geeked anyway.

In all honesty I'd just like Heretical Love Quest to return on Weekends. I'm fine with everything else going down the shitter.

>Except it's not just 3.5
3.5 is the most egregious example. In earlier editions a fighter vs. a wizard of the same level would not be such a blowout, especially because the fighter has the advantage of good saves working for him. In later editions (barring pathfinder, a shameless 3.5 clone), the wizard has been significantly toned down. In 5e the wizard is still really strong, bit the fighter still wins in terms of sheer combat prowess.

>which, let's be honest, isn't really D&D
It's dungeons and dragons 4e, literally the definition of dungeons and dragons.

>I don't see a problem with this. Martials tend to shine in the early game whereas caster shine in the late game. How is that unfair?
Because tabletop games are a cooperative medium, and timmy isn't going to be having fun when bob and his stupid fucking god-wizard is hogging the spotlight 24/7 and making any sort of challenge from the DM a pointless exercise that only serves to stroke bob's raging ego.

Shadowrun does a good job handling the power difference between magical and non-magical characters thanks to the essence mechanics.

High end adepts are hard to kill and can punch ghosts in the face, but high end street samurai will always hit harder, always

See this is why earlier editions of D&D are clearly superior, mages have incredible power but level up more slowly, fighters are able to build forts and gain followers, gaining the trust of powerful npcs while wizards are usually treated with suspicion. Also, if wizard takes a hit the spell they were casting is gone no take backs a and the spell books they carry around are expensive and difficult to replace. Also material components would actually mean something and not be ignored because of a spell component pouch or some bullshit.

I can still remember having to get my parties cleric to bless a strip of leather each day so that I could cast Mage armour.

Also magic users in Shadowrun have more personality thanks to the setting and game mechanics pretty much forcing you to archtype. But the little individual mods for each Awakened is my favorite.

When will fightards ever learn?

Your job is to carry the party through the early levels, till the spellcasters get their full game on. You don't like it play something else.

Oh wait D&D's the most popular system by far, guess what that says balancefags? Nobody cares about balance.

>3.5 is the most egregious example. In earlier editions a fighter vs. a wizard of the same level would not be such a blowout, especially because the fighter has the advantage of good saves working for him. In later editions (barring pathfinder, a shameless 3.5 clone), the wizard has been significantly toned down. In 5e the wizard is still really strong, bit the fighter still wins in terms of sheer combat prowess.

Okay cool. So caster supremacy is only a thing in 3.5 then.

>It's dungeons and dragons 4e, literally the definition of dungeons and dragons.

You know what I mean.

>Because tabletop games are a cooperative medium, and timmy isn't going to be having fun when bob and his stupid fucking god-wizard is hogging the spotlight 24/7 and making any sort of challenge from the DM a pointless exercise that only serves to stroke bob's raging ego.

Timmy has been hogging the spotlight for the first few sessions isn't it time that Bob had a go? Perhaps Bob should have rolled a wizard when the DM explained that wizards are more powerful later on in the game.

>When will fightards ever learn?

They won't. Intelligence and Wisdom are dump stats for them.

>Timmy has been hogging the spotlight for the first few sessions isn't it time that Bob had a go? Perhaps Bob should have rolled a wizard when the DM explained that wizards are more powerful later on in the game.
Timmy couldn't have been hogging the spotlight for the first few sessions, because the fighter's theater rests almost solely in combat. Unless the game was pure combat, Timmy got to have his moment to shine like everyone else, until bob got 2nd level spells and decided that he was sick of actually playing a game and ruined everyone's fun by having almost as much narrative power as the fucking DM himself.

>Aren't 3.5 monks retardedly OP?

No. Rather the opposite problem. They're retardedly trash.

This, in and of itself, is not bad.
Bad was the idea introduced with 3.0 that Fighters and Wizards leveled the same way, same rate.
Putting everyone on the same XP chart, and basing Challenge Ratings and Encounter Levels around character level, introduced the concept that very different character classes could and should be equivalent to each other, level to level.
Now, there are a number a factors that led to magic users being far more potent in the 3.x era, but those factors don't play into the core problem, they just magnify how noticeable they are.

Levels, originally, were only meant to measure character progression, never as a judge against each other, outside of others of the same class.
When classes had separate progression tables, this distinction was easy to see.

Ultimately, under a system where everyone shares the same progression and earns the same experience per encounter, it is a very reasonable thing to feel there should be some parity between classes.
Worse though is when the focus shifts from equally useful to equals in combat and there is just no way to reasonably satisfy that goal and maintain a diverse and unique set of character styles, outside of weekly balance patches.

Try running an adventure where your characters are lucky to get a 2 minute breather, nevermind 8 hours of rest. Shit goes downhill for casters very quickly once they run out of spells while most martials will pass fatigue related checks that cone on with extended adventuring/siege/running away.

Have you ever been in a campaign that went past level 11? Be honest.
>Implying popularity equals quality
Also a solution. 5 - minute adventuring days can take a hike.

Low level wizards are horrible in any combat situation and need to be carried by martials. Their spells are useless and hit like wet noodles whilst they die if an enemy sneezes at them.

Again, if wizards are so great then nothing is preventing Timmy from rolling one.

It's not a matter of fantasy tradition so much as a matter of level measurements being accurate. If you are so incapable of imagining a world where a martial can be useful next to a caster, than a level 1 martial should represent Conan-tier exceptional hero who shows up once in a generation, and a lvl 5 caster should represent a greenhorn fresh-out-of-the-academy apprentice.

Level should not be a measurement of how long you have been training, but a general measurement of your effectiveness to a party of adventurers. If they are of similar level, they should be of similar effectiveness. If you need to adjust what each level "represents" for each class to make it make sense to you, so be it, but level should matter as a measurement.

At this point, you're not even trying. A Lawful Evil player is going to complain about a need to fix the system to fit your worldview rather than realizing it as a vehicle for fun times.

Man, have you missed the point.

Considering hitting shit with sticks is clearly superior in real life, I don't see why that shouldn't carry over to gaming.

In 3.5, THE caster supremacy edition, the wizard can end combat with a single spell. Sure, he can only do this twice before his brain fizzles out, I'm not going to say wizards START overpowered as fuck, but that is very much a thing.

You've ceased to teach the lesson that everyone should learn that magic doesn't solve every problem. Same way a sword or gun doesn't. The same way talking doesn't.

The reason why caster supremacy is a thing is because DMs are afraid to check people.

It's laziness or a lack of creativity and challenge that encourages over reliance on magical powers. Fuck 'em if they call it railroading because you need the world to chase you up a tree and throw rocks at you for it to be a worthwhile adventure. You had to have the chance to fail and fall and be humiliated no matter how many magic missiles you can cast or what your sword damage is.

Even fucking Elminster gets his ass pimped now and then no matter how powerful he is.

You say SJW like its a bad thing.

>high level wizard
>blows up monster with a flame spell

>high level fighter
>cuts monster in half with +5 greatsword

What is the difference?
No class is extremely better than the other. It all comes down to how the player rolls.

In a good system, balance is when classes are close enough in terms of overall power, not identical.

Because magic doesn't exist in real life. Even the strongest MMA fighters alive wouldn't stand a chance against someone who can charm them and control their minds, throw up a wall of flame at their feet, become invisible, summon 1d12 silverback gorillas to rip them to shreds, etc...

>hit like wet noodles

You aren't seriously talking about blaster casters, are you?

A Wizard doesn't need to nuke the entire fight with a fireball to win it. Even if a Caster can Entangle or Sleep half of the enemies, that's a major advantage. At that point, you just need some on half-decent in melee to help clean things up, rather than someone specialized like a Fighter.

It's a good thing that there aren't any full casters that have a d8 hit dice and decent armor, right?

Except that's not how it works. It's more like this:
>high level fighter
>long heated battle with a monster that he'll probably lose

>high level wizard
>instantly defeats monster with any of a couple dozen spells, no challenge involved

The difference is that you're a dumbass

Sorry

The actual difference is that wizards don't blast things if they're trying to be optimal, they put them to sleep, or petrify them, or use an instant-death effect, or mind-control them, or throw them into an alternate plane etc. etc.

Damage in 3.5 is the slowest and most inefficient way of ending a fight

And? Even if magic did exist in real life, who says it's that easy. If it takes 12 hours of chanting and the sacrifice of a fresh bushel of bananas to summon a gorilla squad, it's not the sort of thing that will win a fight when the MMA guy is busting down your door 2 hours in.

That's the problem with claiming magic is inherently superior, because magic isn't inherently anything except for magical.

A setting could have Wizards with nothing but the power to turn fire blue. Would you still say that should be inherently superior to martial?

Ultra powerful spells being quick, safe, and reliable isn't the norm across fiction.

Yes, and even the cleverest stage magician wouldn't stand a chance against a fantasy hero. I don't see your point.

Elminster gets pimped? By fucking who? Deties? Ao?

Personally, I've found the change in the martial/caster dynamic be a lot like changes in Warhammer, be it Fantasy or 40k.

After a particular point (in this case, 3rd ed D&D) it became more about tiers and effectiveness and builds rather than simply creating a character and using your skills in concert with the other players to succeed.

Feats were a horrible idea in terms of balance. All the interesting stuff martials could do was put behind an artificial wall, where casters don't really have the same difficulty. If anything, I'd have made specialist casters the norm, and access to other schools would be feat-locked.

True but we're talking about D&D and its vancian casting system here right? The rules for magic are fairly well established. If a high level D&D vancian caster existed in our world not even every MMA fighter in existence would stand a chance against him or her.

Nothing a fighter does in D&D is inherently magical so the point is moot.

We get it, you like your subtlety. Fighters and Barbarians don't do the "limits" of mortal men. They are the epic heroes that myths are spun on about and they kill monsters with nothing but their heads and their skills.

You wanna go for the unbalanced actions of magic to compare to a lowly mortal. How about the overpowered physical and tactical exploits of characters who do their jobs without the need to cast a spell? And then exaggerate them too?

With all of the abilities, feats, and good equipment, a fighter has just as good a chance to instantly defeat a monster as the wizard.

The only reason for a long drawn out battle would be due to resistances and absurd amounts of health, which could just as easily work against magic.

Demons. And a lack of using his head.

Then D&D is poorly designed. It'd be like placing a stage magician and a fantasy hero in the same game and claiming they're both viable choices.

But that's called being a Charlattan Rogue user...

Both fighters and wizards are perfectly viable choices. They're just not equally as powerful.

>actually responding to all the bait

Good work, guys.

There's not much else to do on night Veeky Forums, all the good threads I have open are going at a post every 30 minutes.

Also just out of curiosity

>True but we're talking about D&D and its vancian casting system here right?

More specifically, we're talking about the caster supremacy most infamous in 3.5.

OP puts forth that it isn't a bad thing, because 'logically' a caster should beat a martial every single time, and there's no situation or setting where the reverse is true.

That's why it's bad. From a game design perspective it's bad to have classes that aren't even remotely balanced, and trying to justify it by saying 'well, realistically magic should be better' is just lazy, because the people who made the setting or system are the ones who decided how strong magic was.

3.5 decided Wizards should be better, and then lied about it by acting like Fighter was somehow more than a glorified NPC class. If it was honest about its intent to be a game all about Wizards, you wouldn't see as much complaining.

Look at Ars Magicka or Mage: The Awakening. They're games all about Wizards doing cool shot and being better, but they didn't feel the need to add in a Soldier class that sucked in comparison and pretend like it was a legitimate option.

I think it should be said that, coming from a token male human fighter, if you feel like you're having a bad time because the caster is being kowtowed to, there might be more of a problem with your group and/or DM than with the system itself.

In a game where cooperation is key and everyone wants to feel like a great adventurer, if Clyde just rubbed his balls all over the table after decimating another legion of skeletons, maybe casters could use a good nerfing, or maybe, more reasonably, you need to tell Clyde not to be a showboating cunt and that he's putting himself and his ego before the other players. Maybe the DM needs to put in the effort of finding a way where Clyde, while not rendered useless, can't just nuke/mind control/transmute/bullshit his way out of a problem. I'll admit, that's what wizards are built for, but a clever DM can always find a way.

But all this aside, the point isn't to show who's RPG-peen is biggest, but to work together to solve problems. A martial should be thankful that the guy who conjures 50-foot walls of fire is on his side, and the caster should acknowledge that without the martial around to soak up all the prolonged beatings, the caster would be like a piñata with a fancy light show.

>tl;dr if wizards got rid of their superiority complexes, fighters stopped moaning like victims, and DMs got creative with their challenges, we'd all get along

But they're not. Fighter simply can't do its job at high levels. Meanwhile, Wizard not only can do its own job, but most other classes' jobs. Again, it's like a fantasy hero and a stage magician.

>Why does Veeky Forums act like this is a bad thing?
Largely because you keep making troll threads about it in this very fashion I guess despite it being such an overdiscussed topic that you likely weren't even playing Veeky Forums games yet when every possible variation of this discussion was already had.
So basically it's entirely your fault I guess.

>From a game design perspective it's bad to have classes that aren't even remotely balanced,
But DnD wasn't "combat balanced" from the get go, there were always skill monkeys and such who didn't balance in combat but served other roles. Why is caster superiority any different?

Because casters are good at all the roles, not just combat. They solve any problem the other classes can solve with the right spells.

3.5 might have taken it too far but I do agree with the premise that casters should be more powerful than fighters at high levels. Maybe it's because I started playing during 2e and that's how it worked then.

Martials would shine in the early game and casters would shine in the late game. It took twice as much XP for a wizard to reach level 2 than a rogue for example which also helped balance it out.

I honestly don't see what's wrong with this. The notion that two different classes of the same level should be equal in power is nonsense and simply impossible to achieve.

A fighter can totally do his job provided the DM balances encounters around the fact that fighters are weaker than what CR system expects and the rest of the party consists of other tier 4 or 5 classes.

The problem is not what the fighter can or can't do, or what the wizard can or can't do. The problem is that the system expects both to be in the same party when that simply does not work.

3.5 is 4 loosely-interconnected tabletop RPGs in one, and any one of those RPGs works absolutely fine on it's own. But since this is never explicitly stated and has only been found via trial and error, 3.5 instead looks like 1 hideous ugly mess of a game designed to extend suffering

While that may be true, that also means to do the things another class does you generally have to specialize and lose out on other capability. Just because a wiz can do it, doesn't mean they should, right?

>Anyone who picks these options has to be essentially the minion to players who pick those options
>These options are so blatantly weaker than those options to the point that they might as well not even be included in the game

I thought these games were supposed to be fun for everyone? This seems like extraordinarily poor design to me.

If casters are so great then why don't you roll one next time? Nothing's stopping you right?

>Because it's an accurate measurement of power in any case involving two character of the same class.

And yet for calculating CR a Fighter, Monk, or Rogue level is equal to a Wizard, Cleric, or Druid level.

Exact equality might not be viable, but they should at least be comparable. You're not providing any reason why they shouldn't be except "that's how they've always done it" - meanwhile, having them be of comparable power means all players can contribute and be part of the group without the GM having to go out of their way to have Aquaman episodes.

The fact that martials are weaker than casters doesn't prevent people having fun playing them. Even in 3.5 people still roll martials knowing full well how gimped they are.

If you're a powergamer who isn't having fun unless he's "winning" in a non-competitive RPG then I suggest you roll a caster.

I don't think anything's stopping him other than the fact that constantly rolling wizards, especially when it's not a class you gravitate towards, all for the sake of being reasonably effective at facing the challenges of the game, makes playing the game feel like shit. At least, that's where I think he's coming from.

I just stopped playing 3.PF.

Explain to me how you would balance martials and casters without giving martials spells or spell-like abilities of their own?

Worlds and stories are much more interesting if there's a variety of powers. For example, a person so fast that he becomes imperceptible, a person so strong that they can destroy the ground beneath their feet, sending shockwaves of rock at their opponents, or even a person who has perfected the defensive arts to such a point that they automatically reflect all attacks.

>They accept that that's just the way it's supposed to be in fantasy.
That's not how it's supposed to be in fantasy, though. Wizards are supposed to perform dark and powerful rituals to wreak havoc on the world, which are interrupted just in the nick of time by the dashing fighter or quick-witted rogue. Then they turn into a monster and get stabbed to death after a brutal fight. That's how it's always been, and that's how it should be.

If you honestly, legitimately have the problems mentioned in this thread then the problem is not in the game, but the DM.

Reduce the power and versatility of magic until it's on par with the fighter and rogue, but different in role. Make it closer to Shadowrun in terms of effectiveness. Current wizard-level magic is solely the domain of monstrous beings and those who have made pacts with them, as beyond normal casters as dragons are beyond normal warriors.