Is the caster supremacy thing a myth used to scare D&D players into sharing the spotlight or is it an actual thing?

Something about expecting GMs to make retarded enemies and going easy all the time.

...

Yes actually.

Yes, and no.

On the one hand you have theory crafting. Assuming that every caster will have access to every good spell and be able to cast them in every encounter. Having 5 minute adventuring days on flat surfaces with idiot enemies who don't do anything more than full attack the fighters. Gods giving clear and distinct answers to divination spells, etc etc. You end up with godly powers starting around 6 or 7 and a huge power gap between Batman Wizard and Dude Who Swings Sword Good.

On the other hand you have practical gameplay. Intelligent enemies with a variety of abilities. Different terrains. Long adventuring days with multiple encounters. Threats in the middle of the night, etc etc. At the table, the caster supremely still technically exists, but is heavily diminished by a halfway decent DM and the fact that you're a bunch of friendly nerds who want to play pretend and have fun.

Kinda.
Casters get a wide variety of options, but the gap between casters and non-casters was less pronounced because the number of available options for casters was less than in 3e+.
Arguably, the thing that really ruined 3.5 was having a bunch of settings be considered canon, and the fact that making a feat for everyone is considerably harder than making a spell for a single class.

>Intelligent enemies with a variety of abilities. Different terrains. Long adventuring days with multiple encounters. Threats in the middle of the night

But those will fuck over Martials even more, since they have less options to deal with them.

People always seem to misunderstand the purpose of theorycrafting.

The examples aren't there to show that things will always work that exact way. They're evidence of a systemic problem by combining elements that exist in the game and could reasonably come together in the course of a normal game, extrapolating the potential effects from this.

Some are extreme and specific, but... That's the nature of examples, and these are often cited when someone asks for evidence. There are also examples of much simpler examples it happening, like a Druid being two, then three bears, rendering a Fighter obsolete in melee and, with a single feat choice, retaining their full casting ability.

As to the whole 'A good GM works around it', that's basically just an admission of a problem. If the GM has to warp their encounter design around a single category of character, that's pretty clear evidence that those characters have a greater ability to influence the game than others. You'll never design encounter design around what the Fighter can do- If you do, those three bear druids are just going to crush it.

>Different terrains.
Sorry guys, this one's a forest. Sword doesn't work in here, it's made of metal.
>Long adventuring days
Sorry guys, Warrior's Union says 3 hours killin' per day, tops.
>Threats in the middle of the night
Sorry guys, I'm off the clock, g'luck though.

Then be a helpful wizard and help the martial members of your party like you're supposed to instead of ending every encounter with a 20d6 maximized twin quickened enervating fireball.

Forest with harsh undergrowth and bushed and rocks for enemies to hide and trees for aerial attacks is going to be worse for a Fighter.

Long Adventuring days seem beneficial to a fighter but it doesn't do anything to the fact a Druid is a Bear all day and summons other bears and has a bear buddy that is a better fighter than the fighters.

Threats in the middle of the night will likely catch the fighters offguard, needing to get their weapons and armor on. A Druid would just wildshape instantly, a mage is probably safe with Alarms and Rope Tricks and other things.

Treating players like children and babies that need help from adult supervision isn't much fun for anyone.

I wonder if it might be a regional thing, but most groups I've been in tend to start at level 3 or 5.

You're a bunch ignore adults playing organized make-believe. Isn't fun the top priority?

Exactly.

>Is the caster supremacy thing a myth used to scare D&D players into sharing the spotlight
yes
most games won't have a caster imbalance because most people are sensible team players, even nerds
but among the autistic it's important to hammer home the lesson that casters can hog the spotlight, pls do no break the game that way

>A Druid would just wildshape instantly, a mage is probably safe with Alarms and Rope Tricks and other things.
So the Druid never runs out of wildshape (and enemies never have dispel), the mage sleeps alone in rope trick, and the fighter has no magical equipment that might help here?

Caster Supremacy is only as real as your party caster player's desire to play competently.

Well, sometimes a moron player invalidates a martial or skill character's role by accident too.

See, your examples are the difference between theory and practical game play.

In theory , you would be correct. However, at the table everyone is there to have fun, and everyone is going to find some way for everyone else to contribute. Even if that contribution is mechanically trivial, what is important at the table is the appearances of balance. The Druid player will make decisions to not out- shine the Fighter, because at the table they're all friends, and friends don't want each other to feel bad.

Now, I'm not saying you're wrong, or that there isn't some fundamental power descrepency between classes, because there is. But actually playing with other people who all share the same goal of having a good time results in those people (usually) making decisions that result in everyone having a good time.

Pretty much, yes.
I mean, if you're going to have enemies waste their turns trying to dispel a wildshape and then call them smart, it's pretty silly since it's Supernatural and can't be dispelled that way.
Not to mention you're trying to bring in casters to threaten other casters, making the martials even more useless.

Reminds me of the time our wizard polymorphed the fighter into a Hydra. Sure he could have cast it on himself but wrecking shit in melee is a fighter thing, no matter what physical form they're in.

>The Druid player will make decisions to not out- shine the Fighter, because at the table they're all friends, and friends don't want each other to feel bad.

When you have class features stronger than an entire class it can actually become hard to not outshine other characters. Rogues can get this bad if you don't do weird builds with them for instance.

Why when the wizard can just end the encounter? Also
>evocation
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

But the point is that if the system is actively working against your goal (everyone contributing and having a good time), then the problem does exist and it's worth discussing and commenting on.

A well designed system supports its premise. A badly designed system works against it.

>20d6 maximized twin quickened enervating fireball.
Shit choice. Direct damage is not what makes casters broken.

In order:

Yes in all practical sense.
No, he has to babysit the other characters so he lets them in his Rope Trick too.
Not as much, no.

The druid being a bear and attacking things with his bear buddy is likely to outshine the fighter without even meaning to do so. And then he summons bears.

It's not even high tier or clever or anything, it's just a typical and easy strategy, on level with a fighters "I hit it with my sword".

The rate at which saving throws advance relative to the DC of a cast spell is terrible compared to other methods of inflicting harm on enemies. Martials have to min-max to just maintain parity unlike casters.

It is a thing, but not in the way that Veeky Forums typically thinks it's a problem.

Veeky Forums likes to assume that every wizard has every spell ready to go at all times and is winning every single encounter, which is not even the most efficient way of playing a caster. Spells that boost your party like Haste or Fly are usually better choices because they work without any natural chance of failure while save or die spells have chances to fail on decent to lucky rolls.

The insidious form of caster supremacy is so much harder to detect though, since if you're doing it right everyone in the party will love you without realizing just how much they are dependent on you. Your friend who loves his fighter will love you for making him into a combat monster, but at the end of the day his fighter is mechanically interchangeable or inferior to another melee basher.

Then you have spells that just fuck over the gameflow outside of combat. Teleport, Plane Shift, Raise Dead, almost all of the Divination school that involves reading the future, Invisibility, etc. Each one of them dramatically alters how the world runs either by allowing the players to fly off the rails, invalidate huge chunks of the standard adventure ideal, or create weird metagames like dealing with Invisibility or scry teleporting into enemy bases.

Keep in mind a lot of this falls under the 3.5/Pathfinder subset of D&D that Veeky Forums tends to cling to, so once you switch editions or systems things change quite a bit.

I agree with you, however, we've had this very thread before and discussed this shit to death. Nothing is going to change, we can't change 3.PF in any practical sense without spending years reworking the system from the ground up. It's not worth commenting on because it can't change amd nothing good ever comes from discussing it.

It's just the same tired thread with the same tired arguments that we've had a million times before.

Don't forget Summon spells. Nothing like being able to pick from your selection of meatshields, ones that likely have spells of their own.

Having extra combatants fucks with the action economy and encounter balance too.

When people talk about Caster Supremacy, they are generally talking about 3.PF so that's why it is being discussed here. 5E has it too but it is generally less of an issue.

It's a real thing. After about level 7 it becomes a blatant that martial characters could literally all die and the full casters would still be able to take appropriate CR encounters with only half the members.

The funny thing is that I've notice some people have a blatant disdain for full casters. I don't know why though.

It's because of the myth that casters are so OP that they ruin every game that makes people want to avoid playing that class in fear of becoming "That Guy".

>myth

You keep using that word.

If you're playing between the levels of 1-6 it's completely nonexistent. I fully reccomend that you start and play at lower levels to make sure the party loves working together and OOC the players have become friends. Then once you hit the magical level 7 the full casters feel obligated to be thematic and helpful with spells (Buffs, martial riding a wildshape'd Druid, handing out Fly scrolls, Etc). Thus caster supremacy doesn't exist for a few levels and by that time either the martials have learned to multiclass or the campaign ends.

>Myth
Casters are so OP that they ruin every game
>Fact
Casters are OP but players without autism spectrum disorder know how to dial back and let everyone have fun.

It's definitely an actual thing in third edition. Although you could say the potential is there in other editions, in practice it doesn't really work out that way. But yeah, I inadvertently broke a couple games back in the 3.5 days.

The irony here is that the CR system was based around how difficult it would be for a party with a blaster Wizard, not a buffer, so no, that's definitely not what you're 'supposed to' do.

Being a buffer that makes classes that suck able to contribute still makes you the most important party member, anyways.

It's almost as though, given this is a game of pretend, that different people focus on different aspects of the game, but from a purely mechanical perspective spellcasters are much stronger than non-casters.

It is very possible to inadvertently break the game or accidentally make a party member irrelevant. Well, in 3.pf anyways. It's not the domain of min maxers and autists. It's incredibly easy to stumble onto "I win" buttons without even trying.

>Rules of the game are somehow different playing in person than online

Not that the CR system is much good anyway.

Fucking CR 1/2 creatures with Save or Dies and low CR monsters with immunity to non-magic... The whole thing is a joke.

>Fucking CR 1/2 creatures with Save or Dies
I'm going to need more info here.

Oh, CR is definitely a useless piece of shit but that doesn't change that the game was built around a blaster.

Which should really tell you about how fucking STUPID the development team and playtesters were, but that's neither here nor there.

Not CR 1/2, but Ghouls are CR 1 with 3 shots at paralyzing you at a DC as high as an optimized caster +1 shot of tanking your CON and DEX, which makes it even easier to paralyze you. Basically can't fight the fuckers without caster support.

It's actually fairly easy to fuck up a wizard if you don't know what you're doing, possibly easier than accidentally winning. Even in that case, each individual win button has a fairly simple counter. Most players tend to stick with a couple of strong options they discover, while the god wizard is the one using all of them once so countering one does jack shit.

CoDzilla is probably worse than a god wizard because it's very difficult to fuck up when you have access to your entire spell list at all times. Those guys only don't break games because of behavior like healbotting being so common.

People play differently if they're physically interacting with the other players instead of just voices over the internet.

Can't dispel (su) features you fucking dumbass. Try knowing the rules.

If you're playing with friends and newbies, everyone will likely be too inexperienced to notice all the bullshit you can do unless they bother reading the book.

If you play online or with strangers however, it becomes an exercise in futility trying to find a good group because everyone will come in with either some fetish bait monstrisity, some OP shit they found on CharOps, or they'll spend the rest of their time going on WoW or LoL until the combat starts and they can nuke the field with a plethora of OP spells gleamed both from the CRB and the many supplements.

So in essence, the more people know about the game, the more likely it'll be that you run into caster supremacy.

>A few enemy archers can knock most wizards out of the sky.
Wind Wall
>Not having 5-minute adventuring days.
Rope Trick
>The enemies are not all bunched up in one area.
Summon Monster
>Casting interruptions.
5 foot shift
>Fort save things.
Pump DC saves to where most creatures won't save anyways.

Keep in mind, all this shit are basic rules or spells that are at least level 3 or lower.

>1
Making everyone ranged screws over melee builds.
>2
Not letting people rest means that martials will run out of HP long before the mage runs out of spells.
>3
Not having people bunched up will screw over melee builds that are built around cleave.
>4
You can't interrupt spells that don't take place in melee and even then, 5 ft. shift exists.
>5
Detect Poison exists and using mages to defeat mages just means that the martials will have even less of a chance of doing something worthwhile.

Even more different if it's just text over the internet.

However, the difference is somewhat diluted if the group played in-person before switching to the internet, but it's still different (ex. my group does more in-character actions with just text vs in person which was more "my guy says 'fuck you' to the dragon and rolls initiative.").

Further proof that 3.PF causes brain damage and most of its fanboys have never read the rules they taut.

5 minute adventuring day is a myth.

Pfft, look at this faggot, trying to act like he know a damn thing.

Listen mate, if it comes down to ending the encounter in potentially one turn or buffing the scrub so that he can be marginally less than useless; the optimum choice is ending the encounter in at least one turn.

Every group I have played in starts at level 5 because the early levels are boring as shit.

>"I've never played 3.PF but here's my opinion anyways
FTFY

>Wind Wall
>Rope Trick actually functioning
>a useful Summon Monster
>level 3 or lower

Rope Trick doesn't function as a rest area until level 8 at least, and Summon Monster is a 1 Round casting time at a level you can't actually afford to do that. You don't get Wind Wall until level 5.

Just saying, caster supremacy isn't huge until the 3rd level spells come into play. Before that and the Wizard still has to play it safe against greater numbers.

>>A few enemy archers can knock most wizards out of the sky.
>Wind Wall
First you cast flying. Then wind wall. Then fireball. That's 3 of your limited 3rd level spells gone and the encounter has barely started.
>>Not having 5-minute adventuring days.
>Rope Trick
Timed missions.
>>The enemies are not all bunched up in one area.
>Summon Monster
Most summoned monsters can get one-shot at appropriate levels.
>>Casting interruptions.
>5 foot shift

>>Fort save things.
>Pump DC saves to where most creatures won't save anyways.
Which requires you to blow spells you probably didn't prepare to make the save vs poison you didn't know would happen.

Then why don't you just kill the scrub and take his shit?

>caster supremacy isn't huge until the 3rd level spells come into play
Thank you captain obvious, I don't know where we'd be without you

When you're talking to a retard that thinks Wizards are gods at level 3, you can't be too subtle.

Nigga please.

Solution: Don't play D&D.
Other solution: GM your own game and kill off any full-caster character whenever they start becoming an issue.

>First you cast flying. Then wind wall.
Yet at the same time I'm immune to arrow/bolts and I'm also immune to melee attacks. Pretty good mileage out of two spells.
>Timed missions.
Okay, what sort of mission are we talking about here? With the right loadout of spells I'd probably be able to get through it a lot more efficiently than if you sent a party of martials.
>Most summoned monsters can get one-shot at appropriate levels.
Yet at the same time, that's 1d4+2 attacks that aren't being aimed at me and my teammates.
>Which requires you to blow spells you probably didn't prepare to make the save vs poison you didn't know would happen.
To be fair, poison sucks in 3.PF and there are plenty of ways to deal with poison that don't necessarily require spells to do it.

Because unless you're playing online, killing another player is kind of a social faux pas unless they deserve it. Especially if you're supposed to be friends.

Why play a full caster when you're basically guaranteed to always win if even half the posts in this thread are accurate?

Fucking retard, we're talking about level 3 spells, not level 3 mages.

Yeah, I've got every NWoD book ever made on my hard drive. Doesn't mean I've ever played it.

There are no friends where true wizards are concerned. Only tentative allies and future spell components.

For the record, I own .pdf for Strike even though I've never played it. The only thing that image proves is that you have enough data to waste on a shitty system like 3.PF.

Wizards are not the only casters in the game and they're certainly not the strongest ones at low levels. It's kind of hard to argue that caster supremacy isn't a thing when level 1 Fighter vs Cleric is really an argument of whether 1 BAB, 2 HP, martial weapon and tower shield proficiency(they hit you with -2 to hit and the main thing they're useful for isn't reliant on proficiency) and a single combat feat is better than +2 Will save, spells, domain powers, better skills to choose from, and Turn Undead.

The wizard doesn't have to with someone getting pissed off and cutting you out of their life. He also doesn't have to deal with having a bad reputation when looking for groups either.

Yeah I bet you made homebrew content for games you've never played either.

It is a thing. It's not a thing at all before level 6, and gradually gets more severe as you go up in level from there.

Basically what it comes down to is a Spectrum with Full-Casters on one end and Fighters on the other. As the game goes on, the fighter mostly just gets number scaling. Everybody else gets number scaling in combination with new abilities that unlock things they couldn't do before.

By level 20, the wizard has lots of broad tools to solve a wide variety of situations and can handle all kinds of situations, even if he doesn't have the *perfect* solution prepared that instant.

By level 20, the fighter still mostly just hits stuff for HP damage and can't do anything else.

It's about the number of scenarios you encounter for which you have useful tools to use. At low levels, nobody has any good tools. At high levels, the number of tools available can vary drastically.

Fighter players typically don't want to be given more tools though, because to do so would make them no longer mundane, and they don't seem to understand that high level D&D plays as a completely different game (which is a lot like playing a game of MtG and having a hand full of instants every turn, with full casters having a larger hand size than paladin/ranger types and fighter having no hand at all) than low level D&D (which is more like LotR).

This is still true in 5e, but less pronounced.

In 4e this is not the case at all, but 4e has many other large changes which you may or may not like.

>Rules of the game are somehow different playing in person than online

They are. Well, not the rules themselves, but people's application of them. Face to face it's much less likely for people to be disrespectful towards each other.

>what does that have to do with anything

Think about it for a while.

Well, that's just embarrassing for you.

Dude, most of /pfg/ makes shitty homebrew and they've also never played in an actual campaign before they got kicked out for being mentally ill furries with boundary issues.

The only thing that proves is that you enjoy theorycrafting more than actually playing the game, which admittedly would fit the profile for most people who still bother to play third edition.

There a few possible solutions to this.

1. Casters broken up into more classes, causing each to have a lower selection of abilities.

2. Make fighters more mythical/anime.

3. Make wizards weaker, riskier, or increase resource and/or time requirements.

4. Have non-casters continue to be weaker, but give them sort of versatile resource, like connections or rerolls

5. Redo the classes entirely, and have every class be varying levels of casterish

6. In a point-buy or random rolling system, make magic harder to get

>Is the caster supremacy thing a myth used to scare D&D players into sharing the spotlight or is it an actual thing?

Depends HARD on edition.

In first and even second edition it's not really a thing. People always point to individual broken spells but bear in mind that 1) in those days, which spells the (arcane) casters got was explicitly under DM jurisdiction - as in, he could simply never give you the broken spells since there was no practical way to research them yourself - and 2), you had very few memorization slots and very few ways to twink more of them for yourself, and finally 3) warrior classes were much stronger than they're in later editions, comparatively speaking.

In 3.X, Monte Cook made casters kings. They got huge buffs, everybody else got huge nerfs, and here is where all the horror stories come from.

In 4.0, Hasbro made everybody casters.

In 5E I actually don't know what the situation is.

>>Nothing is going to change, we can't change 3.PF in any practical sense without spending years reworking the system from the ground up.

>2-Tier-Spread at maximum solves this issue entirely.

>3-Tier spread at maximum makes it small enough that it's not a problem for most groups.

>And Pathfinder has so many classes you still have lots of classes in that range, particularly if you have enough sense to allow the 3 main DSP books.

Done!

That was easy now, wunnit.

Sure, it means printing out a Tier-List from the internet and bringing it to game day/chargen day.

It's not hard at all.

>1
Probably one of the better solutions, too bad that nobody will want to put in the time and effort.
>2
Everyone who still plays this shitty game will hate it because "martial==mundane" to these morons and they'll hate anything to the contrary (see: 4e).
>3
Won't work, it'll just be added management to achieve the same ends and it'll only bog down the GM at the end of the day anyways.
>4
But then, there's no reason for why casters can't have access to the same benefits and if they don't, it'll just piss off both sides of the fence.
>5
Again, great idea but nobody will want to put in the time and effort.
>6
But then it's not exactly D&D anymore, which means that people won't play it.

>maximum damage control mode activated

The problem with that is that most people won't want to play because their favorite class got banned and now they'll have to play something that they've never even heard of and have even less of an idea on how to play effectively.

Tiers only really work in a group where everyone is aware of 3.PF's faults and are also aware of the huge swath of supplements that the game has to offer. You can't just run into a group that has no idea how to play and say "here's psionics and PoW/ToB and also, the CRB is banned" and expect people not to ask questions or storm out in a huff.

Show us your shitty language learning "rule" then, faggot. I bet it's just "five ranks to learn a language"

>In 5E I actually don't know what the situation is.
Much less pronounced than 3.X, but still very much a thing.

Listen mate, short of giving us a video tape of you and your friends participating in a campaign for about 2-4 hours, nothing you've posted actually gives me an idea that you've actually played in a campaign.

At best, we can say that you're in love with the idea of playing 3.PF since you wasted so much space just to own all the supplements and to write up your shitty homebrews but that still isn't what actually playing the game is about.

Sorry.

Sure.

>I can see contents of things purely from the filename
Wow, and I thought /pfg/ had autistic power fantasties. Can I steal your power for my anime roleplay?

I thought /pfg/ hated furrows with a burning passion, due to their extreme hatred of Alexander Augunas, and is one of the reasons why kit sine fags obsessively red-light kitsune as the animu ear version, and even then that's still just one one samefag OP who keeps posting early generals until he vets a 3day ban

Or does having animal ears automatically make something furry now?

...

>"most people won't want to play"
Hasn't been a problem for me, but I only game with real people. And they're aware of the 3-tier spread limit before the game is going to start.

>"Tiers only really work in a group where everyone is aware of 3.PF's faults"
Okay, so if you're expecting to get players unfamiliar with 3.x, in your campaign primer (people besides me give their players campaign primers, right? if no, why the fuck not!) simply put a blurb explaining that there is a large disparity of versatility between classes in PFRPG, and this disparity results in some characters becoming one-trick ponies who sit around twiddling their thumbs because "that thing they do" isn't relevant at the moment.
Explain the Tiers as a spectrum of breadth of options in any turn by character class, and then link them to a tiers document.
That's what I do when someone who hasn't played Pathfinder joins the group.

Plus:
>Vote: "Before building your characters, we're going to vote on what the middle of the 3 tiers allowed will be. Whatever the winning result is will determine which tiers of classes you can build your character with."
OR:
>Fiat: In this campaign we'll be playing with Tiers (1-3, 2-4, 3-5) available.

>"And are also aware of the huge swath of supplements that the game has to offer."
What?
>"You can build your character from the classes on d20pfsrd, and archives of nethys, and these 3 PDFs (Path of War, Ultimate Psionics, Path of War Expanded)", so long as they're in the permitted class tiers.

>You can't just run into a group that has no idea how to play and say "here's psionics and PoW/ToB and also, the CRB is banned" and expect people not to ask questions or storm out in a huff.
Those terms would have been made clear like, a month before the campaign started (for my regular group) or in the primer document linked in the ad if I'm LFG, before anyone joined, let alone the deadline for character submissions, or before anyone shows up at my house.