LFQW Problems

Then base it on 2e instead: tone down casters, and make high level fighters famed warlords who are also the only class who can use weapons to their fullest extent

It would have been so much better if 4e kept the same design idea, but gave each class its own unique take on it. Like, the wizard would have no encounter powers but would have more daily powers, and the Fighter would have only at-will powers but could use other unique fighter powers after certain conditions were met (take X damage, deal X damage, only available to use on turn X, etc). Would really have fixed that issue 4e has where different characters end up feeling the same and being boring.
.

Caster supremacy has never EVER been a difficult design problem, D&D authors just chose to never address it. You can make anything over/under powered by tuning the costs and rewards of each option.

Unfortunately, D&D players mostly have a worse-is-better mentality and treat the game's poorly designed spell lists as a point of pride. The one time they attempted to slay that sacred cow, the response was so negative that it doomed tabletop RPGs to never attracting the attention of talented designers again.

>the devs consistently nerf martials just because.

I have seen people post this without going the extra inch of giving a example. Outside of the issues with flurry of blows that I know of I do not know of any post playtest nerfing of martials. Can anyone give a good example or two?

This is very true and a good point. However in most video game versions of D&D you are way over wealth for level. Do you think that is part of the reason? I do, however I normally give a discount on arms and armor enchants in place of more money when I run.

>I swing a shard of metal around and hold a metal plate in front of me
>I should be equal with the guy hurling fireballs and summoning baatezu

Weapon Cords (Pic Related)
Gunslinger Reloading

See Caster supremacy is not inherent to RPGs.

I agree with your statement. Now the question is, how do you make Martials and Casters equally balanced while keeping them clearly separate (e.g. a warrior teleporting and barfing fireballs begins to look a lot like a Caster), and make them both interesting to play at a table?

D&D failed step 1, but succeeded in step 2. (Step 3 is up to debate, I suppose.)

And of course it depends on the setting, but if your setting could be anything you want, how would you balance Martials and Casters?

So how would you balance martial and casters without removing the very things which make casters interesting?

Literally look at the image. It's proof that casters can be easily reigned in.

The casters in such a seting would be overnerfed, but the blindingly obvious solution is to nerf them less and have competent game designers.

Of course, all of this is moot until D&D players collectively shed the delusion that caster supremacy is an inherent result of casters "manipulating the very fabric of reality with their mind!" and admit that D&D authors are incompetent designers.

Except that defeats one of the main points of 4e and brings about the issue that already arose when you tried to combine 4e and Essentials characters.

Everybody has different limits on how long they can go. Then you get player arguments on when to stop taking a nap because the wizard/4e character ran out of dailies by the fighter/Essentials character is just fine taking a short rest to heal up.

First of all, it's necessary that what makes casters "interesting" does not include being overpowered.

Secondly, there is no one-liner solution or quip that solves the whole problem. The system would just need competently designed spell lists, level progression, and power curves.

>How do you make make martials and casters equally playable?
>Just look at this image of an OP martial and unplayable caster

Er, right. Of course casters can easily be nerfed to whatever lengths.

It is only hard if "what makes casters interesting" is, in your eyes, "being strictly better than martials both in and out of combat".

Again: Caster supremacy didn't exist until 3e.

Hercules punches a river hard enough to redirect to clean out the shitiest stables ever in record time. He also held up the entire universe while a guy when got some magic apples for him.
Cúchulainn can throw his spear and accurately hit targets beyond the fucking horizon
Beowulf fights a fucking dragon, underwater, with his bare hands, for days and wins.

Before you say "But those guys are Demigods, faggot," need I remind you that...
Merlin's dad is fucking Satan
Circe is the daughter of the fucking Sun and in some stories is a fucking goddess herself
Gandalf is the equivalent of a fucking Angel.

It's called a reductio ad absurdum. You don't need to go that far, but going to extremes can be useful to illustrate a point

Ah, I see now.

make magic one or several of the following:
>dangerous to use
>imprecise (i can throw everyone around me into madness, but it doesn't distinguish between friend or foe, and i don't get to choose how the madness manifests)
>tiring to use (the Megumin effect)
>require more time/investment for power (cantrips become 1st level spells, 1st becomes 2nd, 9th level doesn't exist, etc.)
>requires expensive reagents
>requires illegal reagents
>slow to cast, keeping magic more powerful but ultimately less useful in a combat situation

Nope. Answers like "remove fighters or wizards", "don't level up" and "play another system entirely" are simply trivial. So is "standardise everything". Removing everything that makes fighters have a distinct playstyle as opposed to wizards and vice versa does indeed solve the problem. We all already knew that when we clicked the thread. The fact that OP is still asking means he wants a solution that isn't one of those.

None of those characters is relevant to d&d. where: Wizards are not demigods, they are magical and squishy. Clerics are divinely favoured as are paladins. Fighters are mundane and swing chunks of metal around :^)

Short of removing most of the spells available, fighters can't be balanced with magic users. Hence why it has not been done in d&d.

Not relevant you say. I'll quote 2e's PHB on exemplars of classes for some relevancy....

Page 26, in the blue box: "There are many famous fighters from legend: Hercules, Perseus, Hiawatha, Beowulf, Siegfried, Cuchulain..."

Same book page 31, in the blue box: "Players can model their characters after such legendary figures as Merlin, Circe, or Medea."

Eat fucking shit.

>Short of removing most of the spells available, fighters can't be balanced with magic users. Hence why it has not been done in d&d.
I disagree. Even if you insist on making fighters adhere to the laws of realism, making fighters able to predict your next four attacks from your choice of guard or be able to hit you in the eye 10/10 times at two hundred paces while you're in full sprint or stuff like that would help even out the power balance. The main issue with martial classes, I think, is that four weak men can do the job of a strong man but four dumb men can't do the job of a smart man.

D&D works best when you soft cap levels at 10 or so

I love that the best fixes for D&D are ignoring half or more of its content.

Things were originally soft-capped at 10ish. It's not early TSR's fault that the people that came later ignored this.

Out of curiosity, what sort of method was used to turn class feature power into a number for a graph like this?

>Why can no game manage this properly?
Plenty can and have
>You'd think there would be more focus on fixing this than their currently is in the industry.
It's precisly because it's already been solved that no one cares to try and 'fix it'. If you're okay with playing 3.P you play 3.P. If you aren't there are plenty of other games to chose from. Why bother making 3.P but marginally better when most people are just going to keep playing 3.P due to its snowballing popularity?

Especially when all a fixed version of 3.P would have is autists trying to tear it apart.

From experience, at high level 5e play casters and martials kinda balance out. Casters have trouble in actual combat due to massive monster saves and anti-magic features, such as Magic Resistance. They are also squishy and get minced by high level monsters. Martials only have to worry about hitting AC, which is far easier than getting something to fail a save in 5e. They are also tanky enough to take some hits.

Basically, casters suck at combat but are great at everything else. Martials are the inverse. It isn't exactly perfect and casters definitely have more diverse options but it is an improvement.

>Of course, all of this is moot until D&D players collectively shed the delusion that caster supremacy is an inherent result of casters "manipulating the very fabric of reality with their mind!" and admit that D&D authors are incompetent designers.
Pretty much this. Martial -players- are viewed as drooling abject morons who can't handle any action more complex than, "I hit it with my ax." Wizard -players- are sophisticated, elite professional gamers who's thoughts are pearls before swine. The reality is D&D spells are shitty, overcomplicated houserules applied once per round and wizards are rewarded for dragging the whole game to a crawl because they're supposedly geniuses who can handle it.

I will reply to you because you framed the issue in the least retarded fashion.

As others have said, the answer to this is not as hard as people often make it.
I explored this issue when attempting to answer the question of how to make a purely martial character that can be on par with "magical" or powered characters.
The the answer to that question was either they're "Just That Good" at whatever their skill is, they're Captain Charming the Diplomancer, or they're the equivalent of Bruce Wayne the Loremaster/Beastmaster.
In addition to those three approaches, there there is Uncle's Wisdom: Magic must defeat magic.
There is no real reason to build 100% magic free characters in a setting with magic.
It's like making a modern secret agent who never uses guns, sure you can min/max and play Brock Sampson, but that only goes so far.

Like I said, there's really no reason.
Give the martials physical based magic so they can punch like Hercules and cut spells with swords.
It could be items, enchantments, tattoos, chi, curses, bloodlines, or squirrel piss.
It doesn't matter.
Just fluff it to work with martials, keyed to them physically, so that the wizard can't just slip on the ring of Hercules, or whatever, until he trains as a warrior.

Hell, fluffing this to whatever setting wouldn't be that hard.
Balancing it correctly might take a little figuring, but that's more specific to each system.

Any questions?

Most video games don't allow for creativity and lack a lot of spells in actual D&D. Being able to fly for instance, or lighting the environment on fire. The wizard's power comes from utility, which warrior types have no analogue for.

>I'll quote 2e's PHB
>2e's PHB
>2e
Hey dumbass, we're not in the 1980s anymore.

I think the LFQW would be fixed by changing casting times to be double. Reactions are now 1 turn (6 seconds), 1 turn is now 2 (12 seconds). This gives more opportunity to 'geek the mage first'. Oh, and silent casting dissappears. You want to play with magic, you're going to be making weird symbols and shouting magic words.

What I have noticed from a lot of play sessions, is that encounters are scaled wrong, in terms of time. Wizards/sorcerors tend to run out of steam about 2 rounds after the threat is dead. Meanwhile, the warrior could keep smashing away, but the encounter is over. How do you inherently balance that out? Most parties will rest to allow the mage to repower up, but this screws over the fighter/melees, as they are really good at staying power in a fight.

Now my solution isn't perfect, but it nicely reduces the effectiveness of the sorceror in combat, but doesn't mess with the spell list. They can still influence a battle, but the melee/martials get their time to shine.

And yet everyone still uses those ficitonal characters as the archetypes for the classes. To mockingly go full fedora, the Bible was put put together by the end of the 2nd century does that make it less relevant to discussions?

>because you framed the issue in the least retard way
Yeah I get that a lot.

An easy fix that works.
AD&D had different xp requirements for different classes. A magic user (awesome name) needed much more xp to go up a level than a thief.
I don't remember exactly, but a party could have a 10th level thief, a 7th level fighter and a 6th level wizard all with the same amount of xp.

Simply adjust xp requirements until you like it. Done.

And here I was worried that sounded too rude.

But what happens when they all make it to the end? Or does the wizard end at lvl 15?

Basically the other guys hit the cap faster, have ultra low saves quicker and the Wizard over takes them as he fills out his final 3 or so levels.

>But what happens when they all make it to the end?
They eat the gods themselves.
Balance is not exactly an issue at that point.
Not that user, btw.

AD&D's XP curve differences don't amount to shit for balance. The wizard'll actually be a couple levels ahead of the fighter in the 7-11 range.

The fighter's beastly saves are much more important to balance than the XP curve.

3.5e:
Improved Trip [General]
Prerequisites
Int 13, Combat Expertise.

Benefit
You do not provoke an attack of opportunity when you attempt to trip an opponent while you are unarmed. You also gain a +4 bonus on your Strength check to trip your opponent.

If you trip an opponent in melee combat, you immediately get a melee attack against that opponent as if you hadn’t used your attack for the trip attempt.

Normal
Without this feat, you provoke an attack of opportunity when you attempt to trip an opponent while you are unarmed.

PF:
Improved Trip (Combat)

You are skilled at sending your opponents to the ground.

Prerequisite: Int 13, Combat Expertise.

Benefit: You do not provoke an attack of opportunity when performing a trip combat maneuver. In addition, you receive a +2 bonus on checks made to trip a foe. You also receive a +2 bonus to your Combat Maneuver Defense whenever an opponent tries to trip you.

Normal: You provoke an attack of opportunity when performing a trip combat maneuver.

+

Greater Trip (Combat)

You can make free attacks on foes that you knock down.

Prerequisites: Combat Expertise, Improved Trip, base attack bonus +6, Int 13.

Benefit: You receive a +2 bonus on checks made to trip a foe. This bonus stacks with the bonus granted by Improved Trip. Whenever you successfully trip an opponent, that opponent provokes attacks of opportunity.

Normal: Creatures do not provoke attacks of opportunity from being tripped.

Stop playing 3.Pathfinder

It's easy as that. Every other edition is more or less balanced.

How is monk not worst? I cant imagine a monk build that could outclass a well made fighter, rogue, or barbarian

>It's easy as that. Every other edition is more or less balanced.

In what world?

I hate admitting it, but the only edition that is remotely balanced between all classes is 4e. But 4e was hated because it didn't have enough sexy spell lists.

Now that I think of it, Fantasycraft also managed to get it right for martial characters. Hell, arguably the courtier could win fights through diplomacy, which is bad ass in its own right. But no one plays FC.

Reach into your asshole and write down any numbers you pull out.

If they can mostly balance races, they should be able to mostly balance classes.

>need to be above average intelligence to know how to trip someone

It's more like "be above average intelligence to trip worth a shit," but hey, who's counting? Welcome to D+D.

The whole reason Improved Trip got split up into two is because spiked chain trip fighters were a viable build in 3.5e. Pretty sure they nerfed spiked chain in Pathfinder, too.

Yes, the guy who is using a sharp piece of metal to stab things repeatedly plays the same as the other guy who is throwing fireballs and erecting force cages, because they all have at-wills, encounters and dailies.

Inertia is a powerful thing.

Also, designers who get paid barely know the system better than players. They don't know how to fix it because nobody can agree on how without somebody else crying about muh experience.

Finally, some players like LFQW: they like being intrinsically better (or worse). Makes them feel smart when they run their shit and don't die.

4e was closest and the Wizard was STILL bullshit strong, as was the Cleric. Of course, so were the Fighter (until the end), Warlord and Ranger

Orb of Imposition and Righteous Brand/Astral Seal were some shit. But so was Twin Strike, all the charging powers, and Blade Hurricane/Come and Get It/Pit-Fighter pretty nerfs

Just out of curiosity, how is it people say 4e classes all feel the same? Like in what manner.

They all work off the same general basis when it comes to numbers, sure, and they all possess a roughly equivalent number of dailies, encounters, etc. But I don't really see how that's different to everyone drawing from the same pool of statistics, or a Cleric and a Paladin sharing spellbooks.

I dunno, I ran 4e for about 2 years and most of the characters sure "felt" different enough with a little similarity within the roles. Controllers in particular seemed to be pretty varied.

For me, it's because everything is tied to the pseudo-Vancian AEDU system. And because I've barely played it.

Reminder that the reason none of you never have fun when playing rpgs has nothing to do with Quadratic Mages and everything to do with you being horrible people.

You're right. If you aren't having fun because you don't contribute to the game, it's because you're a horrible person, and not because of terrible game design.

I kinda don't get that first part. It's like saying every character feels the same because they all use the same six defining attributes, or Barbarians, Fighters and Rangers all feel the same because they all fight with the same basic mechanics.

This.

"Every character feels the same"... and then you go back to a game where every non-caster is literally just full attacking, or trying to full attack, and casters share more than half their spell lists.

The funny thing is that 4e basically just had every class have their own unique Spellbooks.
But this is somehow more samey.

...

I tried, but no one wants to play fantasycraft with me, the one game where a fighter DOMINATES as a fighter. No one comes close to dishing out death.

Bump because I've been meaning to talk about this and don't want this to fall off before I have the chance.

Okay, here goes.
So basically as I'm sure most people can tell, this isn't just a problem with wizards and fighters, but with the martial and magic systems in general. Any full caster, someone able to cast ninth level spells, tend to be in tier 1-2, and anyone with no spellcasting ability tends to be in tier 4-5, sometimes 3.
The magic system tends to work mostly the same for just about any class that interacts with it. Spells work the same to anyone who can cast them, the rules for timing and metamagic and checks and so on are all the same. What's more casters generally only have one or two important class features, instead most of the power they have comes from their magic. The major differences come from exactly who has what on their spell lists, spontaneous vs prepared, and what attribute is used for casting.
Now do martials really work like that? There isn't exactly a martial system that all the fighting classes interact with, it's just different for each. FIghters get power from having a bunch of feats. and only a little bit from class features. Barbarians rely mostly on class features and rage powers, monks use a mix of bonus feats and native class features.
Essentially what this means is any potential fixes are in a weird place. Most aren't just going to affect one class, but no fix is going to fix them all either. For instance you could rewrite feats so that they were big and important and useful and did all kinds of awesome things. This could fix the fighter, but would only kind of help the monk, and wouldn't help the barbarian or caviler at all (cont)

Instead, to really fix this whole issue you would need a new martial system thats as extensive as the magic system casters have, and would then need to decide how much every class interacts with it. Fighters, cavilers, monks, brawlers, all of these would be 'full martials' that would interact with the martial system in the same ways wizards, sorcerers, oracals, arcanists, interact with the magic system. And that means the system would need to be purmeable enough to have multiple ways of 'doing it'. A fighter and monk should play different as much as a wizard and cleric do in order for these classes to not lose their flavor. Then what about the middle of the road people? A magus is supposed to basically be an even mix between a fighter and a caster. They can cast up to level 6 spells and then have an arcane pool that lets them do stuff like recover spells. Would they get 'half martial' skills and a new set of arcane abilities that interact with that system?
The tl;dr version is that you could in theory do it, but it would wind up creating an entirely new massive system, rewriting all the classes so they interact with it in unique enough ways to be different, and decide which classes get how much interaction with it.

Rolemaster.

I can't help but feel that you have essentially described BonS.

Kind of. I mean, there is that and path of war if you want PF. But in order for it to really get all the way you would need easily twice as many maneuvers as are currently out in that one book. Again, in theory if you want them to match one to one with casters you would need a bunch of different styles so you could have fun interesting builds, and then ideally out of combat stuff as well. Martial maneuvers, or whatever their equivalent is in other systems, that let rogues infiltrate heavily guarded castles as a random example. And thats a problem thats even more baked in. FIghters are kind of defined as the dude who fights and not much else.

Isn't there like 3 or 4 Path of War books out by now?

At some point it stops being content and starts becoming bloat.

I was only aware of 1. If there are a bunch that's a good ways there, though it doesn't help the out of combat stuff. In theory that could be fixed by redoing skills though.

PoW disciplines have "linked" skills, so the classes in them got all sorts of skill boosting things, from what I recall. One is based around intimidation, for example.

Never got to play PF with 3rd party content before I moved on though.

Just create two level progressions, one for class level and other for racial level. The class progression advances the character in class specific skills and features, the racial class represents aging and advances the character's mundane skills and physical/mental attributes. That way you can balance everything you want by simply changing the amount of experience required to advance in different classes. And you can keep the system mostly intact.