How would you make a unified system to empower martial characters that can fit multiple cultural archtypes...

Fuck the moronic Westaboos. They're ignorant of their own cultural mythology.

Know what your system is doing. If it's gritty low fantasy, make it gritty low fantasy.

And if it's over the top high fantasy? Don't half arse it with martials. They should be capable of mighty feats that are just as impressive as any work of magic.

People being dickheads and calling each other names is not a problem with any system itself.

In GURPS even pretty realistic characters could block fire spells with shields, use cover, hide or just plain shoot the enemy in the eyes. Being a wizard at low points there is about a sneaky little cunt that always has a couple of tricks up his sleeves and thinking a couple of steps ahead. And he still would prefer to not engage in open combat.

D6 Fantasy works more or less the same way.

And at high points they both allow martials to do pretty ridiculous stuff. Maybe not on the Heracles level but still scary.

Make any characters be able to learn any power available to them.

They can fluff it as whatever.

In my system, warriors are equal to mages due to coolness charactersitic, which is based on either their fame or connection to some divine aspect. For example, an assasin is strong and can kill gods because he is the vessel of shadow magic, while a hero with a sword can kill dragons because people believe he is so strong that he can kill dragons. The skill only matters when characters of equal powerlevel fight. To beat a legend of higher power level than you, you need to do something persuasive for it to work, like get a blessing of some god, find some artifact, or deconstruct the legend and spin it in such a way that you get a chance to win. You can't just minmax or buy the coolest sword and kill some legendary hero.

Are you gunning for mechanical balance or narrative balance?

You can't be this thick, come on.

>implying that they are/should be separate things

"Westaboo" and "Weeaboo" are terms referring to players. If you wish to say that this is a systemic issue, you will have to provide a usable definition of it.

That OP image pleases my sensibilites

Play 4e?

As much as I like 4e, while it closed the combat gap the utility gap still stayed pretty wide. Nowhere near as bad, but far from fixed.

I wish that D&D - and a lot of other games - had a more robust system for downtime, since it could be a boon for non-casters. While the wizard necessarily locks himself in his study, the druid tends her grove, and cleric embarks on a weeklong fast, the rogue gets to do second-story work, the bards gets to gamble, drink, and get laid, and the fighter gets to rub elbows with upper-crust, or make connections in the great rabble, depending on his background and inclination.

>Non HP system
like what? any systems like this i mean.

You could let them do cool shit and just ignore anybody screeching about anime maybe?

Anima already exists, user.

Satan proves once again to be a being of taste and culture.

Depends on what exactly you mean. Exalted for instance (the most recent edition that is) can do that. Brawl charms let you wrestle giant monsters to the ground and crush them with your fists, thats hercules or beowful right there, and melee charms are just generic hit things with swords. Then on the other side you have martial arts like single point which is straight weeb sword stuff. Unless you meant just western stuff and no weeb stuff, in which case play exalted but ban martial arts maybe?

I think the problem is more of image than any rules.

Anything western has a certain way of portraying things and allows for no variance.

If you introduce anything vaguely like martial arts it's somehow suppose to be asian only as if european knights, men at arms, whatever didn't learn how to punch dudes in the face and what not.

This is only further re-inforced because someone had that one friend who's handle is something like narutofan 1100 or darksephiroth5000 and ruined their own game but making sephiroth in a DnD game as if they themselves are not guilty of wanting to play something they thought was cool.

I've seen this point made all the time, especially in reference to dnd, but i never see advice on implementing it. The mechanics of dnd simply do not allow for things like this. Is the intent behind this 'dnd sucks, find a different game'? in that case, what games have balanced, powerful martials that are the equivalent of these mythic heroes?

4e achieves it. You can bodge 3.PF to approximate it with Tier 3/4 games, limited casters and ToB/PoW Martials.

As for games that support it by default, Exalted, Legends of the Wulin and Anima are obvious ones, although they're mechanically fucked in one way or another.

>How would you make a unified system to empower martial characters that can fit multiple cultural archtypes?
Cultural archetypes are just combinations of physical abilities plus equipment. A samurai is just a dude with a sword, a bow, and some armour, a superhuman samurai can fire his bow with superhuman speed and accuracy and swing his sword with superhuman speed.

I honestly wanted to see fighters just flat getting Spell Resistance or limited magic negation at higher levels, in conjunction with the craziness of physical feats growing exponential with the difficulty curve.

Like, a level 10 martial character leaping 30 feet, or running up a wall, or uprooting a tree, or really anything like that shouldn't be unreasonable. Also, in settings that throw the idea of realism around, it always felt like martial characters should always do enough damage to oneshot an equivalent level thing.

I can't think of tons of ways to give martial characters out of combat utility that wouldn't be just wall and walls of mostly useless text, but I feel like buffing their in-combat utility and damage, and giving them tools that specifically help them deal with magic is workable.

While it's still got nothing of the pile of hot broken garbage that is the top tier of 3.5, I always found the Warblade a fantastic example of what could be done with the flavor of the fighter to give it a nice leg up.

anima beyond fantasy handles this perfectly, as both "grizzled fightman" who has nothing but several inches of steel between him and death, martial artists of any discipline from boxing to kung fu to bullshit anime ninja shit and wuixa as fuck "I focus my ki and shoot a laser beam" anime heroes are character types that are heavily supported and competitive (with the last one being the strongest class in the game until you get to max level magic users that can literally rewrite reality and do other genuinely godlike things)

this is accomplished through combat mechanics that mean a sword to the head is always as deadly, a large amount of system options for combat characters that give the combat more depth so tactics are rewarded, and the point buy system being set up in a way where every point you spend in fancy powers is a point you don't have in extremely usefull mundane utility abilities

>How would you make a unified system to empower martial characters that can fit multiple cultural archtypes?
Well that’s easy you play a game that focuses on culture and localized weapon training so any player feels like they are from that region. Mythras does this extremely well, and since you get a cultural combat style and a different combat style as a warrior...

>The westabos will squeel with hate and cry weeaboo at anything they preceive as anime but knights fighting giants 1v1 and cutting horses (with their riders) in half with your sword seems something any warrior should be able to do.
...

What? Why should any warrior be able to take on a 15ft tall warrior giant or cut a horse in half? I mean, cutting a horse in half isn’t even a feat of strength it’s just stupid. And “slaying a giant 1 on 1” is something folklore’s greatest warriors have done, and certainly not something any warrior should be able to do.

In DnD, the easiest way to house rule it is to give martials better save progressions and more skill points than the casters (after all, the wizard is supposed to be studying magic, why should he have more free time for learning non-magical things than someone who isn't?), and then ramping up what skill points can do.

Let the charge into the sky after flying foes with a climb check, let them fade into the shadows until they are no longer there. Let them shatter mountains, balance on a thought, wrestle the wind, sneak through solid stone, and ferret out the lies that our reality is built upon.

A few spells need a nerf anyways (All of the forcewall related spells need break DCs for instance, and any spell that is [extreme bonus to or negation of] skill should be nerfed hard), and I think that having people who have tuned themselves into magic be more vulnerable to it makes thematic sense, I like to give martial PCs some spell/magic resistance too, though I'll fully admit I haven't managed to get that one balanced properly yet.

I think the implication with "any warrior" in the context of "empower(ing) martial characters" is that the set of warriors under consideration are player characters of types that are supposed to be similar in nature to "folklore's greatest warriors," as you put it.

Off the top of my head, SilCore uses a wound system. There's three tiers of wound threshold (flesh, deep, instant death) which your enemies are rolling against when they attack you. If their attack roll meets or exceeds a wound threshold you get hurt, applying the highest wound that they meet the roll for.

Flesh wounds apply -1 to all rolls, deep wounds apply -2. You can take a certain number of wounds before you keel over. You have a certain number of penalties you can receive before you keel over and go into shock

I couldn't tell you how well it performs in practice yet. Still learning the system myself.

I'm not sure what you're asking

But in my system at least you have multiple ways of attacking/defending and every weapon has a unique advantage.

Savage Worlds had a wound system, I hated it. Wouldn't have been so bad if they made it so at the higher stat levels you could roll say 2D4 or 1D8

Traveller uses a system where you don't have abstract meat points.
Instead every damage is substracted from your physical attributes.
So if 3 points of damage penetrate your protection you lose 3 points of endurance first.
If you got no endurance left you can decide if you want to substract ALL of the damage from either STR or DEX.

>Westaboo/weeaboo disparity
Have we found out yet what that is supposed to mean?

So instead of losing abstracted health points, you get shittier and shittier the more damage you take?

This actually makes a lot more sense, as losing blood, taking injury, and getting tired all kind of have the effect of making you shittier at doing things until you've recovered, either through some resting up or advanced space medical technology.

>spellcasters use magic to affect the world around themselves. Magic is gained through study of various ways of manipulating external energies and memorizing spells etc.

>martials use chi/pneuma/MUSCLEMAGIC to manipulate their own life force and empower themselves. It is fostered through self-discipline, strengthening of the body and following martial traditions
Done.

This. If magic exists, it'd be hard to call any of their traditions mundane. Magic proves that the fabric of the setting itself is mutable and plastic to a huge degree, and mastery of a general or specific class of philosophy or tradition can allow a user (one of a gifted few, perhaps) to use the plasticity of the setting's fabric to empower themselves.

Martial traditions master the body, Rogue traditions master the self, Magic traditions master the mind, etc... Each tradition focuses on a means to empower the user to impress their will upon the world in a way that mundane users cannot, though mundane people can probably manifest some limited powers through other means, or even have very limited abilities to manifest it directly in ways like luck, coincidence, or latent talent. A sword can only strike so hard, a man can only hide so well, and a mind can only perceive so much, but to someone with the gift, talent, or training, they can open more doors and access an entire new scale of power from behind what's possible through mandane mastery.

>trying to give Veeky Forums the anima pill

You just need to give them interesting options in and out of combat that aren't mechanically inferior to the basic attack option and that aren't heavily gated.

...

>When magic cancel is second worst (>bindinglmao) but still triggers one trick pony wizards and D&Dplayers.

Nemesis is the most fun; I had a heap of fun once with an elven nemesis user paladin (Pretending to just be human). They were comically resistant to magic.

Great argument, fuckbucket.

But that isn't an argument. I'm sorry I called you thick. Is English not a language you understand?

Different user. My response was this .

>Option 4
Don't force nonmagical characters to be restricted to what's "realistic" and don't say it's a different kind of magic.

>unified system
>empower martial characters
>multiple culture archetypes

ITT: buzzwords.

P.S. Don't play D&D.

Any alternative to anima beyond fantasy? in know spanish and i dont really want to bother with that system

Eoris Essence.

Unironically GURPS cinematic.

Magic resistance/absorption through equipment and stats.
Refluff magic to be part of the mind and in the eye of the beholder, and add feats so martials (namely monks and barbarians) can resist magic by denying it's substantial existence and disregarding its possible influences upon themselves.

It's only an issue in systems as Simulationist as D&D, where you choose what your action looks like first and then determine its effectiveness based on that. E.g.
>"I roll to attack the wizard with my sword. Natural 20. Does it hit?"
>"Sorry, he's got a barrier that reflects physical attacks."

It's supported by default in more Narrativist systems, where you determine your action's effectiveness first and what it looks like based on that.
>"I roll to damage the wizard. Natural 20 - that should be one wound."
>"He's got a barrier that reflects physical attacks, so how do you get around that?"
>"Hmm... I duck out of sight and throw some knives at him so that he'll raise his shield to block where they're coming from, then dash behind him and stab my sword into the barrier's weakest point as hard as I can."
>"Okay, we'll say that's what you did."

i think hes saying european themed martial classes tend to be less magical

I love effects based systems as well, but some people just can not deal with that shit.