What's wrong with martials having "anime" powers?

Maybe you could make some sort of system, a scale of somesort, where you could place how powerful a character is. Maybe through your adventures, the characters you play could advance along this scale, but if you don't like the upper end of it, you could just limit yourself to playing games where you stay at the lower end.

I don't get it either. Pushing power creep's not great but it would work, and if we're being honest I'm not so joyless that I don't think some of bleach's bullshit was kinda dope.
>warriors should be able to catch a blade in their bare hand and cleave a nigga in half

The real fix is meeting in the middle.

Just play anima.

Roland is anime.

Your sarcasm wouldn't be misplaced if:
1) In older editions levels actually measured power and not advancement within your class
2) In 3.X levels weren't completely uninformative
3) Anyone actually played 4E where your sentence actually makes sense
4) No idea about 5E. Maybe it actually works there

Apparently I should use "actually" less. No posting with a flu, I guess.

The greatest of legendary heroes is nothing compared to the most basic anime character.

The typical legendary hero would be at the level of adventurer(a normal human would not be able to kill dragons or demons), anime characters bend the rules of physics to make it looks cooler

Why is he/she wearing a condom as a tie?

>The greatest of legendary heroes is nothing compared to the most basic anime character.

Hercules rerouted a river with his strength and another hero cut the tops off hills with his sword. Heck, St George killed a dragon, expressly the thing you said they couldn't do.

obligatory

Hercules shot the sun with his bow so hard sun god decided to give him a free ride

Demigods hardly count.

>1) In older editions levels actually measured power and not advancement within your class

They were supposed to. It's not like modules weren't using "for characters from 3rd to 6th level" or something.

>2) In 3.X levels weren't completely uninformative

Again, they aren't supposed to be. A level is worth the same in the systems' eye, no matter if it belongs to the lowly warrior, or a wizard, it's +1 to your CR.

>3) Anyone actually played 4E where your sentence actually makes sense

I do

>4) No idea about 5E. Maybe it actually works there

For combat power? Sorta. For non-combat, it's a step up from 3rd at least.

So which non-demigods do you judge spellcasters by?

Also: Wait, St George is somehow a Demigod? That's kinda in contradiction of the faith he's a saint for.

>They were supposed to. It's not like modules weren't using "for characters from 3rd to 6th level" or something.
Not entirely convinced, given the difference in XP costs of levels for different classes. Then again, the difference wouldn't be more than 1 level in most cases

>Again, they aren't supposed to be.
Point here isn't what they were supposed to be but what they actually were

So you're saying that everything ever written belongs in every setting, because "they're all just stories"?

>What's wrong with martials having "anime" powers?
Nothing IFF you play anime game.

most of them aren't demigods though.

Diomedes, Beowulf, Cuchulainn (debatable), Cu Roi, Arash, Achilles, Sir Lancelot, Sir Kay, Sir Bedivere, Sun Wukong (also debatable), Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Ali Talib, Sigurd, Samson and Big Knife Osla.

Gilgamesh is 2/3 god
Enkidu was created by gods directly
Sigurd is Odin's descendant
Achilles's mother is a nymph

>Sigurd is Odin's descendant
I tried to look up Sigurd's ancestry on wikipedia but all I found was that he's a decendant of a frost giant but mostly humans.

>Enkidu was created by gods directly
so were a lot of people. Almost everyone is the decendant of people made by the gods, that does not make up demigods.

>Achilles's mother is a nymph
I suppose if you can count those as demigods if you count all the other monsters that the gods gave birth to.

You got me on Gilgamesh, though.

Straight away a disclaimer: I'm not actually one to discount a character for being a demigod, especially considering that just about all heroic characters in pre-modern tales are either divine in origin or noble (and therefore superior and possibly divine anyway)

Enkidu kinda should count, because he was specifically created to be Gigamesh's equal

Sigurd is a Volsung: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Völsung

And sure, Greek myths are chock-full of divine beings and their progeny. See the disclaimer above

>So which non-demigods do you judge spellcasters by?
Spellcasters are basically gods. Their entire existence is a mistake.
>Wait, St George is somehow a Demigod? That's kinda in contradiction of the faith he's a saint for.
He killed a dragon. It happens everytime in RPGs.

>Spellcasters are basically gods. Their entire existence is a mistake.
not on Level 1 they're not. When they only got a 50% chance to stay standing after a single crossbow shot. Frankly, I'm surprised any of them became powerful since getting into 1 too many battles that day or getting chased up their rope trick by a pair of angry baboons would be the end of them.

The talk about St George was in reply to who was saying that a human can't kill dragons or demons.

Everyone in this thread just needs to accept that martialfags will NEVER be satisfied so long as casters exist. They don't want to be capable of anything more than an average man, but they'll bitch and complain about how mages of any stripe are so much stronger than them. They want to be balanced with people who can, by nature, do things that are outside the scope of normal men, but don't want to be exceptional in any way so they can continue to jerk themselves off about how realistic they are and about how they're not a snowflake

>Spellcasters are basically gods. Their entire existence is a mistake.

...what?

yeah but Enkidu was made as a terminator to destroy Gilgamesh

What? I'm a Martialfag but I enjoyed the shit out of 4e's 'You can be well beyond the capabilities of mundane things without actually being magical'. Like one of the Epic Destinies for defenders was 'You are simply That Good that you become a one man bulwark against an invading demon army/elder god and hold them off until the end of time'.

They actually acknowledged that magic is a source of power, not 'Everything beyond what an unfit paizo dev can do must be magic', so martial skill can rise just as far as magical power.

Then you're an exception, rather than the rule. Most martialfags who have a problem with casters absolutely want nothing even remotely interpretable as magic anywhere near their character. They want to be 100% mundane and realistic. Well, "realistic", as I've seen people argue certain fairly humble feats are humanly impossible, even after being shown evidence of someone doing it

user, please don't bait people with arguments you've dredged from threads of your past. Just argue against the people here, not ghosts.

I usually play martials as well and you are right. I guess it all comes down to what kind of stories and heroes we prefer.

Exactly. I think that the issue is people trying to have their cake and eat it too. You can't satisfy both the "I want my swordsman to be down to earth and capable of impressive but plausible heroics" guy and the " I want to be able to bend reality to my will, much more so at later levels" guy, and D&D in basically every recent edition favors the latter. You can have balanced martials and casters, you just need either the casters to accept limitations or the martials to accept the lack of them.

>What's wrong with martials having "anime" powers?
Only casters are allowed to have anime powers.

t. flying prescient wizard firing energy beams from his hands.

>Point here isn't what they were supposed to be but what they actually were

I mean, yeah, for us, enlightened individuals, that is so. But most people actually thought the game worked like they assumed it did, even if it did not work out in practice that way. (This cognitive dissonance is responsible for 5e)

BUT

This is all irrelevant to my original, sarcastically made point anyway. You already have a power scale in the form of levels. You just need to up martial classes so they can do exciting things when they get there, instead of not doing that. You aren't taking anything from people who don't want "anime fighters", because they should be just content playing low level anyway.

Cu Chulainn threw an apple through a man, leaped on a series of thrown spears to catch a bird without even realizing that he was under attack, held off an entire army by fighting one man from that army every day, and literally had a super form. His friend Fergus took the top off a distant mountain with a sword swing because someone ruined his fight boner. In this same story a guy gets a spear thrown halfway through his head and then stops the fight so that he can go back to camp and show his friends before coming back and fighting the next day, spear still in place.

Fix DnD casters:
>Ban Cleric and Wizard
>Force them to play mixed classes like Magus, Inquisitor, Oracle or otherwise if PF
>Just say no if they want to play a full caster in 5e, or institute magic bans or SR/Teleporting/Ranged enemies to press the casters

>In this same story a guy gets a spear thrown halfway through his head and then stops the fight so that he can go back to camp and show his friends before coming back and fighting the next day, spear still in place.
I think I just found my spirit animal.

If a character was a demigod or had odd heritage it'd be called out for being weebish though. When in fact a lot of heroes of ages past DID have divine heritage, or frost giant blood, or whatever.

Can you imagine that?
"Ok, woah, hold up, can we just take a break? I've got to go back and show me mates this because they'll never believe it. That ok with you?"

"Sure, mate, see you tomorrow. Just don't be late!"

Yeah, I guess. People, or at least Veeky Forums, seem to look down on those races that are part daemon, divine, dragon and what have you.

I always find it strange when people say martials with divine heritage don't count in conversations like this, yet people are happy to point to characters like Gandalf and Merlin as exemplar casters even though neither of them are human.

Merlin is a tiefling for fuck sake.

>he hasent read vedic mythos
shit makes DBZ seem tame

>You can't satisfy both the "I want my swordsman to be down to earth and capable of impressive but plausible heroics" guy and the " I want to be able to bend reality to my will, much more so at later levels" guy
Thing is, the former category is not equivalent with all "martialfags". People who like (or me, but that's cheating) want to be superhumanly but not supernaturally capable exist too. People who want to be a gritty down to earth magician exist too, in OSR circles especially.

It's just that there are two solutions:
1) Make separate games each with a specific powerlevel in mind (DCC and Godbound come to mind)
2) Make in the same system character levels matter and have lover levels be gritty and dangerous for all classes and high levels be high-flying action similarly for all classes. Thus on this gradient people could choose a band they're most comfortable with. For one, I think 4e did a good job with this, though maybe its lower levels weren't quite meatgrinder-y enough, if we ere to omit that one article with rules for 0th level characters

b-buh it's fine, wizards can break the rules!!!

You're all talking "demigod martials doesn't count".

When every mythological spellcaster, from Merlin to Gandalf, also aren't human after all.

>Cuchulainn (debatable)
isnt he the child of light?

Wait, a 4e epic destiny is becoming the Doom Marine?

>The DM to Gilgamesh's player: The gods are mad with you and have created an opponent equal to you, made to humble and defeat yo- what do you do?
>Gilgamesh's player: I roll to seduce
and thus the worlds oldest hero became a faggot

Actually, can we sift through our collective brains and find one non-divinely empowered spellcaster in pre-modern fiction? Only spellcasters (period) that I can remember are Circe and Ariadne, but both are children of the gods or possibly minor goddesses themselves

Mate, he rolled to wrestle. Seduction was a side effect

Medea might count

>implying wrestling isnt sudection
youre grappling with a barely clothed sweating muscular man for 7 days, thats pretty gay

>Medea
daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, niece of Circe, granddaughter of the sun god Helios

at least she isnt a direct descendant

Both of Aeëtes's parents are non-human: Helios is his father and a nymph his mother

No, but you obviously have a double standard. Spells have a basis in fantasy and mythology and are all over the place, but giving fighters mythological powers is apparently going too far?

Mages are stupid yes.

Only a fool would think it's weebish, though it's still a retarded idea

I'm fine with D&D martials having ridiculous power and shit to balance them with casters.

But is there an alternative system I could use where martials really are just regular people who must rely on wit and tactics to overcome spellcasters?

>The greatest of legendary heroes is nothing compared to the most basic anime character.
What's a basic anime character?

I can't think of one off the top of my head. Though you're probably looking for a low-magic type of game.

>just regular people who must rely on wit and tactics to overcome spellcasters?
that would depend on the spellcasters, because if they are like what casters in dnd are then you get the batman problem- where people who have no business even getting near their opponents win through PiS and plot armor disguised as planning and strategy

if casters are more like mages in dark souls/witcher then that could work

either way I dont know of a system that does that

>But is there an alternative system I could use where martials really are just regular people who must rely on wit and tactics to overcome spellcasters?
GURPS.

>PiS
eh?

Song of Swords will probably be one of those when they get their magic rules done.

Plot Induced Stupidity

>if casters are more like mages in dark souls/witcher then that could work
What does that entail in mechanical terms?

in dark souls casters are glass cannons who specialize in shooting ungodly amounts of blue dakka in straight lines, but often at the expense of melee prowess or health

in withcer mages are similarly vulnerable if they lose control of the situation

basically, magic is difficult to use and you cant have everything

Right, yeah. Aren't they supposed to be sort of similar in D&d though? Smaller hit dice, less AC, physical stats are dump stats.

yes but the problem is there exist spells which make up for all of those shortcomings. In D&D blaster mages of the kind you get in Dark Souls are not the kind that unbalance things

so what you want to do is narrow it down, force specialization. you want polymorph? sure, but youre going to have to go full transmutation for it

In GURPS, there are multiple ways to fix casters. One is to introduce the magic system Ritual Path Magic, which is slow in combat unless you're REALLY high level. But you can make charms and "hang" spells outside of combat, so it functions like spell slots.
Another is to use the Magic Styles system where there are many different "schools" of magic, with their own spell lists and whatnot. The more powerful schools will be hard to find and/or learn, meaning that the game master has an in-story reason for why the high level wizard doesn't have earth-shattering abilities yet.
Another still is to use a harsh spell-slot system where the player has to spend days allocating spell slots. The players wont want to allocate spells such as "Lockpick" or anything of the sort, and using high level spells is saved for when it's needed most.

Many things, like an average dude with nothing special about him who is loved by a bunch of girls, for example.
Pic related is basic anime parents.

Is absolutely desirable, at high levels.

Bitch, let me tell you about a guy called Archbishop Turpin. Don't let the title fool you, he wasn't any "wizard but holy and shit" D&D cleric. He was just a badass dude whose day job happened to be "top church guy in France".

In the Song of Roland, he racks up a personal kill count in the thousands. He cuts through high-quality armor like it's tissue paper, on the regular. He gets impaled by FOUR FUCKING LANCES, his horse killed out from under him, and you know what he does? He LEAPS the fuck up, RUNS over to where Roland is passed out, and stands guard over him. He kills FOUR HUNDRED Saracens before Roland wakes up. With, need I remind you FOUR LANCES stuck in him.

Then when Roland gets up, he starts to charge back into the battle on his horse, and Turpin RUNS ALONGSIDE HIM AND KEEPS UP until Roland decides to stay put for their last stand rather than making the guy with FOUR FUCKING LANCES STUCK IN HIM try to keep up on foot. Even though Turpin just demonstrated HE FUCKING CAN.

So they fight, and Turpin doesn't go down until the Saracens hit them with a fuck-huge volley of arrows and javelins that split his head right the fuck open. Literally.

BUT HE STILL DOESN'T FUCKING DIE, cuz Roland lays him down in the grass with some half-assed improvised bandaging. And this badass motherfucking archbishop just chills there, with four lances sticking out of him and his brains spilling out his forehead, giving last rites to whoever they bring over to him.

And ALL of the twelve peers in the Song of Roland pull this kind of shit. Turpin's not even the main fucking character! Oliver one-shots a Saracen general and goes on to Great Cleave SEVEN HUNDRED of his men like it's nothing, and has a mortally-wounded last stand nearly as awesome as Turpin's. Roland himself, as you know, cuts through a mountain...and that's AFTER he's burst a fucking artery in his brain and suffered so much blood loss from wounds that he's passed out multiple times.

Anime ain't shit.

>The real problem isn't that martials are weaker than casters. It's that casters are too damn overpowered.
No
The problem is the spellcasters have too many solutions in their toolbox while martials are entirely at the mercy of the DM and rolls.
See "I want to knock the target out" vs "I cast sleep"
or
"I want to sneak past" vs "I cast invisibility"

Zeus sends the gods to stop Achilles in the middle of his rampage at the end of the Illiad because otherwise he would have had destroyed the Trojan army and sacked the city all by himself, defying his fate in the process. That is something which is usually impossible in Greek myth, even for the gods

The people who complain about martials having anime powers are the same people who complain about martials without them being underpowered. They just like to complain.

>ITT: The Triggered Martials Support Group

And that itself only works if the schools themselves are balanced among each other. Full Transmutation in 3.5 is barely a limitation at all, that school has nearly everything you could want. As opposed to full Evocation, which is very narrowly focused.

You'd need to reshuffle the spell schools, and even then some individual spells (Polymorph being a notable example) will still need overhauled for balance.

Roland is pretty fucking anime, m8.
youtube.com/watch?v=P0HWLe9xNbI

I mean I think having ultimate versatility is a form of OP.

That would be a cum funnel actually.

I can think of only a handful, because the pre-modern idea of magic mostly involves invoking or binding some spirit or god or demon or angel or fairy to schlepp around and do stuff for you. So if a witch is flying it's because a devil is carrying her around in the air. If some wizard's enemy's house catches fire it's not because the wizard cast fireball, it's because he sent a spirit out with some matches and gasoline. Spellcasters in pre-modern stories that can do that stuff "of their own power" tend therefore pretty have some innate tie to "the spirit world" which means they can do and know things normally reserved solely for spirits. Merlin in a few version of the story is half-devil, but was baptized at birth and thus got to be something other than a gibbering monstrosity, but he got to keep the cool powers. Skuld the Witch in the Saga of Hrolf Kraki is the result of some viking banging a qt elf, so obviously that means she can use magic to make an army of zombie vikings to resolve her daddy issues.

Whereas in a lot of modern fantasy, magic is nothing like that. Magic doesn't necessarily have anything to do with spirits and the moral world that accompanies them, it's mostly just "science, but with supernatural trappings and weird and you can cast fireball".

> "science, but with supernatural trappings and weird and you can cast fireball".
It's not even science.
How many magic systems do you know have a premise and derive magical abilities from it?
Most of them just rationalize post hoc based on what they want to be available. "I want the character to be able to throw fireballs, so I'll make some shit up to 'explain' why they can throw fireballs"
Most magic "systems" people praise are actually shit.

your mom is a cum funnel

>make casters weaker

That’s stupid, just do the VTM thing and have non-mages be able to keep up with mages.

But they didn't.