When people make terrible decisions and can't figure out ways to improve their situation they tend to want to drag...

Well, I've never seen a game like that, so that's a good thing.

Repeating memes about 4e just makes you look stupid

Oh, it deletes more than one space in a row. Never mind

What's "mundane" and what's "magic?"

you could chain them with empty spoilers
[s][/s] [s][/s] etc.
but it probably doesn't work anymore
>or does it?

Or you could be making the mundane magical, dumbass.
>I carry around guano and babble nonsense while waving my fingers in a specific pattern, this entitles me to be more powerful than people who have spent their whole lives training for battle.
>Stop laughing!
I can strawman too.

People specifically don't want to play magical bullshit. That's why they choose fighters/ranger/rogue. So now that you just made them play "Gish fighter bullshit" that they didn't want to play.

Giving mundane characters interesting and useful mechanics doesn't mean they suddenly become casters, moron. Lots of other systems manage it.

Name and explain them. Don't weasel word "lots".

Anima, Shadowrun, Exalted, 4e, Zweihander, Legends of the Wulin, Savage Worlds, FATE, Dungeons the Dragoning, Mutants and Masterminds, those are some of the systems which achieve it, and there are many others, both major and minor, I can't be bothered to list.

>People specifically don't want to play magical bullshit.
Then stop playing at level six. Math checking the things one can be expected to do with skills, how HP works compared to fall damage, and other mundane hazards and stuff like that proves at least in 3.0 3.5 and 3.pf that the greatest people to ever exist on Earth would not be more than level six. And that's for guys like DaVinci and Houdini for skills and Genghis Khan or Musashi for warriors. Normal people are level one to three.

>Ranger isn't magic
That aside, something like E6 or personal homebrew might serve to ground the players while still retaining some of the setting's magic.
Oh, wait, that would require an actual in-depth understanding of game mechanics and how to appropriately modify them.
Alternatively, you could realize that attempting to appeal to two far spectrums of playstyle and being unable to resolve them is a conflicting expectations issue, not a mechanical one. You don't expect a guy who's looking for a comedy campaign to appreciate your moral conflicts, why try to force everything under one roof?
Answer: People are willing to overlook certain flaws inherent to a system because they enjoy playing more than they're willing to stick to their guns, or alternatively the cost of entry for a new system is more than they're willing to pay, so they try to fix what they have and that generates resistance from people who enjoy things as they are (You).

The good thing about E6 is that not only keeps the mundanes mundane, it keeps the casters low magic.

I think that's the problem with D&D, caster go from a low magic setting to a high magic setting, but martials stay in the action movie genre and are not allowed to move to wuxia/anime/whatever.

>Anima
Have not heard of it don't know mechanics
>Shadowrun
Called magic run because anything a mudnane can do a magic user can do better.
>Exalted
What did I say about mundane players don't want to play magic characters? Does beign fucking demigods that can flex and fucking level buildings not reek of magic and supernatural bullshit to you?
>4E
Instead of doing 4D8 sonic damage plus knockback I do 4DW damage plus knockback for my once a day special note that my weapon does 1d8 damage.
>Zweihander
Not familar
>Legends of the Wulin
So when you punch a guy so hard he becomes a woman the system stops being magical muscle magic as well?
>Savage Worlds/FATE
Never seen shit materialize with it so possible
>Dungeons the Dragoning
I highly doubt it as its a meme of a game.
>Mutants and Masterminds
Linearly swap anything for anything else to the point your powers don't mater. Your human made gun? It can shoot holes in planets? Why cause you're PL 15. Ignore that it should be the a normal gun but because its just status effects thrown together with no reason its exactly the same as a magic user using magic missile except descriptors! Yet somehow you can hollow out a tank with your normal gun cause higher level.

I don't think you're very good at this cause the ones I have at least a brush with I can call out your bullshit. If you want to make everyone magical say it, but you're not pleasing people who want to fight good.

Ahh, you're one of the idiots who considers anything not 100% realistic magic. That would explain it then.

You're also wrong about most of those examples, just so you know.

Not that guy and not arguing his position.
Fighters in TSR's D&D don't have special abilities and are better than Magic-Users or Clerics.

I actually like discussing magic balance, but OP is being so overly aggressive and pedantic it's not fun.

>Martial is mundane
There's your fucking problem.

Honestly, it seems like he's just ignoring the valid points along with the bad ones. I'm gonna see if there are any decent shitposting threads active.

It really is. It's such a goddamn obvious double standard and yet people still defend it.

Example of trying to make magic on same footing as mundane and failing. To the degree that they over corrected and anything magic can do a normal person can which sorta makes it the autism of a fantasy world.

...What?

>More games need retarded anime 12 foot blades swung around by 6 foot teens
No thanks.

>over corrected
It was the starting point from which all RPGs branched off.
>anything magic can do a normal person
And that's not remotely true.

There's a couple of reasons for it, but the main two are
• combat has phases in addition to initiative (movement, melee, shooting, ...), spells are declared first, resolved last, and disrupted 100% of the time you take any damage
• classes don't share a unified xp table and spellcasters advance slower* than non-spellcasters *Clerics level fast, but their casting starts at level 2 so it's the same in practice

It's astonishing how much you completely missed the point

I think much of the problem can be solved by making magic users a support class. They can heal, bless, restore damaged equipmemt, identify magical items, but the fighting classes are the main "power" classes and are required to get shit done.

this

it's either trolling or genuine retardation

I'm impressed at how perfectly recursive your post is. It completely encapsulates itself.

The solution is already known and exists all over the place.

You want realistic martials? Pair them with highly restricted low power magic users.

You want powerful high fantasy magic users? Pair them with mythically potent martial heroes.

Trying to mix completely different scales of power absolutely does not work, outside of some wanky narrative system where less powerful characters get given more narrative control.

Maybe we could discuss around OP and his tantrum?

I'll start, as a 3.pf shit, if I had the chance to rewrite the core books I would make sure that NPC classes only went to level six. Maybe level five to keep levels to multiples of five.
I believe the fact that you can by RAW have a 20 level commoner helps ingrain into peoples minds that you could be mundane even at high levels.

I know that there are skill encounters and people working could naturally gather enough xp to level up, but most day-to-day work and even most common troubles (troublemaking consummer, bad crop) don't count as encounters. And most encounters (store gets held up, fighting with the boss) end in defeat. So the time necessary to become sixth level without actually adventuring would be so enormous that elfs and dwarves wouldn't be able to do it regularly, much less humans. And if you do adventure, if you do use skills or fight or use your magic in dangerous situations, and get that xp that would bump you to seventh level, when you gain your next level you should automatically get a level of a PC class, that is what makes NPCs with class levels in the setting.

That might help perception, but honestly feels like kind of a bandaid.

Reworking 3.pf from the ground up would be a real ordeal. You'd need to completely redesign both magic and the core combat system, since the key of the problem is magic being ridiculously versatile but default martial options being crazy restricted.

My general metric for a good combat system is that two characters without any abilities can still make meaningful choices in how they engage one another and a fight can still be interesting and fun. This isn't always true, but if you were reworking 3.PF that's the standard I'd apply to the combat system, making all the default combat maneuvers worth using and having the feats actually be improvements rather than necessary to let them function.

>Trying to mix completely different scales of power absolutely does not work,
It COULD work, that's the problem. A class and level system could work so as the caster starts as a restricted low magic guy with few spells a day and the martial starts as an action hero, badass but believably human. and then as you get levels the caster would become a high magic wizard capable of challenging demigods and minor gods and the martial would BECOME the demigod. D&D 3.whatever gets 3/4s of it right.
The real problem is the people who think that 3/4s of right is good enough or worse that it's the right answer. People who don't understand how levels are supposed to work, or that equate martial with mundane and don't want "anime" martials on the game that already has "anime" casters.
4E got the idea mostly right, but in a way too mechanically similar, that most people didn't like.
I don't know about 5e or older editions. And yes, this is a D&D focused problem. Other games don't have the same problem of trying to enable both low fantasy and high fantasy at the same time, they have more thematic focus.

Play Barbarians of Lemuria. The magic system is freeform and yet it doesn't invalidate the player who wants to be a swashbuckling martial hero. The magician can cast a spell that can rip apart mountains and summon demons, but he'll have to make (sometimes permanent) sacrifices and perform elaborate rituals for him to actually cast the spell in the first place. Meanwhile the martial characters are getting shit done because they're able to act like sword & sorcery heroes instead of total idiots with 2+Int modifier skill points and an inability to actually do anything worth a damn except for full attack.

>That might help perception, but honestly feels like kind of a bandaid.
I know it's a bandaid. But it's a pet-peeve I never see adressed and I thought it was better than my rant about how combat should work and how most classes would have to be redesigned to the point of it becoming its owb system.

Like, I like the Bo9S/PoW system of maneuvers, but I get torn on whether it should be a core part of all full BAB classes or if the combat system and the baked in class abilities should be enough and the maneuver system something that can be bought into with archetypes/or by paying expected WBL. My current solution is trying to design the classes with two tracks, one with more big number and narrative abilities and one with the wuxia martial arts, baked in before archetypes, such that most archetypes can be taken independent of the track you're in.

>but he'll have to make (sometimes permanent) sacrifices and perform elaborate rituals for him to actually cast the spell in the first place.
That's also part the problem. D&D players like the idea of casters as we have now, with little sacrifice and spells every six seconds. Even suggesting wizards have restrictions on their schools can get you a riot. That's why the discussion comes back to making the martial into sword and sorcery that eventually evolve into mythologcal heroes. And then people complain that martial should be 'mundane' (and by mundane they mean not as good as sword and sorcery heroes). And the circle continues.

Other part of the problem is that, dammit we want to play D&D, or something close enough to soothe our stockholm symdrome.

I actually completely agree. The REAL problem is grognardisms.

>Glass cannon
>You can't learn how to swing a sword and CONTROL reality at the same time, pick one or the other
>Cept if you get your magic from jeebus, or nature

It's all shit grandfathered ideas.

As many have said, at least the fighter from a 3.5 perspective is not equipped to handle existing in the same field of play as any type of discrete spell caster.

Making spells "mysterious", or "hard to cast" is the highest level of gay, so it shouldn't even be considered in a game with set rules. Crunchy spells are amazing.

What DOES need to change is the "Fighter's" Lack of a resource mechanic. Without some metaphysical way of actually representing a change in strength and speed to supernormal levels, without some freakish imbalance of muscles, there needs to be a "fuel", for these types of abilities to shine through.

Call it Aether, or Pneuma, or Spirit, or mettle, or what have you. It needs to be something that can run out, and something that can be used to power their techniques, as well as directly be spent on mundane skills, so that they can make high successes without directly turning to spellcasting.

OR
Just make them spell casters proper. Don't have wizard be the only guy who gets the magic, have EVERY class get the magic, and divide up the specialties as well as casting mechanics.

The wizard can be the divination/evocation specialist
The fighter can be the Abjuration/Transmutation specialist
The Rogue can be the illusion/enchantment specialist
The Priest can be the Necromancy/Conjuration specialist

Have the physical classes not require secret words and spices, but their effects are only within their physical vicinity, and the mages proper can effect things outside of their range.

The fix is completely eradicating the idea of "mundane". Play another setting for that. No NPC classes allowed.

I play super smash bros competitively at tournaments, where skill determines your standings, not main/class.

...

>tfw your army's standardized weapon is a giant ass sword
>even your recon troops

>dragging them down to your level
>not plunging even further down into oblivion and taking EVERYTHING with you

Why have I seen this dozens of times? Is this just the same guy?
Its so fucking dumb

That's kinda my point though. That's putting both characters on the same mechanical power scale.

And with 4e, it only looked similar, in actual play characters were very distinct, but most people just judged the system on using the same formatting.

That sounds like a decent compromise, as much as I like ToB/PoW I also know there are people who prefer to avoid it.

...

Never thought i'd get this much milage when I made this thing.

>what are tiers?
really gets your noggin' joggin'

This.

Why do people keep making these threads?

no, magic becomes mundane when it's fucking everywhere in a setting

>"power" is the defining element of magic
JUST HOW FUCKING WRONG A MAN CAN BE

THE DEFINING ELEMENT OF MAGIC IS MYSTERY, YOU FUCKING BLUBBERING NITWIT
HOW IT CAN'T BE REPRODUCED
HOW IT CAN'T BE ANALYZED
HOW IT DIFFERS FROM PERSON TO PERSON PURELY DUE TO THEIR SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCES
HOW IT HAS ARBITRARY REQUIREMENTS AND RESTRICTIONS
HOW IT IS RITUALISTIC IN NATURE AND DEFIES EXPLANATION

AND YOU ARE JUST CONCERNED ABOUT "POWER", YOU FUCKING RETARD?
JUST FUCKING STOP POSTING, YOU SORRY EXCUSE FOR A HUMAN BEING

>Magic is Mundane
But that's what I want? Superman and Raven on the same team.

Not him, but no.
Fuck mystery, I wanna turn people into frogs with a glare.

He can sit with all that mystery and wander how I did it. But I know. THAT'S the point. Everyone else thinks it's a mystery, but I know the TRUTH

I think that it should have actually said

>If you make mundane as powerful as magic, mundane is NOW just magic. Magic isn't any less able to counter the natural laws of the world, BUT having mundane be able to counter magic, or even be superior without logical explanation or limit, it then invalidates magic.

On the superman and raven piece, Superman is an alien, and necessarily has benefits that aren't tied to being human [technically this applies to raven as well]
The issue is people having a cognitive dissonance in how they want martials to behave. Since all we talk about is 3.5, I'll use TOB as an example.
Most people who are actually caster players don't have a problem with it. Generally, it's people who don't play casters, and whine that it's

>Too anime
>Too casty
> insert other bullshit excuse

Most caster players don't mind there being an actual system that supports both without invalidating the other.

But if all you are going to do is talk about demigods as examples to why martials should be doing anything in a very crunchy game, it becomes stupid quick.
But just skating by on an unquantifiable rule of cool is stupid as fuck. Have a mechanic, make it measurable and logical in game, and attach a resource mechanic. And it's okay if that mechanic is just magic energy.

But there needs to be rational and gradual growth. This however has already been done to good effect with stuff like path of war and TOB. Can their be other methods? Sure.

But Imma stab my fucking eyes out if I see another "derp, my character is a muggle that hates magic users, and kills the shit outta them, and just shrugs shit off, and wrestles dragons.
But he has nothing that makes him magical"
>You have to go back

Except the latter example has plenty of mythological precedent? The idea that everything that isn't realistic has to be magic is fucking stupid. In a fantastical world, some things are just more than they are in reality.

>But Imma stab my fucking eyes out if I see another "derp, my character is a muggle that hates magic users, and kills the shit outta them, and just shrugs shit off, and wrestles dragons.
>But he has nothing that makes him magical"

What is transcending the nature of your mundane skill into the realm of supernatural?
What is wuxia? What is "stop being retarded, fuckboy, and accept that depending on the genre the game is emulating, martials can and will be equal or surpass the casters"?

Just because it's in mythology doesn't mean it makes for good gaming.

The difference between a lot of what I have seen is rules.

Magic in most TTRPG's has very concrete yes and no rules. Yes at this level you can do 1dx damage, 3 times a day.
That is good. That is very good.

Most of what I have seen from people's harebrained schemes is essentially some sort of player/dm handwavium that isn't organized or concrete. It's like "Yeah I have the power to shrug off X, just because I am tough"

What the fuck is that? At least have some "tough guy points" so you can't just do that all day.

Not only does it invalidate magic [which they all obsessively target], but it completely makes the idea of non-human threats null.

Again, I don't mind martial arts being a means to physical perfection, but it needs to be organized. Not just rule 0, which is what I have seen from a lot of people.

Give me maneuvers, give me some sort of Technique points, and give me an in universe explanation to why you are different from dave the turnip farmer. Cause he farms all day, and he hasn't made stoopid gainz and isn't able to kill a dragon either.

There needs to be a seperate "element" that allows superhuman growth, and it needs to quantified if it is going to stand side by side with magic, which IS Quantified and organized.

Otherwise, you would end up with kung-fu hustle level shenanigans.

And there should not be any magic null bullshit. That is why it needs a resource. Because if something is spending a resource to attack, and at high level, then the other should be spending a resource to defend the attack.

Honestly I think one of the best ways to go about it is to just limit how many schools of magic a caster can access at once. Necromancy, Illusion, and Conjuration have wildly different effects, you'd think that they'd work wildly different as well. Start Wizards off with one, maybe two schools. They get more as they level up but never have access to them all. Sorcerers, to offset their small spell lists, still get to pull from all the schools because their magic is innate and instinctual. They don't have to understand how it works, it just does.

Old wizards aren't scary just because their spells have bigger numbers, old wizards are powerful wizards because they can do so much. Liches are scary because they've probably "lived" long enough to actually learn all the schools.

5e isn't much better, can speak from experience.

This
>High level caster can teleport
>High level fighter can swing a sword fast

The only real superhuman feat that martials can do is a level 20 fighter being able to fire 48 arrows a minute, which isn't as impressive then a random bandit can already fire 10 arrows a minute. Why not give martials more superhuman weapon effects, a fighter can dash through a line of enemies slicing through everyone in that line, a barbarian can smash someone with a hammer and hurl them back 60 feet. To make them more useful outside of combat simply give them superhuman physical capabilities.
>A high level fighter or barbarian can leap across a 100 foot chasm or leap 100 feet into the air
>A high level rogue or monk can hope from tree branch to tree branch, if the branches can't support his weight he manages to leap off the branch before it can snap
>A high level martial can run at 30 miles an hour, a high level monk can run at 60 miles an hour
>A high level monk can run on water or straight up sheer surfaces for a significant height
>A high level barbarian can squat over a ton

There's a lot of good points here. What tends to make martials weak isn't lack of numbers, it's lack of options. Sure, a Barbarian might be able to consistently pump out more damage than a caster if he works at it, but the moment the combat ends and they need to get something done that doesn't involve muscles, he shrugs and passes the buck to the casters because magic has all the solutions. I bet you anything you could end like 80% of martial/caster griping if you just gave martials more out-of-combat features without taking away their in-combat features and gave most of them (because there will always be people who want to play the braindead classes like the Brute Fighter) some sort of legitimate resources to manage, and choices to make in a fight that isn't "hit guy A, B, or C."

I'm not against having consistent, well designed rules for it.

But having rules and a resource system for something doesn't make it magic. And it doesn't need in universe explanation. Rules aren't physics. They're a necessary abstraction. 'Martials are capable of training to superhuman levels' is all you need.

3e was called nerd revenge fantasy before you were born.

They did that in 4e and it upset people because they used consistent formatting.

Which is funny because you could boil down the majority of 3.5 and 5e spells into very similar formats with very little fuss.

That's not how M&M works.

Yep. 4e's biggest issue was simply that it stopped obfuscating things, and people didn't like seeing what was behind the curtain.

Wuxia is using chi, chi runs out, chi can be used to power spells. Chi is an explanation to why someone who is 150 pounds can cut a mountain in half. Chi is an explanation to why someone COULD cut a fireball in half.

Now, make rules for all those uses, and have things like experience costs to purchase them, and you have a balanced system that is internally and externally logical.

But chi is magical. It's an element that makes normally impossible things possible. They might not get into the esoterics of spell casting proper, but they can and more often than not do.

The caster/martial divide is very small in those settings, and that is a good thing.

My issue is in the narrative that I have heard about with "caster killers" and dumb shit like that. These aren't people powered by anything necessarily special, in fact, they aren't special.

The Ying [Wuxia hero] is generally strong because of training, physical and mental, to cultivate power above that of a normal human being, but it is finite. It doesn't last forever[in most stories], and doing things spends it.
He is no more resistant against the supernatural than anyone who is themselves supernatural, and by possessing an energy, he might be able to create rudimentary effects like a shield of aura, or fly. Whatever. I like it.

What I don't like is people coming up with shit home-brews that automatically have an inbuilt caster inferiority.

Like, why would they be on adventures then, fuckwad? And furthermore, if you just have unexplainable powers without having to learn magic, why learn it at all.

It would be like learning sign language, after a total cure for deafness existed.

I don't hate martials. I hate players ideas that martials should remain as simple and narratively powered as possible without giving them actual rules or techniques that signal "this rule is changed under this moment".

Give them lists, give them points, give them basic techniques and advanced techniques.

>But chi is magical.

Bzt. Incorrect. Within chinese metaphysics, Chi is entirely mundane, a simple extension of purely natural physical processes. Magic exists as something completely separate and unconnected to it.

Stop using 'magic' to mean 'anything supernatural'. It's dumb.

>Ahh, you're one of the idiots who considers anything not 100% realistic magic. That would explain it then.

even worse, they consider anything "magic" as equivalent with "spellcaster". As if in order for a setting to have anything fantastic, mystical, or magical, there have to be guys who wave their hands around and casts spells like Gandalf or Merlin.

Let me ask you one thing,
in schifi setting there are usually people using some form of psionics.
Is that also magic in your eyes ?

Just tone down the high lvl spells. Also,You get fireballs way too early.

>fireball
>good

Turning people into frogs with a glare is a great example to talk about honestly when it comes to the great Martial vs Magic debate.

At least in any system I know of, no martial can even begin to duplicate that feat. And that, to me, has always been the point of magic. Regardless of fluff, you have someone who can bend reality in certain specific ways they've worked out that Martials can only sit there and wonder about how the fuck you even begin doing what you just did. It doesn't even need to intersect with physics or science in any way.

Meanwhile, I see nothing wrong with Martial being able to match or honestly even surpass Magic in a pure combat situations like straight up dealing and taking damage. That is, after all, the point of the supposedly "lowly Fighter." They can't turn people into frogs, they can't walk through walls or scry on the enemy or bring people back to life, but god damn if you have to go toe to toe with him.

But thanks to some 3.x-era bullshit, it feels like a sizable portion of Traditional Gamers seem to think that magic users should just be better at pretty much everything for all time because a 3.x-era 20 Fighter doesn't hold a fucking candle to 20 Wizard because 3.x was unbalanced garbage.

And modern players are no better. But that's because the traditional concept of wizard has been horribly erroded. It used to be understood that a wizard was someone who literally poured their life into cracking the code of reality, spending years in pure academics, research and experimentation until they finally mastered the ability to harness the unreal power to cast certain magic spells. They were left a frail husk, but endowed with reality defying powers. But this Merlin-esque figure shares the landscape with the likes of Lancelot, a knight worth a 100 knights.

Nowadays you get the Harry Potter generation, teen prodigy wizards in a world where the rest of the world humbly obeys physics.

>Yep. 4e's biggest issue was simply that it stopped obfuscating things, and people didn't like seeing what was behind the curtain.

It also didn't help that they dropped the "Ye Olden Tome" aesthetic and went with plain white pages with black text and colored templates for easy reference/identification.

Another layer of illusion shattered.

>Chi is entirely mundane
Not him but so is fire, lightning, ice, and whatever else mages sling at people when they want to deal damage to as many fuckbois as possible.

Just because it exists naturally doesn't mean that it's not supernatural, especially in settings where magical energy exists as a free floating form of energy that theorhetically anyone can harness if they understand how it works.
Not him (again) but what's the difference between performing jazz hands and shooting a fireball and telekinetically causing an object to combust using psychic power?

More to the point, what's the difference between a Bard singing a tune and shooting a fireball, a Sorcerer just knowing how to shoot a fireball, and a Wizard spending X years learning fireball?

The answer to both, very fucking little unless you go out of your way to delve into semantics based on the cause rather than the effect.

The horror.

But, again, a Chinese person, or a person in universe, would explicitly tell you that you were wrong. Chi is not magical. It's actually pretty important to the idea of what Chi is.

And that's the thing, in those figer vs matrial threads, 90% of pro martials only want to do mundane stuff but only on a higher level.
Lifitng a horse isn't supernatural in it's basic idea it's just "lifting something heavy" turned up to an inhuman degree.
And to be fair, level 20 fighter can hardly compete with modern athletes, except when it comes to survive falls at terminal velocity.
Whereas turning people into frogs is just plain bullshit, but that's what the mage does, and that's okay.

Martial Classes and Casting Classes should both be powerful, just in different ways.
When you let casters do the same things as martial characters, there's no reason to play a martial character because you've created a strictly better option.
That said, in a fantasy setting, you'd naturally see people mix magic with their combat skills and technology. It's common sense and if you don't allow it, your setting feels much more limited.
You really can't win.

>Chi is not magical. It's actually pretty important to the idea of what Chi is.
This.
Chi is a inherent part of the world and everything in it. Cultivating it within yourself allows you to transcend limits, but it is not an outer force or something that defies creation or laws.

Look at this thread and you will see the reason why.

Veeky Forums has no creativity left, so all there is is reposted shitposting threads.

I regret never having played 4e. Wasn't another big issue that the online component never came out?

A murder/suicide ended up scuppering the online tools, yeah.

Although fan made/updated versions persist. We never got the online tabletop, but Roll20 does the job, while funin.space has an online version of the compendium and you can still find cbloader, an updated cracked version of the old character builder.

It's kinda sad, but a little while after the system died after the terrible crap they put out in Essentials, 4e became the most easy to play it'd ever been.

Interestingly enough, I think 4e's fighter was PERFECTION, Or rather, almost. I would have made the fighter a striker, and had something else be a defender. Steward, or Sentinel or something.

I agree. I think the SECOND problem is the existence of the Rogue as something separate from the fighter. Or the big stupid fighter idea in general.

Rules ARE physics.
And there needs to be a necessary abstraction to why magic, which is a pretty common resource is being shirked.
Secondly, no, something having rules or a resource doesn't make it magic, no. But for the most part things like "bonus fighter feats" are HARDLY anything magical at all.
Most of them are very mundane.

TOB isn't magic, and most of it isn't even supernatural, it's extraordinary mostly. And I am cool with base classes being extraordinary, but the non-magical one's aren't.
I loved how 4e handled martials. What I think was the worst part about it, was actually that the classes had all their powers on the class pages, rather than having them all in the back, and in some sort of order.
4e's organization is my biggest gripe with it.
It's a clusterfuck.

The other part I didn't like is that everyone had the same ways to spend powers.

Daily martial maneuvers don't really make much sense to me. Daily anythings don't make much sense to me, really.

At wills and points work well blended.
At wills and slots for casters.

I also hated the art.

Or perhaps you should stop being a gamist bitchboy who puts the "game" element of RPGs ahead of "roleplay" element of them.
Crunch is important, but it isn't be-all-end-all. Just because you have a hard-on on strict rules and autistic level of technical specification doesn't mean that everyone does.

Rules are not physics. How the fuck do you like 4e if you go by rules as physics? 4e is one of the most abstracted games out there.

>Chi is not magical. It's actually pretty important to the idea of what Chi is.
>Chi is a inherent part of the world and everything in it.
Again, you're arguing semantics. In some settings, magic is also an inherent part of the world and everything in it and can only be harnessed through intense training and dedication, which is something that is already assumed with most casters in general (except maybe Sorcerers).

>is that everyone had the same way to spend powers

Well, Wizards has tried for like two editions to give martials special shit like maneuver dice or whatever the fuck but people inevitably end up hating change so they stick with the boring status quo. I'm not disagreeing with you, and at least 4e was going in the right direction (and even hit upon basically the perfect way for them to work, except on Psionic classes with Power Points) and then 5e came around and the playtesters shitposted martials back down to what amounts to full attacks every round.

>rather than having them all in the back, and in some sort of order.
I think you were expected to copy them down somewhere easy to use at the table.

You're the one asserting a stupid paradigm where everything not 100% realistic has to be magic. Magic is an aspect of the fantastical, it is not the be all and end all.

>Honestly I think one of the best ways to go about it is to just limit how many schools of magic a caster can access at once.
Doesn't work, has never worked, stopped posting the same stupid bullshit in every fucking thread.

this thread is too autistic