Magical Martials

Would you say a termite mound, wasp hive, or beaver dam is a natural thing? I'm a third party just asking, not actually trying to argue one way or the other.

You mean psionic?

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Martials can exceed realistic limits without relying on 'magic'.

I'm all on board for fantastical martials who are capable of amazing things. But the idea that all fantasy elements should be reducible to magic is dumb.

Yes. Though in this case, we're going to wind up with a problem since there are two common definitions of natural. One of which is "exists within the universe" and the other is "exists without the influence of man." Obviously I mean the former.

>They can cast whatever is requried for the situation, then fight normally.

Nnnnnnnnnno, that's not how it works even in 4e.

I guess, but battleminds are too telekinetic/telepathic/tele- in general, and monks can't into heavy weapons and armor.

I say that the lack of self-aware design is what separates the natural from the unnatural. While animal may build a nest, it is driven to do so mostly by instinct, where as a human could be driven primarily by genuine passion, desperation, or some other sapient/sentient need.

People tend to get "native" and "natural" confused.

The problem is that you're always going to have some pissy realism fag who wants to have his hardtack and eat it too. He wants to be the unextraordinary everyman who gets by on mortal skill and grit alone and balks at the idea of supernatural abilities or heroic feats, but also demands to be on par with the guy who can conjure army destroying fire or the guy who can sunder a city's walls with a sword strike. That's something you just can't do. You either have to piss on everyone else and drag them down to his level or drag him up and give him a bunch of abilities that he'll probably ignore anyway then complain that there's nothing he can do

Why can't the martial be the one to sunder a city's walls with a sword strike?

That's why the solution is to write the game such that he's clearly excluded and won't want to play.

>battleminds are too telekinetic/telepathic/tele- in general

All the key battlemind powers are I Hit Guy

Those people should play low fantasy games, not high fantasy stuff like D&D.

At least past say level 5-6, if we are talking about D&D. Though at level 6 you could cut castle gates with a sword.

On the flip side, you just might have a, un-ironic, casterfag who loses their shit at the slightest idea that a martial could be better in a single, specific, scenario than them. Regardless of if said martial is extraordinarily mundane or super-powered.

That's why the solution is to write the game such that he's clearly excluded and won't want to play.

If I wanted to play Exalted, I would play Exalted

The issue there is that Exalted is extremely setting-locked. There's clear market demand for a [Song of Rolandese/pre-Malloric Arthurian/Homeric/Beowulfish]-toned Occidental fantasy game, and the problem is that DnD pretends to be that thing but faceplants terribly at it.

Nah, DnD does not really pretend to be anything other than DnD at this point
It has always been just a dungeon crawler where you hit stuff in the dark cave
People have been trying to impose some "higher purpose" on DnD for years but always that has been in vain

I mean he could be, and I want him to be, but he very strongly objects. This isn't even a hypothetical scenario but something I'm dealing with right now. I was pretty explicit that the campaign was high mythic/heroic fantasy in the vein of the mahabarata, the mabinogion, and other ancient myth (plus some modern influence) and that normal mundane fighting was basically just for NPCs or the groundwork for more heroic, superpowerish stuff. He's just kind of ignored that in favor of making basic attacks and being a normal person. I thought he was going along with things since he picked up a few Astras (basically heroic supernatural fighting styles) in character generation but he's outright refused to use any of them, even when the stakes were really high and the situation would have been perfect for it. I even went out of my way to make him a pair of custom styles based on his input, but he still won't fucking use them.
The guy is a good friend and normally a good player, but he's just being a fucking prick about this and I don't get why.

>It has always been just a dungeon crawler where you hit stuff in the dark cave

It hasn't been that since 2e dude

He probably just jumped from 2e to an OSR and pretends 3.PF and beyond don't exist.

It still cannot fucking escape that legacy, no matter what 3.0 tried
3.0 was the greatest mass hallucination of all times among dnd fans because they felt they could do ANYTHING THEY WANTED, as long as it eventually resolved conflicts one way or another by killing stuff
See, 5th ed is a weird subversion of this. 3.0 tried to make rules for all the non-combat stuff, in hopes to promote it. But they could never cover all bases no matter what, so it always fell apart somewhere. So they just made non-combat very easy to do purely on GM fiat in 5.0, in another way to promote more of that "don't just find hostile monsters and hit them" approach.

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No I mean 2e was already mostly focused on shit that was not dungeon crawling.

5e is just another illusion then, because the PHB is 90% ways to hit guy with a single page here and there about other things, and the DMG book is nothing but lists of things that exist with very little how-to.

Being mostly ways to hit guys doesn't contradict with being like Song of Roland --which is mostly about hitting guys with long speeches in between-- the problem is the way you hit guys sucks.

What bothers me the most about 3.5 is how they change the importance of ability scores. Suddenly they go from being this very real and important stat where every number matters, to just a basis for calculating modifiers. It feels very odd to me and I wonder why they didn't just change the ability score system altogether.

>Like, there are these people whose magic is almost exclusively "I use this magic to fight better/perform noncombat skills better." Why would anyone bother with that when the "mundane way" works just as well? Is "I use this magic to fight better/perform noncombat skills better" something to actually take pride in by that point?

If magic has some kind of serious limitation (which has been the general idea in most fantasy RPG design since the genre existed) then it probably comes down to fighting with that limitation vs fighting without it, with magic offering an advantage at some kind of cost. I've seen a lot of fiction where a character without magic rationalises this in terms of something like "cold steel is more reliable than fickle magic", but they fail to actually make magic fickle which defeats the point. If magic has no serious limitation then everyone of note should be using it, unless it's not very powerful, or not everyone can use it.

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If you give some out of combat rules, GM and players still have to wing the cases that the rules dont cover
If the rules cover nothing, then they will wing it from the start and don't have to go half and half on it

if so many people wanted anime fighting, why arent anime fighting rulesets popular then

I think magical martials are shit and universally come with a schizophrenic flavour that clashes with itself.

I'm cool with warriors that are super strong, tough and skilled, and I don't care how you want to model that mechanically, but guys that go "I'm gonna half-ass magic and use that to prop up my equally half-assed fighting skills" don't do anything for me.

Because people don't want anime fighting, they want mythical fighting.

Anime is popular in the west precisely because it's the only western-influenced non-iconoclastic culture.

Gish is actually the opposite of what he means by "magical martials"

Because everything that isn't D&D winds up unpopular, and most "anime fighting" rulesets are generic RPGs trying to horn in on the tiny slice of pie left that GURPS already has covered.

>I honestly think that pure martials should be nixed in favor of magical martials.
I honestly think that you need to kill yourself.

>I really like the way 4e does this with its arcane/divine/primal/psionic weapon-using classes, like avengers, battleminds, and wardens. I also like the way Pathfinder does it with its 3/4 BAB half-casters, like hunters, inquisitors, and investigators.
Thats because you are a reddit-faggot with braindamage.

>I can understand the fantasy of being a guy who does fighting and noncombat skills with nothing but mundane talents, sure. But that kind of cuts into the thematics behind all of the "magical martials," you know?
Yeah because your weebshit sucks. Fuck off with that. There are enough people who actually arent massive faggots like you and enjoy the heroes journey and the mundane fighting man prevailing against the evil wizard. You just want to jack off to your teleporting NUFFING PERSONEL KID-DONUT STEEL-garbage sue.

>Like, there are these people whose magic is almost exclusively "I use this magic to fight better/perform noncombat skills better." Why would anyone bother with that when the "mundane way" works just as well? Is "I use this magic to fight better/perform noncombat skills better" something to actually take pride in by that point?
The only thing you take pride in is how many dicks you have showed down your throat.

>What do you think about these magical martials?
I think Hitler was right about State Sanctioned Euthanasia of retards and that it would have prevented the existence of you and subsequently of this shit-thread.

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Thread was actually doing fine until you came in with your runny diaper.

Reading through his post again, I still get the impression that gishes are exactly what he's talking about.

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His main example is "avengers, battleminds, and wardens." These are not "gish" classes, they are fighting-man archetypes who start off _looking_ 90% martial and end up _looking_ 90% magical.

I think the difference is synergy.

A Gish is the classic warrior mage. He can do some magic, he can do some swordplay but they are two separate things. He might buff himself to sword better but they are still separate skills.

The alternative is something more like the D&D 4e Swordmage, where you can't really separate the two. The swordplay and magic are part of the same skillset and you can't really separate them. A swordmage can't just turn off the magic part of his swordplay because it's an innate part of HOW he does his swordplay.

>this very real and important stat where every number matters,
That doesn't sound like AD&D.

I don't know, even at level 1 an Avenger can be teleporting and making glowy energy attacks, and a Warden can be throwing thorny vines at enemies and covering themselves in ice. I feel like you're underselling how magic they are to start with, basically.

The only runny diaper in here is yours and its full of semen from getting fucked in the ass all day.

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0/10

Try less salt,

Tell me more about how absolutely not mad you are, sonnyboy

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I think they're way gayer than wuxia martials.

>Not achieving such internal mastery that you rearrange your organs at will to avoid dying from a sword piercing where your heart would normally be, making your otherwise fatal wound about as painful as getting your flu shot
>Not meditating on the nature of nonexistence so hard that you learn how to sap atomic motion from niggers so you can encase them in ice just by grabbing onto their shoulder
>Not ingesting so many fucking poisons and venoms and nasty shit that your body learns not only how to immunize itself against poison but also how to produce its own touch based venom so you can give some faggot a handshake and three minutes later his heart gives out
>Not learning the details of human anatomy to such a ridiculous degree that you can induce pin-point precise cracks in bones and tears in flesh so when your stupid ass rival begins his victory speech you can just laugh, poke him with your finger, and watch the horror on his face as his hundreds of otherwise insignificant internal injuries compound on themselves until his spine cracks into sawdust, as if you just set up and knocked down a series of dominos except the dominos were his organs

Achieving supernatural effects with nothing but intense self mastery A BEST and I will fucking fight anyone who disagrees.

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>covering themselves in ice

For like 15-30 seconds a day

Well, some people don't want anime fight. Some do. Some don't want *mythical* fighting, others do. Thing is, you're never going to make a perfect system that appeals to all of them.

Actually have to check vs the stat itself rather than adding it as a modifier to a DC roll.

Because "anime fighting" doesn't mean anything. Also, you're an idiot.

Neither does "mythical fighting," by the way. You are also idiots.

...But in context, they have distinct and easy to understand meanings that convey a lot about the kind of aesthetic and storytelling a game is intended to support. What do you gain by just dismissively claiming they don't mean anything? Do you just not understand what they're being used to mean?

This is what tiers are made for: a tier akin to E6 for the players who want to be hard bitten "realistic" warriors and a tier akin to Exalted/Immortals for the unironic Caster Supremacy types.

The BECMI/Epic/Paragon Path concept was smart, even if the execution faltered.

He's likely just trying to stir up drama for his own amusement, ignore him.

>...But in context, they have distinct and easy to understand meanings that convey a lot about the kind of aesthetic and storytelling a game is intended to support.

No they don't. There are literally dozens of mythical heroes that performed antics that, were I to relate them to you without mentioning the source, I have absolutely zero doubt you would describe as "anime fighting."

There is absolutely no useful distinction being made here, and your insistence that there is is merely further proof that you are an idiot.

I think you're just making some rather stupid assumptions.

Yes, you are correct, the actual combat you see in anime and mythology is very varied, but we're talking about the cliche depictions of them, the iconic or stereotypical ones. That they're not accurate doesn't stop them being useful things to discuss when you're talking about unrealistic martial combat.

If you are a martial artist, you by definition cannot be as strong as a martial artist who trains just as hard, but supplements their attack power with magic. Similar to steroids.

The gish will always be a better fighter than a pure fighter, because the first step of any skill is, and should be, bigger than the twentieth step. The first step of magic takes you further than the twentieth step of karate.

This would be considered magic/psionic.

No, that's retarded, what the fuck are you talking about?

In a fantasy setting there is no reason magic should be inherently superior to martial skill. That's entirely up to the whim of its creators.

>Achieving supernatural effects

It's almost like these are magical warriors or something!

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The idea that everything beyond realism must be reducible to magic is a toxic cyst on modern fantasy.

>It's almost like these are magical warriors or something!

I'll end you.

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I prefer the original idea of Dragon Ball, where the characters were just really fucking strong martial artists.

These premises are confused. You state that magical martials should replace mundane martials, but then claim that mundane martials can do what magical ones can, defeating the purpose of the magical martial. Granted, in 4e, everyone functions on the same level of power and can do similar tasks, but PF Bard-chassis martials can do myriad supernatural things.

The idea behind a magical martial is giving a martial character means to handle the increasingly supernatural challenges your average fantasy game throws at them. Every character should have the ability to handle problems in the game world, mundane and supernatural. One of the problems with mundane martials in 21st century games is they lack that ability after a certain point.

I'm assuming they are equal,but that skills are logarithmic. That the biggest hurdles come early, and that as you gain skill the difference is objectively less.

In short, the difference between a complete lack of understanding in a language, and someone who can speak in broken sentences but basically make themselves understood, is much greater, yet takes much less time to develop than, the difference between someone who is fluent and someone who speaks at a native level.

It's got nothing to do with magic per se, and everything to do with the 80/20 principle.

Which is also not necessarily true and entirely up to the whim of the people designing the setting. Hell, that principle doesn't even reflect how most fantasy fiction works. It tends towards the opposite.

So it's easier for a great master to become the best in history, than for a know-nothing to become a novice? Which fiction is this?

If you're playing D&D, the three main classes are supposed to WORK TOGETHER. The fighter is your tank, your shield. The mage is your power weapon. And the cleric sits in the middle healing them.

Wizards can do fucking magic, you just can't change the fact that they will be more powerful in terms of brute strength.

And then they were all superdoubleawsome aliens chucking planets at each other.

Which is cool too I guess, but not as fun.

Qi cultivation is the cornerstone of these arts, and that literally a mystical force that exists in the world and the self, like modern fantasy definitions of mana. Qi cultivation techniques are paranormal (beyond normal) ways to affect this natural force, and thus the natural world. That is definitionally magic.

It's punch magic, Chinaboo. You're living a lie.

The splitting of magic from martial prowess done by D&D is way worse, because it makes people like you exist. Read a goddamned mythic poem and educate yourself.

>Wizards can do fucking magic, you just can't change the fact that they will be more powerful in terms of brute strength.
Sure you can. "Fucking magic" can mean anything from mixing herbs that make the warrior stronger to spending a week devising an arcane ritual to summon a demon and ask him questions to chucking fireballs with a staff and a magic word to creating planes of existence on a whim. The notions of "magic" as dictated arbitrarily by D&D's mechanics are all but universal.

Using absurd examples isn't a good way of making a point.

Most fantasy treats progression of skill as roughly linear, maybe with a big power boost late in the game and sometimes a turning point in the middle. But it also tends to reward specialisation and not expect every character to also dabble in a dozen other things because it's inherently a better idea, as it would be in your bizarre progression system.

>Wizards can do fucking magic, you just can't change the fact that they will be more powerful in terms of brute strength.

Except you absolutely can, because what magic is capable of is entirely dependent on what you say it can do.

Also, this requires the martial to be given tools to actually tank, which in many cases they are not.

I'm well aware of mythology. I'm saying that martials should be capable of mythic style feats without it all being declared to be reducible to 'magic', because that's boring as fuck. Magic is one aspect of fantasy. Not all fantasy should boil down to magic.

I want neither the realismfag nor the casterfag at my tables. Both sound like miserable shitheads.

I don't think you understand, the point of having different classes is to have different roles. If they're all just re-fluffed version of each other, all just big damage-inflictors, then what's the fucking point? Fighters could, at least in 2E, command armies where Wizards couldn't. Seems like you focus to much on the G and not the RP.

By the way, a fighter should give priority to DEX and buying the best armor, not STR.

I think you're missing the point. The guy that spends 20000 hours practicing swordplay is going to be better than the guy spending 10000 hours on ju-fu and 10000 on swordplay. And being good at those two things doesn't mean you can combine them in a way that renders you superior to the guy that spent 20000 hours on swordplay.

Your premise that skills are logarithmic doesn't suggest that two different skills should be additive. Log(20000) = 4.3 but that 0.3 matters compared to the guy with two 4s.

>Wuxia martial arts are magic

Oh look, a total fucking retard

>Qi cultivation techniques are paranormal (beyond normal) ways to affect this natural force, and thus the natural world.

Flying saucers are also paranormal but not generally considered magic. These terms are not frankly very meaningful by themselves.

...What the fuck are you even talking about at this point? How does that lead on from what you were saying before?

Nobody is saying all the classes need to same. Where did that absurd bullshit come from?

If I had to guess he's approaching it like 4e and the assumption that all those classes are the same?

Cause y'know. If two powers both have an encounter limitation then that instantly means they're indistinguishable from one another.

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Fighters are leaders and shields first, not living WMDs. A level 1 fighter in 3.X can have an AC of >20 just by buffing his DEX and buying a tower shield.

Looks like all of you are attracting the attention of the retard who can't figure out what definition of magic to use.

>Fantasy Setting =/= Realistic laws of physics
ergo
>Supernatural elements =/= Magic

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...And doing so is irrelevant because most meaningful attacks don't target AC and they have no way of ensuring they're attacked rather than their party members?

None of this is about taking away the roles characters have. It's about giving every character interesting options and ways to actually fulfill their role.

Although it's also worth pointing out that 'Does magic' is a shitty fucking role, because it boils down to 'does everything'. Limitations on what they can do with it, actual thematic restrictions or focuses, are necessary to make it balanced and interesting.

Magic is anything supernatural you mong. If they're doing something supernatural then it's magical

Most meaningfull attacks should come from massive beasts and enemy troops, the rare wizard is a special treat.

No, that's retarded.

Even most magical beasts have spell like abilities and other things that ignore or overpower AC.

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Realistically speaking, or as realistically as is possible in this discussion anyway, magic would be the only way to achieve the kinds of feats a martial would need to be able to exceed human limits. It doesn't have to be arcane magic, but some outside force would have to give them that little boost.