D&D 5E Should martial characters be mundane or supernatural?

[Oofta]

That's the crazy part.

The problem wasn't that GWM and SS deal big damage. It was the TWF, Unarmed Strikes, Sword and Board, and Finesse fighting didn't have damage feats as well. And sucked.

Funny thing is that when you look at the whole picture, meaning not just DPR but survivability, GWM is not that great. I wrote a simulator a while back where I simulated cage fights against various foes matching fighters up to appropriate CR monsters and seeing how long they'd survive. Up to level 5 dual weapons won, from 5-10 duelist style with shield master won if the fighter is allowed to do the shield bash before other attacks (otherwise it was dual weapon). Even without the shield bash, the sword and board fighter was still the winner of the fight more often than GWM.

People overestimate GWM's effectiveness in combat if the fighter wants to actually live or not drain the cleric's healing to keep them up. The disclaimer is that the gap wasn't really all that huge, a few percentage points at most and not something people would actually notice in play. Suffice to say, I don't think GWM is all that.

As always, this was still white room analysis so take it with a grain of salt.

 

[Vaalingrade]

You think that and get excited because in PF you can now sneak attack constructs and undead where you could not in 3.0 or 3.5, then still get tripped up against oozes, elementals, and anybody with fortification.

Some elementals can still get got.

Also, the important thing is that the only creature type the adventure designers care about are now sneak attack capable.

 

[Minigiant]

I'm on record as considering the 3e fighter the best-designed class, elegant in it's simplicity, yet having customizeability and depth. The Rogue was just nearly random class features, by comparison - the Expert was better designed

You have the right to talk like a crazy man. That's Freedom!

Elegance alone is not the only factor to design. Too many put too much emphasis on elegance and simplicity that they end up with beautiful trash.

The 3e Rogue did what it was designed to without a million parts. And was designed in such a way that it's class features would be adjusted to better fit additional archetypes.

It wasn't as powerful as casters but 3e caster were broken if run by anyone but a noob.

 

[Scribe]

Agreed a moderately high level fighter is functionally as strong as Rhino or eventually matching great Dragons... not Olympic level at all.

Look at what I was responding to.

 

[Oofta]

Agreed a moderately high level fighter is functionally as strong as Rhino or eventually matching great Dragons... not Olympic level at all.

Expression of strength in D&D is pretty FUBAR because of how it adds to damage. However, if you simply look at how much they could lift? Not sure what a "great" dragon is but an ancient red dragon has a 30 strength and is gargantuan. Since carrying capacity is 30 X strength score doubling for every category above medium, that dragon can list 7,200 pounds, 3.6 tons. That fighter with a 20 strength? 600 pounds.

How exactly are they functionally as strong?

 

[Minigiant]

Funny thing is that when you look at the whole picture, meaning not just DPR but survivability, GWM is not that great. I wrote a simulator a while back where I simulated cage fights against various foes matching fighters up to appropriate CR monsters and seeing how long they'd survive. Up to level 5 dual weapons won, from 5-10 duelist style with shield master won if the fighter is allowed to do the shield bash before other attacks (otherwise it was dual weapon). Even without the shield bash, the sword and board fighter was still the winner of the fight more often than GWM.

People overestimate GWM's effectiveness in combat if the fighter wants to actually live or not drain the cleric's healing to keep them up. The disclaimer is that the gap wasn't really all that huge, a few percentage points at most and not something people would actually notice in play. Suffice to say, I don't think GWM is all that.

As always, this was still white room analysis so take it with a grain of salt.

People play with magic items.

GWM is powered by the fact that employers of it could load up on defensive and offensive magic items and abuse advantage.

The DMG doesn't tell DMs to not let you warriors get to 20 AC cheap.

Never hand out +X armor. EVER.

 

[Oofta]

I'm on record as considering the 3e fighter the best-designed class, elegant in it's simplicity, yet having customizeability and depth.

The 3E fighter was simple? Lordy lord ... that's a new one. When you had multiple attacks, every iterative attack had their attack bonus decreased. Resistance based on weapon material was practically standard after a certain level, two weapon fighting was a mess, feats and build dramatically altered effectiveness. Don't even get me started on different damage types you could put on weapons and all the buffs and bonuses you regularly got (I had a chart). Then in combat? Hope you can tumble because if you can't you get hit every time you close with an enemy that had reach.

Don't get me wrong, I had a blast with my fighter. But if I had a full action attack (another fun wrinkle) I had to roll literal handfuls of dice to resolve that attack. The learning curve for 3.x was steep, even for fighters if you wanted to be effective.

 

[Oofta]

People play with magic items.

GWM is powered by the fact that employers of it could load up on defensive and offensive magic items and abuse advantage.

The DMG doesn't tell DMs to not let you warriors get to 20 AC cheap.

Never hand out +X armor. EVER.

Magic items just shifted the numbers, they don't change the overall percentages if you assume the same number of bonuses. Magic shields would tip the balance in favor of the sword and board fighter because they are uncommon (as opposed to armor which is rare).

 

[Tony Vargas]

You have the right to talk like a crazy man. That's Freedom!

Elegance alone is not the only factor to design. Too many put too much emphasis on elegance and simplicity that they end up with beautiful trash.

Elegance does correlate with so many other positives, tho. But, yeah, I'm just a sucker for it.

I blame the entire rest of the edition for making the Fighter Tier 5. If every other class were as simple, yet deep & customizeable, and utterly lacking in versatility & power as the fighter, the edition would have been perfect... well, threats would need to have been toned down a skosh...

Except multi-classing, the 3e fighter worked well with 3e multiclassing. If any other class had, that'd've really been something.

The 3e Rogue did what it was designed to without a million parts. And was designed in such a way that it's class features would be adjusted to better fit additional archetypes.

I don't think we were given a goal before it dropped, so the only evidence of what it was supposed to be is the old Thief (which it's much better than, of course), and, well, itself. It's like painting a bullseye around a bullet hole and calling yourself a marksman.
TBF, D&D has done that a lot.

The 3E fighter was simple?

The design was simple. Like, you could reconstruct it from memory very easily.

Building and playing a fighter, OTOH, could be quite challenging & fun.... and would have been even more fun if all the other classes were better designed, too.

When you had multiple attacks, every iterative attack had their attack bonus decreased. Resistance based on weapon material was practically standard after a certain level, two weapon fighting was a mess, feats and build dramatically altered effectiveness. Don't even get me started on different damage types

TBH, none of that's the fighter class design not being simple, none of it's the class design, at all, you're just talking about the entire rest of the edition being bad...
...which, like, don't feel up to arguing against atm....

 

[Oofta]

...
The design was simple. Like, you could reconstruct it from memory very easily.

Building and playing a fighter, OTOH, could be quite challenging & fun.... and would have been even more fun if all the other classes were better designed, too.

Like I said I had fun with my fighter. But I also out-damaged the rest of the party on a regular basis. Well, until about 15th level when wizards exponential growth made every other PC superfluous. But to get there? I'm not one to peruse the optimization boards so figuring it out was not simple.

It's just one of those things. I was tempted switch to PF at one point in the hopes that they had fixed the linear fighter exponential wizard issue 3E had but after chatting with people realized they had just doubled down on build complexity.

A certain part of me enjoyed the optimization side of things and I'm good at it, but I also accept that for a lot of people that complexity was a huge barrier to entry.

P.S. I forgot about power attack and the chart I figured out about how much to subtract from my attacks based on target AC (reduced by bonuses to hit of course). Like I said, fun but complex.