D&D 5E The Magical Martial

[Minigiant]

It is the mark of being a skilled professional, and outside of combat styles and feats it is the limit.

So, what is proficiency to you then? Should we allow weapons to be Expertised? I can tell you, in bounded accuracy, giving a character a +6 to hit to make for a +17 leads to VERY boring fights.

Skilled is not mastery
Preficncy is not mastery

Mastery is Mastery

What counts as mastery differs from edition to edition

 

[CreamCloud0]

This is why an done with this tread. I have never discussed (in this thread) the issue of martials vs casters or martial vs caster balance. That is not what I am talking about at all. That is a separate issue.

it became about casters the moment we needed magic to justify martials in the higher tiers of play...soooo basically post 1.

Why not to level 30?

My issue with level 20 is that most groups don't get there and to fully realize batman/hawkeye type you would like need to be level 15-20. So most groups never actually get fulfill that fantasy. You keep it to 10 levels and the vast majority can play the characters they want

the fact that most groups don't get there is not an actual argument for not making high tier non-supernatural/magical martials powerful and have good abilities.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Again.

Why can't I play level 17 Hawkeye, Deadshot, Usopp, Batman, Kenshin, or Cap and stay non-supernatursl like the source material?

Usopp shoots plants that explode or rapidly grow in seconds. Those plants are supernatural tools.

So, how do you play Usopp without dipping into the supernatural? Completely mundane exploding plants that can grow to full maturity in any environment within seconds?

 

[FrogReaver]

Hard Disagree.

Let us say the party is high enough level to have Planeshift, and they are gathering allies for the fight. They remember that they had good interactions with a Fey Lord.

The martial characters... the best they could do is find someone magical to take them to the place, if that person even knows such high level magic. Which could be weeks of searching and travel.

The magical characters... can just go there and recruit that Fey Lord.

That is a huge story impact. Entire plot lines and challenges have fallen before spells like fly, speak with dead, invisibility, mage hand, ect ect. No martial character has ever been capable of doing the same with their skills and abilities.

They don’t need to be for the plot to be the same. Martials can still recruit the same Fey Lord without planeshift. And if they don’t, the plot isn’t changed. They still go on to the great battle.

If you really mean every element of the fiction may not turn out exactly the same then sure, but that’s a trivial difference IMO.

 

[dave2008]

it became about casters the moment we needed magic to justify martials in the higher tiers of play...soooo basically post 1.

Being magical and a caster are not the same thing. I am talking about innate magic like a dragons ability to fly, not cast spells or similar. However, that is not really what I (notice I am talking about me) care about.

the fact that most groups don't get there is not an actual argument for not making high tier non-supernatural/magical martials powerful and have good abilities.

Maybe you haven't read my posts; however, I have never suggested martials shouldn't get their nonmagical abilities. I am simply advocating for them to be available much earlier.

Listen the line it happens (lvl 10, 15, 20, 25, 30+) is not really relevant to the discussion IMO. That line is mostly arbitrary and a personal preference (I have some stats to back up my selection).

Frankly I am tired of people assuming magical martials means you don't have mundane martials with all of their wonderful nonmagical abilities - why are people so narrow minded!

 

[FrogReaver]

They are for whole game design, but I was only talking about one aspect. Might thought: get martials correct and then modified casters to fit the martial model. So you balance the casters around the martials, not the other way around.

I like this. I don’t think it’s an approach that has been tried before. I think level 1-10 is mostly right. So maybe not much work there? The real question is what martial capabilities from 11-20?

 

[FrogReaver]

Frankly I am tired of people assuming magical martials means you don't have mundane martials with all of their wonderful nonmagical abilities - why are people so narrow minded!

Depending on the power level of the magical, I think there comes a point where at the bare minimum both of those cannot exist at the same level.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Usopp shoots plants that explode or rapidly grow in seconds. Those plants are supernatural tools.

So, how do you play Usopp without dipping into the supernatural? Completely mundane exploding plants that can grow to full maturity in any environment within seconds?

even long before the timeskip where those upgrades happened Usopp was managing to accurately snipe people from like 1000ft away at Enies Lobby, let DnD Usopp use supernatural ammo all day long, tanglefoot bags, alchemists fire or vials of poisons, but that doesn't mean his capability to snipe is any form of magical.

 

[Chaosmancer]

you already can, more or less, but nobody tells the people with the magic class fantasies 'oh sorry you can only play below 10th level, or compromise your desired aesthetic' it's a double standard.

or maybe flip the standard on it's head, say you can't play any magic classes on a character below 10th level? how would people feel about that?

I think the issue is more in "what do you mean"

Like, I took hawkeye, took everything that was said he could do... and did it with a level 5 fighter. I took Batman and covered all his skills that were listed... in a level 2 rogue.

So, let's take Deadshot. Deadshots supreme martial abilities are... he doesn't miss. Unless he does. Which he has, quite often. So he's just a really accurate ranged combatant. So... 20 dex, Archery style and sharpshooter. Level 4 martial? Less since he's human and can start with Sharpshooter and we can just hand wave ability scores? If you go rogue, you can take Steady Aim and get advantage by level 3.

So, what exactly am I missing? Why isn't this good enough to cover that concept? I'll accept it isn't, fine, but what more do we need to do? Because doubling his to-hit from +9 at level 3 to +18 will sure mean he misses less, but you could get the same end result from just having good dice rolls. Narratively, he is still a top tier marksman whether he just has good dice and a lenient DM on the ASIs or if we double all his numbers. He still isn't doing anything other than shooting his weapon.

 

[Chaosmancer]

What bothers me is the jumping, not the falling. And not just jumping, but anything physical - swim speed, climb speed, wrestling down giants and dragons, etc. Without needing magic items or spells I think the fighter should be beating world records at 9th level, if not 5th. Not by a small bit either, but by the time the character gets to 20th, it should be as jaw-dropping as being able to take the above mentioned fall.

For example, would it kill the Fighter class if at 5th level they could double their Jump, at 10th triple it, at 15th quadruple it and at 20th have a x5 jump? Or the ability at 5th/9th they climb and swim at full speed (and at 5th they can swim in heavy armor without sinking - though I don't think that limitation is mentioned anywhere in the current ruleset...).

Just even these kind of things I think would be quality-of-life improvements for the Fighter/martials without even getting into crazy damage abilities.

I liked my long jump idea of making martial characters able to jump 5ft per their bonus. So a fighter with a +5 strength and +5 prof could jump 50 ft, and then we could halve that for high jumps.