Martial/Caster Disparity
Actually, it’s known by many names. “Bullshit” is only one of them. If you’ve heard of Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards, or tier lists, or the guy at the gym fallacy, then you understand the gist. Whatever you like to call the martial/caster disparity, it all boils down to casters being reality-warping war gods who can reshape the cosmos at a whim, while martial characters can deal damage sometimes.
This design made sense back in the day. When 0e magic-users rolled 1d4 hit points and frequently died before level 2, it was an achievement to earn that fireball, much less phenomenal cosmic power. Fighting-mans were comparatively hardier. They had an easier time surviving into the late game, and part of their job was shepherding their scrawny wizard brethren through early-game dangers. After all, who wouldn’t want an arcane nuke on their side? Even better, because “I helped the other guy become a superhero” is unsatisfying, an emphasis on base-building and commanding armies meant that high-level martials could still affect the world on a grand scale. They might not have access to wish, but reshaping nations and winning fiefdoms was their bread and butter.
Smash cut to present day, and we’re still dealing with the fallout. Every edition tackles it differently, from 4e’s encounter powers (now everyone is a wizard!) to Pathfinder 2e’s emphasis on teamwork (casters are good at buffing)! You’ll also see frequent denunciations of the problem. (This is only an issue on paper! Real games are more balanced in practice!).
For my part, having cut my teeth on 3.X, I remember looking at optimized summoners gating in multiple balors and thinking, “Huh. That makes fighters kind of redundant.” And that does indeed strike me as a problem. I’m pretty sure Fighter shares that opinion at the moment.
And so, in light of these general musings, what say we enjoy a sane and rational discourse on the topic of martial/caster disparity? Have you run into it at your table? Is there a game or edition that gets it right? And why is everyone else too blind to understand the basic game design assumptions that undergird your own perfectly-rational opinion? Hit us with your hottest hot takes down in today’s can-of-worms comments!
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Well, 3.X did bring us the Sublime Way to balance stuff out, I guess…?
I doubt any game does it perfectly.
Fighting Fantasy allows you to pursue both martial and magical paths, and the limitations of magic meant sooner or later you’d need to be able to use a weapon or throw a punch.
7th Sea, for me, was all about finding ways to shine without magic, and I found a bit of cleverness went a long way.
In 3.X and PF 1e, I think it’s possible to hold your own as a warrior against spellcasters if you stay smart, pick the right feats and shop for good gear. There may not be balance, but there always opportunities. That wizard can gate in balors, but if you can get him with three solid sneak attacks or a Crippling Critical Hit before he can start chanting, he won’t be looking so powerful. If you can get a 3.X Spellthief in close (and they can cast invisibility), all that power soon becomes a liability.
First order of combat: kill the enemy spellcaster…
All that being said, though I still loathe Summoner as a character, I am getting a kick out of seeing the Rouges kick the crap out of Fighter. 😀
Yes in 3.x the fighter can be as cabable as a wizzard.
But ‘The Gamers 2’ shows that there needs to be Rule Knowledge.
Fighters in 3.x are Combo Seeker: Power Attack, Cleave, Greater Cleave, Improved Critical on an enchanted Reach Weapon
and the Fighters becomes a Fireball on its own. He has only launch himself into the Enemy.
And while a Wizzards can Cast 1 Fireball per round, a cleaving Warrior with a reach weapon with improved ciritcal Range has a Chance to do it around 2 times per round.
We had a Socceress aka Fireball Maschine and a Fighter aka Meatgrinder. On average the Meatgrinder dropped more Mid level Enemies than the Socceress.
Magic in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay:
Upside: Phenomenal cosmic power!
Downside: You’re a random adventurer because you weren’t good enough to hack it as a *proper* wizard, so you’re stuck with party tricks.
Upside: No slots, no mana. Spam spells all day, every day.
Downside: Doing so will kill you sooner rather than later.
Upside:[this space for rent]
Downside: If the locals see you doing magic, they will probably burn you.
Downside: College dues and tuition fees (unless you’re an elf, which is it’s own problem).
Downside: Wearing armour grounds magical energy, so it’s harder to cast spells.
Downside: Assorted *FUN* tables to roll on.
You forgot Downside: Risk summoning the forces of darkness each time you cast a spell.
That’s covered by downsides 2 and 6
…also in Upside 1
Well, you can summon daemons on purpose, in the same way you can coat yourself in gravy and jump into a lion enclosure at the zoo.
I’ve been reading through the whole series, and I couldn’t help but notice that the women just keep getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Not to say that there is anything wrong that the women keep getting heavier, I’m all up for body diversity, it’s just an interesting take on how the art style has changed over the years.
I noticed this during the ending arc with Magus coming back, but I wasn’t stupid enough to point it out at that time.
Well I mean… Rouge the Eidolon is supposed to be size Large.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/waifudolon
Is there a side-by-side with Magus that illustrates the point? I’m having trouble seeing the change, though I have no doubt that I’m too close to have noticed.
I may be reading into this and imparting personal bias, but I think Sandvich might be using the alternative spelling of “large” with two c’s…
Makes sense though; after years of carting gear and bulk loot around, you’re almost guaranteed some HAUNCHES!
“big”, not “large”*
Merged the reply with the OP!
I’m a little puzzled here. Summoner’s eidolons have always been near-giants — as Claire points out, they’re large-sized by game rules, and the little slimeball who summoned them is probably compensating for his own puny physique as well. But I don’t notice any changes in the cast of the return-of-Magus arc that you mentioned. Ranger kind of towers over the rest, but no more than befits a badass half-orc, and no more than I remember her doing in the past.
Queen Scratchypaws of the Demonweb Pits did look heavier than either Demon Queen or Magus in their standard forms…but visually she was a new character altogether, with a distinct look from either of her progenitors.
short of bringing up exalted, where everyone has magic, so the disparity isn’t really a thing (though sorcery is much more of an xp sink when compared to anything else except maybe craft), and 2e solar dawn castes could be a little limited when compared to the other castes, or even the other martial focused castes and aspects of the other exalt types
it’s hard to balance unless you make magic laughably risky or expensive, in which cast the martials get a power fantasy but the casters don’t,
incidentally, the one time I ran dnd 5e the party was 2/3rd casters, and the non-caster was a rogue, it went fine, possibly suggesting that the narrow utility if fighters is as much a problem as the power of casters
> the narrow utility if fighters is as much a problem as the power of casters
I can get behind that. My personal “three pillars of RPG play” is “combat, social, and downtime.” You want to be able to affect the game at all three stages of play. If you can’t, then you’re sitting there bored for a large chunk of session time.
Right.
When the subject of “Martials vs Casters” comes up, people often take that literally as “the PC Fighter in a duel against the PC Wizard”.
But that’s not a situation that comes up in games.
I have been in a high-level DnD 3.5 campaign where
– The Wizard and the Cleric would use Commune and Contact Other Plane to play 20 Questions with the gods about the villain’s location.
– The Wizard uses Scry Location to scout the perimeter
– Everyone rests for the night, to get the valuable spell slots back
– Teleport outside the evil lair
– Cleric summons an extraplanar buddy
– Wizard and Cleric buff the rest of the party, and the extraplanar buddy
– We go into battle
– Wizard locks down half the battlefield at a time with area-denial spells
– Cleric applies save-or-suck spells to most dangerous-looking enemies
– The rest of the party (an extraplanar buddy) apply damage to the bad guys’ faces
So, in character, I guess my character was glad to have powerful friends who could divine our destination, because we didn’t have many leads otherwise.
And I guess he would be glad that we could teleport across continent rather than taking weeks to trek there. So much evil could have happened in that time, and instead we just had to rest overnight for spell slots.
And he would be very grateful that the fights were so much easier. The enemies had been de-fanged and divided. It wasn’t all up to him, life and death.
But out of character, I felt like an extra in someone elses’ story.
And that fact that I could probably beat the Cleric in a 1v1 arena fight didn’t change that because that was not the nature of the problem.
This is my take on 5e as well. Two problems, really. If you have the right adventuring day, with enough encounters to put pressure on the spell slots, then their combat abilities are close enough to balanced. But problem 1 is, it only works in a narrow window, so if you have too many (rare) or too few (very common) encounters, then balance falls apart. If you only have 3 rounds of combat, then casters can use their 3 most powerful spells, and totally outshine the martials who can attack 6 times.
Problem 2 is exactly what you said. Combat can be balanced with some planning, but everything else is the domain of casters (and sometimes rogues). Can’t so much as charm someone without using a spell. All your language proficiencies aren’t as useful as a 1st-level ritual. Even nonmagical skills like picking locks are often trivially duplicated by spells. The rules give Fighters nothing they can contribute outside of swinging swords – it’s entirely on the player to be inventive and find ways to contribute, or else sit there bored.
Another thing that most people tend to brush over is that casters get even more powerful with each new supplement that’s released that gives them access to more spells. Even if there are things for martials (like subclasses and the like), it’s just another *option*, and if you’ve already picked your subclass, well, it does nothing for you. While spells? If a new spell gets added to the wizard spell list, EVERY wizard has access to it. They might or might not take it, but it doesn’t change the fact that they can.
Personally, I liked 3.5’s Tome of Battle. Or what was it salty people called it? “The book of weaboo fightan magic” or something? Anyway, it gave martials more options. I thought it was a good thing.
I haven’t had the opportunity to try it out myself, but I heard good things about Pathfinder 1e’s Spheres of Power too.
I know we’ve got a few Spheres fanboys lurking about the comic. I’ve never investigated it properly myself, but I really ought to.
Brawler behaves similarly with feats in Pathfinder 1e, swapping them out and (theoretically) becoming more powerful with each option. They still aren’t quite as modular as spells though.
How exactly did Tome of Battles resolve the issue? I only now it by reputation, and have never delved much beyond the cover art.
Tome of Battle is great, in my humble opinion.
It allows martial characters to manifest non-spell powers of their own, drawing on evocative disciplines like Iron Heart, White Raven, Setting Sun and Tiger Claw.
Sure, it’s pretty much ‘fighter magic’, but it allows a martially-inclined character to live those old Wuxia fantasies and rock awesome in combat and escape the linear trap. 😀 And it’s unique enough that it isn’t just ‘fighter with some spells’.
I also liked that there are ways for members of classes other than the three new ones designed for the Sublime Way to learn a handful of powers and stances to spice up their game.
I think PF 1e based the Style Feat-chains on the Sublime Way, but that may just be me.
The Tome of Battle added the Swordsage, as well as other classes and feats that used “maneuvers and stances”. Said maneuvers and stances were tiered from 1-9, had use times and effects, and did magic fighty stuff.
The really fun bit was that splashing into one of the classes from the book let you count existing martial levels for taking maneuvers, so you could get good stuff even from a late-game dip.
I was fond of White Raven Tactics, which let you do things like swap initiatives with people, let someone else move as a reaction, and so on.
It was basically a bunch of martial themed “skills” that were close to spells in effect and power. Which you got while also wearing armor and beating the crap out of people. It was a little busted.
Eh. I figure if a caster can buff themselves to the hilt and start beating up like a warrior, it’s only fair if the warrior can get a little flash and thunder for their own game. 😀
I like to give Magic weapons like the Javelin of lighting. Ways of martials to cast spells that just worse enought compared to true spells so that casters don’t really use them.
I find that when half of the book are spells and ways to use magic you should give classes without magic ways to use them too.
Give that Silver Short Sword the ability to dispel ilusions, why not? Let the Tower Shield turn into a Wall of stone, the fighter will feel like and earthbender. Let that warhammer use Passwall, the barbarian was already breaking doors at level one, now is time to open holes on mountains.
Since I have 0e on my mind, it’s worth pointing out that access to the game’s best magic swords was the province of fighting-mans. Not a bad solution all things considered.
Still, it doesn’t scratch the itch for those dudes who want to beat magic without magic.
“Still, it doesn’t scratch the itch for those dudes who want to beat magic without magic.”
Then it seems that one would want a system that differentiates between “combat-effective magic” and “brawl-effective magic.” I’m not in the headspace to recall right at the moment (since it’s a workday, and my mind is on work), but there are some systems where while the mage always wins given enough distance and time to cast, the fighter (usually) just pounds them in a face-to-face fight because spells aren’t designed for instant casting.
Regarding the matter brought up in the mouse-over text:
Perhaps Summoner has taken the Broodmaster archetype? That’d give him access to multiple eidolons at once.
This does seem a bit unlikely since doing that renders each of them weak enough that we’d expect fighter to pretty easily smash his way through all of them.
Still Summoner might just be significantly higher level them Fighter in this comic, or possibly Fighter might just suffer from some morale problems.
As an alternative Summoner might have Called in some extraplanar minions with planar binding ahead of time and merely have used magic to disguise then as Rouge the Eidolon (or possibly some good old fashioned skill checks). An arcane mark could quite likely help with the Rune issue.
Maybe he’s hit Rouge up with Haste and we can see her afterimages.
Maybe he’s researched a Rainbow clone-spell.
(I like your idea that he just called up some help and dolled them up to look like Rouge.) 😉
lol. I actually thought about going through the archetypes. But then I was like, “Claire, you just double-checked all the evolutions for the sake of a mouse-over gag. Maybe do something more productive with your time.”
Granted, I’m rather a noob, but I played one 5e campaign as a sorcerer, and I have to say it seems that 60% of spells are for fighting (either offense or defense), 35% are utility, and the last 5% are buffs. And it seems that once you reach level 3 spell slots they are all fighting related. In 5e, we really could use more buffing spells. Be able to give ally weapons the magic property for X turns from a distance or in a radius. Bless armor to protect against fire damage. Temporarily give someone dark sight (*cheers from all the human mains*). It wouldn’t be too hard to make good high level buffing spells.
Those are all spells already: Magic Weapon, Protection From Energy, and the spell simply called Darkvision. Problem is, no one wants to waste a spell slot, or a spell known, or their concentration, on one of them, because they’re not flashy, and rarely as effective as another fireball.
I was resistant to the change to 3.X, but eventually embraced it. I had enjoyed min/maxing with the “kits” available in late 2.0.
I’ve re-evaluated 3.X. I’ve had to reign in my urge (as DM) to tell tables full of players that if they’re dying that easily, then clearly they’re not building/running their characters “the right way.” For every “why did you take that feat?” or “You’ve played this guy up to 10th level, what do you mean ‘what’s a feat’?” I’ve seen well-crafted samurai take down tough threats solo and 4th level wizards save the day with little more than a few spells, some ingenuity, and a bag full of scrolls/potions of their own creation.
In my experience and in the campaigns I’ve seen, most of the core classes in 3.X (I can’t speak for all the variants in the multitude of books) can hold their own if the player is familiar with the unique features of that class and is prepared to min/max a little to create a cool and effective build. Again, if that swiss-army knife makes a lousy hammer, maybe you’re not employing it the way it was intended.
That being said, having seen 1st level sorcerers in 5e slay every creature in a dungeon with unlimited uses of “ray of frost,” to me 5e seems like the wish-fulfillment of someone whose wizard was killed by a goblin in their first AD&D encounter.
I liked casters in Earthdawn, to cast you spent one or more rounds weaving the magic (with a skill check) and then a round casting it. But you could do it all day. And a failed check was just a simple failure, basically a wasted turn nothing more and nothing less. You had only two spells ready to cast at any given time, but changing them out of combat was easy. (changing them in combat time was risky but possible.)
The issues I’ve been facing as a wizard in my current Pathfinder (1e) game are myriad. First, I run out of spells fairly quickly, so I can feel useful with something to do on most rounds of combat for maybe 2-3 encounters at most, until I’m sitting in the back taking potshots with my crossbow, (because it’s more useful than the 0 level damage dealing spells.) Often I find myself doing that even in the first encounter of the day since I’m trying to have spells left for the second.
Then there’s the fact that between spell resistance, saving throws, evasion, and damage roll averages, about the only thing I have been able to reliably do is buff. So while the spells would seem to confer godlike powers, the chances of them doing much are often small. It doesn’t feel great to expend a limited resource like a high level spell slot and have it do squat, or have it connect and do less damage than the fighter gets much more reliably, and can do again next round.
Most of the damage in this party come from a ranger with a bow, and a gunslinger, with the inquisitor and paladin coming in at the next tier down. And I’ve seen fighter builds that could put out triple digit damage fairly reliably, either building for crits or abusing returning thrown weapons dual wielded to get lots of attacks per round. Both builds have good and bad points, but both were outputting high double digits fairly consistently, and because their output was feat and equipment driven, they could keep it up every round.
Lastly, playing a spellcaster in D&D and derivatives is an exercise in prognostication. If you have the rights spells available, you can be a god on the battlefield (at least till you run out.) Choose unwisely and you’ve got a roster full of useless or worse than useless spells for that day’s encounters and you get to be taking potshots from the back and feeling useless.
How did it feel on the turns building up to casting the spell? To me, it seems like it would feel like you’re not doing anything productive, and not really playing the game while your teammates are getting to do something cool every round. And what happens if the battle changes before your spell completes, i.e. the planned target is killed or not in range?
I’ve seen discussions about multi-round spellcasting before, as a fix for exactly this issue, but those are always the typical arguments against it. I’m interested in the perspective of someone who’s played a system like that, and enjoyed it.
I’m a big fan of balance in games, so I’ve given this a think before. One of m yuh favourite examples is from my first and favourite systems, Alternity. Now, it’s been a hot minute (read; most of a decade) since I opened up the FX handbook, but my strongest memory of the magic system is the cost. Each magic system had a different cost, but I remember that diabolism’s costs were all paid in actual blood; specifically the master’s. And with Alternity’s lack of health increases with leveling up, even high level casters were in serious danger of bleeding themselves dry.
Now, since I haven’t found a group willing to play an old, dead game with me recently, I have been playing with less ideal systems. It can make balancing encounters a little tricky, but this far I’ve got no proper horror stories about it.
Ah, the old Martial vs Caster disparity.
I play mostly 5e, though I remember the good old 3.X / Pf1e days where the cleric could out fight the fighter while dropping magic nukes. Also things like Incantatrix, Disciple of the Sevenfold Veil, Druid 20, and Synergist existed.
At my current table, I rarely have this issue, hilariously because all my players love martial and half-caster characters. It has been noted at the higher levels, though, that full-casters have *Narrative* power, rather than mechanical power. In combat I’ve not noticed much of an issue in power disparity, but it’s the scope of what the character can do to the story that is vastly different, and I think that comes down to expectation.
If a barbarian wants to stomp the ground so hard it collapses a tower, how do you resolve that? Do they roll a skill check against an absurd DC? Do you decrement their hitpoints for the attempt? What resources can they expend to accomplish the feat, and how?
Meanwhile, the Cleric says “I cast Earthquake”, you mark off a little box, and down it goes. Because the spell says so.
It’s an issue, and I find that opening the mind to superhero-level action-movie bullshit and finding a way for the non-mages to be able to do crazy world-shaping stuff is how you bridge that gap. Can the rogue vanish into the shadow of a potted plant while under observation? You know what, sure. Roll it. Can the Barbarian change the course of the river through sheer physical might? Eff it. You can try. Can the Fighter jump off an airship, crash through a roof a thousand feet below, roll to his feet, and start wailing on people? Actually yes, that’s in the rules, stop uncapping fall damage.
Magic vs Mundane is, to me, a stupid argument. I can hear people sharpening their pitchforks as I type this, but whenever I hear the “my nonmagic character should be as good as a wizard” argument I have to roll my eyes. It’s a fantasy RPG. Every character is extraordinary, and SHOULD BE. Realism is not very applicable in a fantasy RPG, but too many people get hung up on it. “No, your fighty-man isn’t a magic man, so you die from falling off a second story building while the wizard duels another guy with lightning bolts.”
I think it’s a matter of expectation. Also of rules, but the core of it comes down to what we think is possible. “Magic” can handwave things, but martials get close to our real-world experience, so we limit them based on what seems ‘realistic’, and that is not the way.
/rant
Very well put!
Although I don’t want to denounce the disparity, I do think the “real games are more balanced” argument has a point. At high level, it occurs quite often that the wizard can gate in an epic outsider when we wanted him to conjure a meteor, can conjure a meteor when we needed him to teleport us to a nearby planet, and can teleport us when… you get the gist. Some classes are less prone to that (especially summoners), but overall that holds in most cases.
Of course, depending on how the game runs, this drawback of casters be avoided. If you do one encounter per day and get all the information about the enemies in the morning, or can re-prepare your spells, or have every single existing scroll in your bag, then the disparity comes back in force. Which is why my group tends to insist on keeping adventuring even when the caster goes all-in in the first battle, rather than immediately rest. In the long run, it makes things more fun for most players, and the GM.
But! Issues of disparity tend to be more obvious when it comes down not to battle, but to the plot. The BBEG ritual? Magic. How to get our army to the battlefield in time? Magic. How to find where the evil god will be reborn? Magic. In the end, a martial can only really shift the balance through good roleplaying, with very few mechanics in their kit to change the direction of the plot. Even things like ritual magic and artifacts don’t seem to quite balance that part out. That is, at least, the portion of the disparity that I dislike the most.
How do you convince the wizard to keep going after using up their slots? In my games, it usually plays out that once the casters are out of slots, the martials say, “eh, I might as well get some HP back too,” and take the rest. What motivates you to keep pushing forward?
Normally, we simply discuss if we feel we had enough encounters for the day, and typically decide together in advance how many more encounters we are willing to do so that the caster knows roughly how many spells they can cast per combat such that they can contribute without running dry. Typically, we end up doing 2-4 per day, depending on how hard the fights are (for mid-level characters, that amounts to 2-3 high level spells per combat, and not running out of low level spell before the end of the day).
There was one case of a player for which, unfortunately, it had to be by majority’s opinion. The GM let us discuss it for a while between players, but after it was made abundantly clear that this was harming the fun of everyone other than the wizard, he also backed us up.
It’s not a great resolution and the time it happened in our high-level campaign remains one of my worst gaming memories, but overall, I still think the rest of the table was right. The player was a min-maxer: by ignoring the daily resource pool he outperformed everyone else by a wide margin in combat, and also outskilled everyone out of combat, i.e., pause to re-prepare his spell slots to play trapfinder in a room, then immediately make another pause to re-prepare his combat spells and cast 35 buffs (not making that number up) before continuing.
> once the casters are out of slots, the martials say, “eh, I might as well get some HP back too”
That’s how we usually do (in combination with discussing in advance how many encounters we plan to fight) when we face unexpected or particularly difficult enemies. But it assumes a modicum of effort to manage your resources properly, and not systematically blowing 80% of your spell slots on the first encounter of the day, when everyone can see that it causes significant imbalances and doesn’t leave anyone else a chance to contribute.
Resource management is not only an issue with spell slots, of course. Other classes can also become problematically overpowered if they spend all their resources at once, then ask for a rest. Spells are just the most obvious, and the one for which the character becomes the most useless if managed poorly. A monk without ki or a paladin without smite evil can still contribute in combat.
If you accept that D&D “magic” is like real-life “technology” (which you should, because it is), it becomes clear that powerful mundane characters fade in importance as magical infrastructure grows. No amount of mundane skill can rival polymorph, just like no amount of mundane skill can rival an attack helicopter. That is how the world is and how it should be.
Granted, WotC never wrote the 3.5 fluff that way; they were stuck on a generic “anything pre-industrial goes” kitchen sink, with very few allowances for all the high-power magic they were mixing into that. That’s a shame, because caster-martial disparity is fantastic for world-building. Granted, it’s a little dystopic for mundanes, but the societal consequences of vast personalized power are very interesting. Very little of that is ever explored in 3.5 products.
Magic is, per 3.5 mechanics, a world-defining industry. Treat it as such!
I’m sure the disparity conversation is all well and good, but… HoEF with the maybe-not-eidolon triplets? Clones? You can leave Summoner himself out, please 🙂
I started playing when I found the plastic bagged ‘fantasy’ supplement to the Chainmail gameset in the University bookstore c. 1973
When the boxed set came out, I was in the military and it was the perfect thing for a night in barracks when you were too broke to go out drinking, that and there’s something about blowing things up and hitting them with swords that appeals to the average serviceman/woman 😉
The single best thing for me about later versions was not the expanded spell list and innumerable feats/skills/bonuses was the change away from figuring oiut THAC0 to a “roll a higher number than the AC/spell/effect has” system.
Magic is supposed to be powerful, rreeeaaalllyyyy powerful, more powerful than any bodybuilder swinging a sharp iron bar around can ever be. That’s why in the beginning magicusers didn’t get as many ‘attacks’ per round as a fighter, it took a lot longer to cast a spell than to swing a sword
The new spells are nice but that means more work trying to use the ones that aren’t instant finishers and make them entertaining for everyone else instead of using the same halfdozen for every character because it’s harder to save aganst them.
That’s my main goal in a game, to make it fun for everyone, not a bottomless bag of temper tantrums.
People always seem to try to make characters that nobody in their party can ‘beat’ forgetting that ther idea of the game is to use all the party members’ skills together to defeat the BBEG.
You never ‘win’ the game because there’s always another BBEG waiting in the wings, unless of course you want to let your character ‘retire’ to a life of bring indolence sitting on a heap of cold hard coins.
For relatively balanced magic i did like the tome of battle in 3.X as it allowed you to stab things but have the full versatility of doing it fancifully. In a similar vein there is a recent 3rd and a half party 5e supplement called Adventures in Rokugan that is L5R adapted into the base 5E system that has a good balance between martial and magic.
Hot take: 4e’s solution is a good one. (Or 3.5’s Tome of Battle classes, for that matter.)
Martial classes aren’t just generally weaker than casters, they’re less interesting to play. Wizards have resource management to consider, they have a range of tactical options as broad as their spellbook, and many of those spells have creative uses that aren’t subject to the DM agreeing that it sounds cool. Fighters have “I hit the monster with my sword” and sometimes “Can I drop the chandelier on him?”
Giving the martial characters abilities with similar design principles as the casters—potent and flexible, but un-spammable due to resource limitations or other constraints—not only closes the gap between them, but also gives the martial characters interesting choices that would otherwise be lacking.
Also: I just think non-casters should be able to actively perform supernatural feats. High-level fighters are already strong enough to juggle anvils and tough enough to survive a dragon’s stomach, why not some of the cool techniques that Guts, Roronoa Zoro, and Tanjiro Kamado use? Hell, why not Ichigo Kurosaki, Future Trunks, or Zelgadis Graywords?
Might also be worth mentioning that I place part of the blame on the game trying to fit Conan the Barbarian and Lina Inverse in the same party. Low-fantasy thud-and-blunder is conceptually tough to balance with high sorcery without making one seem too fantastical or the other seem weirdly toothless.
Going to link this: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/587/roleplaying-games/dd-calibrating-your-expectations-2
The buffest guy at the gym is maybe a 2nd level Fighter; keep in mind that most of us are 1st level Experts. If you know a 4th level Fighter, congratulations, you’ve met an Olympic athlete or at least someone who could have been one. Even a “mere” 6th level character is past what someone from Earth could ever be.
If an 8th level Fighter wants to swing his sword so fast it throws shockwaves, or a 10th level Monk wants to wrap his fists in lightning, or a 12th level Barbarian wants to flip inside out and catch fire, they should be able to do that. No magic needed, not even a (Su) ability. It’s just something you can do once you’re That Good.
In my experience the problem in 5E is incredibly overstated. In-combat casters burn out, immunities and are common, saves scale faster than AC, legendary resistance and magic resistance are things, and concentration is a good bottlenecking mechanic.
The real divide is outside of combat. Everyone who isn’t a Rogue/Bard has 4ish skills to solve problems with. Casters have those skills, and problem-solving skills. Social skills fail? Use a mind-whammy. Also some problems can only be solved with magic. Is your objective on the bottom of the ocean? Better be an aquatic race or have a spell for it.
I think 5e has a good handle on things when it comes to that great disparity. Mostly because of concentration and low DC saving throws. Concentration limits the number of reality warping effects that a caster can have active (and can make summoning a dangerous gamble). And the low DC saving throws greatly curbs debuffs and attack spells.
Savage Worlds is kind of nice for balancing casters vs martials because casters’ power points are enough to pull off a few flashy moves, then they have to wait for them to recharge at a rate of 1 per hour (better pool and recharge rate with enough edge investment, of course).
Wasn’t he dead? 🙂
You mentioned it in another comment, but the biggest issue is when the martials are left behind in the social and exploration/downtime pillars of rpgs other than combat. I’ve seen plenty of martials in Pathfinder that can easily out damage the spell casters (so long as mythic and other utterly broken options aren’t implemented), but it’s really damn hard for martials to meaningfully contribute in those pillars better than the casters. 5e is hardly any better at that balance in the long run (high level wizards, druids, bards, and clerics still rule the game) and Shadowrun has so many goddamn pillars as to be nearly unplayable.
It’s hard to balance a game when some characters can use magic and others can’t. On one hand, you’ve got someone making the laws of physics roll over and beg for mercy. On the other hand, you’ve got someone who is pretty good with _____. I don’t know if there’s a good way to balance it out.
Maybe part of the solution is to put more restrictions on what magic can do? You’re not breaking the laws of physics if that’s just what physics are in this world. Just because something is impossible in our world, doesn’t mean it has to be possible with magic. It could be as limited or unlimited as you want, if you recalibrate your expectations of it.
Kind of sacrilegious, I know, to suggest that wizards shouldn’t be able to automatically solve every problem. But it’s one way of bringing them onto the same power scale.
Martials commanding armies sounds great for balance and reshaping the world… but it feels like in 3.X, casters were enough more common that you could have them commanding the armies instead.
Though “the rant” does sound like it would be very nice for balance purposes, and anti-frustration.
Granted, these days I think World of Darkness subsystems where everyone is roughly the same class but has differences like Clan/Tribe+Auspice/etc and mostly fights others of their own class (with some exceptions) might be better overall for addressing the disparity.
Well, getting beat up by spectral women isn’t the most noble way to go out, but it is somewhat unique. It makes me wonder if Rogue doesn’t ever try and convince them to ditch the summoner so she can use them as decoys?
So what did Fighter do to deserve this treatment, this time? Or is Summoner just being a full-time bully?
Part of the problem in 5e, imo, is that people don’t make use of a full adventuring day or short rests. The rogue who never runs out of resources, or the fighter who gets them back after a short rest, start feeling a lot more fun when the wizard doesn’t have ALL their spell slots for EVERY encounter, combat or otherwise. If your casters are running on fumes and cantrips by the time you long rest, suddenly being able to action surge every other encounter while the wizard is doing less fireballing and more firebolting doesn’t seem so bad
Of course, WotC seems to be moving away from short rests as a design concept, so we’ll see how that works out in the future. My personal opinion is that the “nobody uses short rests -> phase out short rests and make things pb/lr” mentality is only going to hurt martial characters and make the game less fun—I’d rather have more material that explicitly talks about how short rests work.
Also, more DMs should interrupt long rests. Spell slots and daily preparations are a privilege, not a right (this is a joke but I do think that the “long rest after every 1-2 encounters” mentality hurts the game. No you can’t long rest yet you’ve been awake for 20 minutes.)
On one hand, having longer adventuring days sounds like fun.
On the other hand, when you gather up only once a week and only have the steam/time for like two encounters, people want to just get shit over with and move on with the plot and quests.
This is one reason why I really enjoy 4th Ed. I know Claire joked about it “making everyone wizards”, but I’ve always felt that each class played differently enough that it worked well. Of course, I’m not saying 4th was the perfect game by any means – like all the other editions, out of combat stuff like the whole ritual casting was a little more slapped together. It also has longer combats than 5e simply because everyone has a choice of what to do in combat – the fighter will do more than just swing their sword ; )
5 minutes of casting and the mages will want to have a fighter at hand to get them through the rest of the day, the night, and back to where they can spend another 5 minutes of casting.
All the while they hope that the fighter doesn’t fudge a will save.
Our answer to the problem was each “level” of spell required an answering level of intelligence. Since our homebrew is based on the old SPI DragonQuest, you build your character from a set amount of points/ceilings that you roll for at the beginning of the game. There is also no “end game” built into the system. Your character can go until they die of old age. Of course we also have aging negatives and benefits built in, but since I was mainly DMing during mine and hubby’s military careers, the max time I ever stayed at a base was 3 years and it never came up.
This means if someone wants to have a kick ass mage by a certain level, they need to build that character at the very beginning. There are ways to increase stats ingame, but they are rare and usually have interesting side effects.
It also means that it’s not unusual for a character with a high enough intelligence to learn some lower level spells as the game progresses. Acquiring spells is usually through the characters mentor and other higher level mages and takes buying the spell and then being taught exactly how to throw it. Access to spells like “wish”, “alter reality” and some of the other “god” spells is beyond rare and 90% of the time aren’t available to the characters. I’m not dumb enough to give most players that kind of power. There are only a few that I would have trusted not to use it to screw the game up.
So most of my games end up with a fair spread of classes and since magic items are fairly easy to acquire, or have made, in most of my world space, it’s not unusual to have a party do without a mage altogether. So a middle level fighter who also can throw a fireball when needed isn’t unusual and mage running around in non-ferrous light armor whipping out a non-ferrous weapon when they run out of spells is also something you see.
Doing it this way really give the players the opportunity to grow their character into some thing completely unique to them and I’ve had only a few players who didn’t love the system.
In my experience, the easiest way to balance martials and casters is a ticking clock. If the party is up against a deadline, where they cannot rest and regain spell slots, then it tends to even out. Yes, your wizard can go nova and destroy absolutely everything in the first encounter or two, but what are they going to do several rooms further in the dungeon when they are running on empty? Fire their mundane, non-masterwork, light crossbow for 1d8 damage? By removing the ability to regain spell slots, your casters are holding things in reserve because they might need it later. Your fighter doesn’t run out of sword. And he can cleave to his hearts content. 🙂
One of my recurring fantasies is about getting one of the “MAGIC RULEZ” powergamers in my group, then waiting for just the right moment to have a fight in a confined space… with a permanent Anti-Magic Field in the floor.
I feel like the Spheres of Power/Spheres of Might 3rd Party supplements (for Pathfinder and D&D 5e) do alot to help curb the Caster/Martial disparity on a variety of levels.
First, there are casting traditions, which can force impose a variety of different drawbacks and weaknesses into a caster.
Second, by having two pools of talents (Casting vs Martial) to draw from that progress at the same rate (regardless if you are a caster or martial), it makes both caster and martial have a linear progression (instead of the caster being quadratic, over the martial’s linear).
Third, unlike Tome of Battle (for D&D 3.5e), or Path of War (for Pathfinder), Spheres of Might offer many more options that are not related to combat at all, which gives martials a thing to do for non-combat encounters; Additionally, with the inclusion of the new Spheres of Intrigue supplement, martials can not just participate, but contribute and excel in intrigue, social, and downtime activities in ways that core spellcasters otherwise couldn’t.
Finally, although this applies to only PF, Spheres of Power/Might have varying levels of progression; low, medium, and high. So GMs who want to give martials a boost can simply give them a boost in progression or drop the progression of casters; or vice versa.
The Answer to this Problem is: Magic/Money.
Why doesn’t have Fighter his Chainmal +5 with Damage Reduction?
Where is his +5 Sword of Bludgeoning, with Sharp Edge casted on it ?
Where is his Ring of Protection Against Outsider?
Where is his Shield of Protection ?
In 3.x is a formula how much money a Party should have and get per Level.
When i looked over Chars etc. Most Fighters are only at 30-50% of Money equipt. Which means only at 50% effectivness.
> Most Fighters are only at 30-50% of Money equipt.
Depends on how you look at character wealth. Consumables get consumed over the course of the campaign. Party items like flying carpets exist. I’m honestly not sure whether “wealth by level” means “wearing your wealth by level,” but I suspect it doesn’t.
My Pathfinder 1e groups have so far mostly avoided serious caster/martial disparities. Some of that might be because we usually aren’t in the double-digit levels, and some of it might be because we tend to not have focused full casters. I have a Level 9 party, for example, where no one can cast 4th level spells (either because of multiclassing or being 3/4s casters), and it’s working pretty well. The enemy occasionally uses 4th level spells, but mostly we’ve left that out by silent gentlemen’s agreement, and use all the other crazy powers instead. The most overtly powerful PC is a min-maxed Kineticist, who can still only snipe one foe at a time, so everyone else ends up contributing.
In our Level 16 not-really-a-oneshot, there was a powergamed Wizard and a pretty decent Oracle, but both were outshined a bit by a Gunslinger. Because if there’s one thing more broken than magic, it’s guns.
I’d just like to point out that Summoner is one properly cast Banish from having a REALLY bad day and a REALLY angry Fighter up in his grill.
Even with a scroll, that would still take a decent casting stat (if not a caster) to pull off…
If it makes you feel any better, Fighter got revenge in the HoEF this week. ;D
I know I say it a lot on here, but I like Spheres of Power for this reason. It makes casting and martial prowess a bit more normalized while retaining their own identities. I like that a caster can say “I throw a fireball at thug one!”, and the barbarian responds “I throw thug 2 at thug 3!”.
It just boils down to how many options you have available, and how creative everyone involved is. Magic is easy because “it’s magic” is all the explanation you need. Martial takes a bit more setup.
If a wizard throws down a cone template in the tavern brawl, that’s magic. ‘Nuf said.
If a martial class wants to in Spheres, they gotta punch a thing and destroy it, sending a cone of shrapnel at anything past it, or throw a ton of knives in a flurry of attacks…
The world is moving on, and that sucks. I haven’t had the chance to game with a sufficiently crunchy table to take Spheres for a spin. And that’s sad times, because it sounds like a fun DIY rules suite.
Oddly enough, the general feeling in my current (5e D&D) game is that things are going somewhat the other way- a couple of martials are absolutely annihilating everything on the battlefield.
That being said, it’s a bit of an odd group- celestial pact warlock, other caster that I’m completely brainfarting on, crossbow rogue, elemental totem barbarian(?), and open hand monk.
There’s a few reasons for it- we’re playing at level 11, which is very much a sweet spot for monks, the DM is fairly liberal with magic items, even allowing ‘birthday items’ that can be as stupid and broken as you like (with the understanding that combat is gonna get proportionately harder) and has a strong tendency towards boss fights that are a single, big, nasty enemy, aka ‘stunning strike fodder’.
Still, it feels a bit odd to have the martials completely wreck shop before the casters get to do much.