Yes, I know you can reflavor things, but even though I responded to this in my previous post, I'll repeat myself again: There are technically ways you could reflavor anything. I could pretend my Terrasque was a cat and spend hours making elaborate explanations for that, but what new player who wanted to play a simpler class that didn't require much work would want to spend hours reflavoring a class that has a clear-cut, premade, limiting and inflexible concept that all of their features relate to and close to 1/4 of their features actively mention?
Not only would your proposal force new players -- or players who just want simplicity -- into the most conceptually limiting class, but these players want the class that you are trying to take away from them, not the class that you are trying to shoehorn them into.
I don't know, I kind of like teaching new players that classes are more than their stereotypes, and that flavor is something that can be treated flexibly, rather than a straightjacket. But sure, it takes hours to pick up a 1st level barbarian and say "instead of 'primal ferocity,' it's more of an intense battle trance."
How about we have a Fighter that can be simple or complex instead of all one or the other, so we don't have to take away the "only" simple class to have a complex martial. As the most conceptually versatile martial class, the Fighter is best position to be mechanically versatile as well.
Classes do not have to be stereotypes and part of building a character is flavoring it. That is the whole idea of roleplaying.
The thing I love about D&D 5E is the game is SO flexible. You build just about any theme you want and have a viable character. Sure there are ideal ways to powergame and maximize your build, but there is nothing saying you must do it that way.
A Fighter can be EXTREMELY complex. The idea they can't be complex is just plain false. Nothing is simple about an Eldritch Knight or a Echo Knight or a Rune Knight. They are very complex characters and that is before you even consider backgrounds, races and feats. For that matter Battlemasters can be very complex. You can even have a battlemaster that does not even use maneuvers for weapon attacks at all.
I'm saying that Fighter is the most simple martial by a decently large amount. The other martials may seem simple to you, but for the vast majority of players, I don't think Rogue is exactly known for being simple. As for Barbarian, not only is that class not actually as simple as some make it out to be, but it's also the most limiting concept in D&D, as I explained HERE. Yes, most martial classes aren't complex, but I never pretended they were and they aren't exactly simple either. Martials aren't just "complex" or "simple", most are something in between.
Sure, and then you were given ideas for how you could see the barbarian as a more expansive concept, something which I think you'd have the flexibility for, since you're capable of seeing the Fighter as more than "I hit things" despite the lack of mechanical backing for that, but you dismissed those ideas in favor of insisting the Barbarian can only be a "frothing madman." You insist without explanation here that several Barbarian features characterize them as frothing madmen when they are far from being that limiting.
For instance, it was suggested that the Barbarian's "Rage" could be flavored as a Sherlock Holmes-esque combat calculation, and when Holmes grabs Moriarty to throw him over the falls, knowing that he is leaving himself open for Moriarty to drag him over with him, what is that if not attacking with "fierce desperation"? A "Reckless Attack," even. Hardly a frothing madman. Relentless rage is nothing more than the ability to keep fighting under grievous injuries, something that happens in countless action movies without any need for froth or madness. Brutal Critical and Indomitable Might are both simply about being strong and powerful, with no need for any reference to gnawing on shields.
But anyway, you've already moved the goalposts. It's not that the Fighter is the "only" simple martial, and that if it is made more complex we're taking away "the [sole] simple martial option," it's that the Fighter is somehow the "most simple" martial (because Action Surge is so much simpler than Rage?), and our simple martial must not be conceptually limited in any way. Why shouldn't the Fighter, who devotes their life to studying combat and approaching it with skill and honed technique, be the more complex martial?
You have taken basically everything I've said out of context.
For one, yes, there are ways to spend time, effort, and energy in reflavoring most of their class features for different concepts, but do you seriously expect a new player who is actively seeking out a simple class they can play to spend all that work remodeling things? Not only that, but a new player might now know they're allowed to change and reflavor what is written.
Secondly, I never insisted that a Barbarian can only be a frothing madman; I said that's what their features say they are and make them out to be.
Thirdly, I did not "insist without explanation" that several features tie into these themes. I simply listed features that mention or relate to things about the stereotypical Barbarian.
I don't think you're looking at the text around the rules that we're discussing. So I will quote the text in the PHB of each of the abilities I mentioned, and more specifically, the sections taht contained what I said they mentioned.
Rage: "In battle, you fill with a primal ferocity."
Reckless Attack: "You can throw aside all concern for defense to attack with fierce desperation."
Relentless Rage: "Your Rage can keep you fighting despite grievous wounds."
Persistent Rage: "Your Rage is so fierce that it ends only once if you fall unconscious or if you choose to end it."
Not only that, but as I mentioned in that post, there are numerous other features about superhuman strength. Those are more features that tie into the Barbarian's theme.
There is more text and evidence I cited in the post you responded to, but you appear to have ignored it, so I won't bother bringing any of that up again.
Yes, I know you can reflavor things, but even though I responded to this in my previous post, I'll repeat myself again: There are technically ways you could reflavor anything. I could pretend my Terrasque was a cat and spend hours making elaborate explanations for that, but what new player who wanted to play a simpler class that didn't require much work would want to spend hours reflavoring a class that has a clear-cut, premade, limiting and inflexible concept that all of their features relate to and close to 1/4 of their features actively mention?
Not only would your proposal force new players -- or players who just want simplicity -- into the most conceptually limiting class, but these players want the class that you are trying to take away from them, not the class that you are trying to shoehorn them into.
Per the links I cited above, there is a 5% difference between the amount of people who play Fighters and Barbarians, with Fighters on top. There is a reason more people like Fighter: It's because the class actually gives them conceptual versatility, among numerous other things.
We get it: You want Fighter to be complex because you enjoy complexity, but you can make literally any other martial class in the game complex. So why are you so insistent on taking Fighter away from the people who love it or need it, and then pushing those people into playing a class they don't want to be?
Fighter is the one simple martial with a versatile class design that was made to be available to new players.
To the extent fighters are versatile they aren't simple (and this is not limited to fighters -- there's a pretty direct correlation between complexity and versatility for all classes and subclasses) -- in fact, I suspect many of the people who want more 'complexity' for fighters are really more interested in making fighters more versatile.
Actually, I was talking about conceptual versatility, although the two are connected.
You're fine, Steg. I have deeply limited ability to post from the never-sufficiently-damned phone is all. That said, Pantagruel has an excellent point.
Versatility is the end goal. OPTIONS, beyond "I hit it w/muh Hittin' Stick!" REAL options. VALID options. I am also deeply tired of being told that giving the people who want OPTIONS more OPTIONS is Ruining The Game Forever (!!!) for people who can't deal with options and just want a one-button class that doesn't do anything but Hittin' Stick, and those people are intrinsically more valuable than the rest of us and deserve special consideration to the active and intentional detrimental of everybody else.
Stop it. Let us try and have some gorram fun too.
Feel free to like more complex classes, with more options, but some people like/want/need simpler options, and they should be able to have those options, too. No one said their players who like simplicity "are intrinsically more valuable than the rest of us and deserve special consideration"; all we said is that it might be considerate not to take away the most beloved "simple" class so that you can turn it into something that is much less accessible for new players.
Well then why don't we just take the angry man flavor out of barbarian. We rename the class and features change descriptions and then put a table in giving the suggestions for what your "battle trace" could be, Which would include Rage but also things like the Sherlock Holmes analysis or even something like Zeke's Eye of Shining Justice from xenoblade 2.
That way the new "barbarian" could be the simple Martial class and fighter could be the complicated one. No flavor defaults for either one.
Exactly, that is why you should not try to balance them. That is not broken, it is the way it should be.
The single biggest problem with 4E is the classes were very well balanced. That was the ONLY edition that actually had class balance. There were several poor design elements in 4E, but the near perfect balance is the largest reason the edition was so terrible. Your lightning bolt is doing 2d6 because that way the wizard was hitting several targets and doing the same damage as the fighter using an encounter ability.
Balance Sucks! and not just a little bit, it sucks a lot. It gets in the way of story, which is the central element of D&D.
The problem with 4e wasn't that it was balanced, it was that it was same-y and generally low on *wow* moments. RPGs absolutely need to be balanced, but balance doesn't mean everyone doing the same damage, it means everyone getting equal shares of glory. And that generally means doing ridiculous things, not being the mundane grunts while the spellcasters do ridiculous things.
The thing I love about D&D 5E is the game is SO flexible. You build just about any theme you want and have a viable character.
You apparently have never played any game other than D&D (by RPG standards... it's a straightjacket), and your concept of 'viable' is distorted by the fact that D&D 5e's default difficulty scaling is "trivially easy".
I'm sorry for the time it takes to type all of these on my phone, but here's another thought.
I work with data daily. Data is great. It can tell you all kinds of things that our perceptions can't. But it's also important to know how it can trick us sometimes too. So I wanted to look at BoringBard's sources and go through it some, since we haven't really addressed it and it's pretty interesting.
In order from most popular to least popular classes on D&DBeyond:
13% - Fighter
11% - Rogue
9% - Warlock
8% - Barbarian, Cleric, Wizard
7% - Bard, Monk, Sorcerer, Paladin, Ranger
6% - Druid
Artificer came in at one percent, but that brings up things to look out for in data. I think this low rating has much more to do with availability than anything else. It wasn't a core class, and only came out in wide release officially very recently. It would probably be more popular if it was part of the PHB.
It's also not very useful to look at the subclasses. The most common choices for every class are the ones that D&DBeyond offers for free. That makes that data suspect at best.
So here we can see a pretty even spread of most core Classes. With such a large sample size, we should expect them all to be within a percentage of each other. The outliers could mean one of two things:
A - There is something wrong with the data - for example, if you were counting how long it took people to make a character, that's easy to graph. The points would be a bell curve with some number in the middle being the most common number of minutes. But the average can be thrown way off if one person spent 10 days in the character creation screen with their browser left open before coming back to finish. You'd have to throw that point out because it doesn't represent actual time working on the character. I don't think this is the case here. Though we can't rule out the idea of people just playing around with concepts and not using them. Yet.
Or B - The data shows statistically significant preferences. That's what this looks like. It's pretty safe to say that fighters are by far the most popular, followed by rogues, and with druids in last place.
How can we be sure? Well, we can't entirely. But we do have more data. And that helps us confirm that it is highly likely. We have the actual party composition most used by players. The top 10 party makeups for both 3 character and 4 parties. These are the characters that people are actually playing in games.
Of the top 10 parties of 3 characters, 8 had a Fighter or Barbarian and 6 had a Rogue. The rest of the slots were mostly some kind of healer, either a cleric, druid, or paladin. Out of 30 total players, only 3 were arcane casters of any sort. Almost half of the character slots were filled by Fighters, Barbarians, and Rogues.
In parties of 4, every single one has a Rogue. All 10 of them. 8 of them had a Fighter or a Barbarian. The only two that didn't, had both a Paladin and a Ranger to take up the combat slack. Out of 40 characters, even with an extra slot open, only 6 were arcane casters of any sort. Again, almost half of them here were also Fighters, Barbarians, and Rogues.
What can we infer from this? Well, for one thing, people seem to know how to make a balanced party pretty well. They know they need warriors, experts, and priests at the very least. Mages are an afterthought.
But we can also tell that people aren't just making the popular classes, they are actually playing them. The only exception is Warlocks. I suspect that might be because they are fun to mess around with builds, but ultimately aren't always chosen. In fact, they only appear 1 time in these lists at all.
Fighters and Barbarians seem to be pretty interchangeable. Rogues are almost always used. That means the three most common classes in the most common parties are all what we consider to be the 'simple ones.'
People like them. They are useful, meaningful to the party, and fun to play. Their being simple is not a deal breaker for a majority of players.
The most 'complex' classes are the least played. The arcane casters that everyone wants to match in power and flexibility aren't even often used. The druid is very unpopular, despite being one of the strongest classes in the game. It's also very complicated, with detailed subclasses, prepared spells, wild shape, and unclear role. It's overflowing with decisions to make.
The point is that people really do love these simple classes. And to be clear, that does not mean that anyone else who wants them changed is wrong or should be ignored. We should absolutely listen to everyone, welcome all requests, and do our best to make the best options available for every style of play. We should absolutely look for answers that can bring more players the same joy playing a fighter as the others already have playing them. We just have to also be respectful that a lot of people like where they are now. And note that complex is not always better. It's options and flexibility we need to find, not necessarily more rules.
Exactly, that is why you should not try to balance them. That is not broken, it is the way it should be.
The single biggest problem with 4E is the classes were very well balanced. That was the ONLY edition that actually had class balance. There were several poor design elements in 4E, but the near perfect balance is the largest reason the edition was so terrible. Your lightning bolt is doing 2d6 because that way the wizard was hitting several targets and doing the same damage as the fighter using an encounter ability.
Balance Sucks! and not just a little bit, it sucks a lot. It gets in the way of story, which is the central element of D&D.
The problem with 4e wasn't that it was balanced, it was that it was same-y and generally low on *wow* moments. RPGs absolutely need to be balanced, but balance doesn't mean everyone doing the same damage, it means everyone getting equal shares of glory. And that generally means doing ridiculous things, not being the mundane grunts while the spellcasters do ridiculous things.
4E had many problems, but BY FAR the biggest problem is it was balanced and to a large degree that balance caused the few "wow" moments.
Balance is great in a board game or video game but it sucks in a RPG.
If the fighter is doing the same thing as the wizard then there is no "wow" at all everyone can do the same thing because they are all balanced. If the classes are balanced then there is no such thing as classes, every class is just a reskined version of another class, that is what made it "same-y".
The thing I love about D&D 5E is the game is SO flexible. You build just about any theme you want and have a viable character.
You apparently have never played any game other than D&D (by RPG standards... it's a straightjacket), and your concept of 'viable' is distorted by the fact that D&D 5e's default difficulty scaling is "trivially easy".
I have played every single version of D&D, Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Top Secret and Pathfinder 1E and 2E and I find 5E to be THE BEST at building a diverse character how you want to build it. Compared to 3E there are way more options to build a character in 5E, especially after Tasha's revamped racial bonus, languages and proficiencies providing more options. The ability to use any armor and not interfere with spells and level your classes at any rate you want.
The default scaling in 5E is much more difficult than is typically played. Default is 6-8 combat encounters per long rest. That is not trivial if those are medium or tougher.
Also there is gritty realism in the DMG. It is an optional rule and it will significantly tilt the game away from the casters. If you combine Gritty realism with an 8-medium encounter day, not only will the game be very difficult, classes like fighters will get much most of the "glory" and those are rules that already exist.
If the fighter is doing the same thing as the wizard then there is no "wow" at all everyone can do the same thing because they are all balanced. If the classes are balanced then there is no such thing as classes, every class is just a reskined version of another class, that is what made it "same-y".
Balanced does not mean everyone does the same thing. It's the easiest way of balancing, but by no means the only one. 4e's theory of balance is "no-one can do ridiculous stuff". What I want is "everyone can do ridiculous stuff, but not the same ridiculous stuff". What you want is "some people can do ridiculous stuff, while other people are stuck being boring".
I have played every single version of D&D, Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Top Secret and Pathfinder 1E and 2E
So... you've played lots of D&D (the only system there that isn't a D&D variant is Top Secret, and even that was published by TSR), nor is any of them especially flexible.
The most flexible game systems tend to separate effect and description -- if you want to blow up a bunch of mooks, you just acquire the "blow up a bunch of mooks" power, and it's up to you whether this is casting a fireball, or leaping into the midst of them and chopping through them all with lightning attacks, or calling in a strike from an orbital laser platform.
There are flaws to this style of game design -- frequently limits on what is possible make for a better game -- but D&D has always been at the extreme end of inflexible game systems.
A - There is something wrong with the data - for example, if you were counting how long it took people to make a character, that's easy to graph. The points would be a bell curve with some number in the middle being the most common number of minutes. But the average can be thrown way off if one person spent 10 days in the character creation screen with their browser left open before coming back to finish. You'd have to throw that point out because it doesn't represent actual time working on the character. I don't think this is the case here. Though we can't rule out the idea of people just playing around with concepts and not using them. Yet.
If there's a character created on DnD Beyond, it doesn't mean this craracter is being played. I created dozens, if not hundreds, of characters to play around with builds and then delete them the next day.
I don't think you can ignore cultural influences either. There are a lot of fantasy protagonists that map easily onto the Fighter, Rogue, or Barbarian, so someone trying to use them as inspiration will gravitate towards those classes. Meanwhile, magic-using fantasy protagonists tend not to map easily onto the Wizard. The D&D Wizard is just very idiosyncratic compared to how magic-users tend to function in fantasy media, once you get beyond the surface aesthetics.
Can I just confirm we're not attacking the wrong thing here? I haven't read this whole thread sorry, nor the entirety of the other thread , so forgive me if I'm mistaken, but the issue seems to be to me that people don't want to just make bog standard attacks each turn in combat? They want complex options available each turn? The answer isn't, in my opinion, making it so the fighter has extra complexity baked in, but rather baking in more complex options to the combat system itself.
Consider that attacks are a resource like anything else, and fighter at level 11 (which is too late, but that's a different issue) has more attacks than anyone else. We can already trade an attack for a shove, and I know that's very unexciting for some (despite it being extremely effective), or a grapple, but why not hope for other, more interesting options available to EVERY martial? Because fighter has more attack resources to spend, they can take better advantage of these more complex options if they want, but if you prefer the simplicity of just bashing someone multiple times a turn then there is nothing stopping you.
I feel in some ways every class should be a simple base design, the complexity should come out of the options you have available within the game, so you can have your fighters being played as bashers, or you can have them running around the battlefield making amazing plays. The risk is of course adding too much and bogging the game down, so there will always be a middle ground that has to be reached, but there are, in my opinion, better ways to give complexity than gatekeeping it into a class.
A - There is something wrong with the data - for example, if you were counting how long it took people to make a character, that's easy to graph. The points would be a bell curve with some number in the middle being the most common number of minutes. But the average can be thrown way off if one person spent 10 days in the character creation screen with their browser left open before coming back to finish. You'd have to throw that point out because it doesn't represent actual time working on the character. I don't think this is the case here. Though we can't rule out the idea of people just playing around with concepts and not using them. Yet.
If there's a character created on DnD Beyond, it doesn't mean this craracter is being played. I created dozens, if not hundreds, of characters to play around with builds and then delete them the next day.
For sure. Everyone does that. That's what I was saying. We have to be careful not to confuse characters created with characters actually used. Characters made just to theorize for fun are probably more evenly distributed across all of the classes enough to balance the influence out. If anything it might land more heavily on classes that have more complex option interactions to try combinations with, like Warlock. Which is why I mention later that might be a reason there are so many Warlocks made, but rarely played. It's the least represented class in actual parties.
But the whole second half of that post was explaining that we do have more data. We know what people are playing in their parties. That's the other chart they gave us. So we can see by the party compositions that people aren't just making fighters, barbarians, and rogues. They are actually playing them. Half of the most popular party combinations are 3 of the most 'simple' classes.
In a game with 12 classes to choose from. If all other things were equal, you would expect every class to be played about the same amount. Considering how much people point to wizard as the height of power and versatility, you would expect them to dominate even. Or bards with their conceptual appeal to so many people and their wide range of abilities. Even for melee combat, the common wisdom is that Paladins and Hexblades are the superior choice.
In parties, you would expect that people would play each kind of character about 8% of the time, or even lean in favor of the more powerful or 'interesting' classes. But that's just not what we see in the data. Almost every single party has a Rogue. Almost every single party has either a Fighter or a Barbarian. These are very popular classes, even if they are simple. Possibly even because they are simple.
I don't know, I kind of like teaching new players that classes are more than their stereotypes, and that flavor is something that can be treated flexibly, rather than a straightjacket. But sure, it takes hours to pick up a 1st level barbarian and say "instead of 'primal ferocity,' it's more of an intense battle trance."
How about we have a Fighter that can be simple or complex instead of all one or the other, so we don't have to take away the "only" simple class to have a complex martial. As the most conceptually versatile martial class, the Fighter is best position to be mechanically versatile as well.
I doubt many DM's think to tell every new player they meet that they should ignore what is written and the concept their class is supposed to be. That being said, yes, reflavoring abilities without changing anything mechanically takes time and understanding that new players wanting to play a simple class may just not have. Hours for level 1? No, it would take a decent amount time and understanding, but it wouldn't take that long.
However, I was talking about reflavoring the whole class, and judging by the amount of abilities in the base-Barbarian class that relate to the Barbarian concept, yes, that might take hours.
Not only that, but you seem to have missed my most important point: players who like simplicity like Fighter much better than Barbarian. So why do you want to take Fighter away from players who like simplicity and push them into a class those players like far less? I mean, you can literally put all that complexity in any other martial class, so why are you so determined to put it in the class that is mot beloved for being simple?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explainHERE.
I don't think you can ignore cultural influences either. There are a lot of fantasy protagonists that map easily onto the Fighter, Rogue, or Barbarian, so someone trying to use them as inspiration will gravitate towards those classes. Meanwhile, magic-using fantasy protagonists tend not to map easily onto the Wizard. The D&D Wizard is just very idiosyncratic compared to how magic-users tend to function in fantasy media, once you get beyond the surface aesthetics.
You're right, we can't ignore any possible influence on people's choices. But that includes the complexity of the character.
We don't know what everyone is thinking when they make their characters. But we know that people say wizards are the strongest and most versatile class. And we know people love Warlocks and think Hexblades are broken. And we know how many classes that optimizers prefer over the basic ones. We know the ones people talk about the most. And then we look at the data and see it is the simple classes that dominate the field of characters, both created and actuality played.
Data never tells the whole story. That's something I was trying to make sure to explain. But it does tell us some of the story. And this data tells us that half of all the characters being played in actual games are the 3 simplest classes.
So if we know nothing else about the reasons why, we know that any changes to these classes will affect a lot of people. It's not the end of the conversation by any means. But it's definitely worth consideration when we talk about it.
Right, but you also have party composition tropes that say "You need a Rogue to deal with traps and locks, you need a meat shield, and you need a healer." Those are mainly less true than they used to be, Rogues no longer have a monopoly on trap removal, for instance, but the tropes persist.
I mean, I played a Rune Knight for a while, and I tried hard to make her interesting to play in combat. I took Shield Master, thinking the bonus action Shove would give her more options, and Prodigy to make sure those Athletics checks would stick. First combat I ran up to the lead enemy, hit it with my sword, and then knocked it to the ground. Then it just stood back up and hit me back. Runes gave me a couple extra options, but since I only had three of them and they only recharged on a short rest, I had to ration them out. So mainly I ran around hitting things with my sword, occasionally throwing a shove in for the hell of it, and once per fight I would do something cool and actually feel like a Rune Knight.
I had it good compared to the Arcane Archer in the same party. She should have just made a Ranger. She still would have been standing around shooting arrows and using Sharpshooter, but she could have had actual spells and abilities that came into play more than twice per rest.
We sure helped give the Warlocks "wow factor" in comparison, though, so mission accomplished there I guess. Glad that not having nice things allowed the other characters to shine.
Speaking to Pantagruel's point, people who are huge fans of the fighter class are often also not fans of the magic classes, with lines like "they just don't interest me" or "they feel like cheating." The note about D&D players wanting martials to suck was a big one, because it's true. Players looking for the Badass Normal experience want martial characters to be at a huge disadvantage compared to spellcasters, because when they overcome that disparity it's the biggest possible dopamine hit. Nothing is as cool for those players as finding a chance to say "**** your magic!" and using talent, training, wit, and superior preparation to accomplish something most people only ever solve with magic. it's the whole "Batman is better than Superman!" bit, and for a lot of people that's what they actively chase in their D&D. A chance to stick it to the (magic) Man and show that earning your power is better than being born with it or cheating to gain unnatural abilities.
And not just in an intra-party sense - the fighter stabbing a beholder to death with nothing but the aforementioned Talent, Training, Wit and Prep is showcasing the superiority of human ingenuity over the forces of chaos and evil, and a lot of people find that to be infinitely cooler and more fun than "I cast Solve Problem." All of which is why they push back so violently against "supernatural" abilities for martial characters, why the various [Something] Knight subclasses of fighter are not only less popular but also generally shat upon by fighter adherents, and why they welcome the Caster/Martial Divide. Overcoming it and proving that no weaver of the dark arts can overcome a foot of steel in their belly is what those players are here for.
It's simply too bad that D&D is one of those games where it's just not really feasible to do.
2.) Bell of Lost Souls.
If your source is a BoLS article, you need a new source. BoLS is a clickbait adbot website concerned with driving up views and ad revenue rather than reporting true and accurate stories. Nothing is false specifically because BoLS reported it, but one can consider the website nothing but a collection of editorials with only the vaguest association with facts. The other thing to consider is that data is useless if one does not know how the data was acquired. Much like Steg, my day-to-day work is based in technical data and details. I don't work with statistics, but I do work with testing data, and one of the most important truisms of Reading A Datasheet is "if you don't know the testing parameters by which a spec was obtained, you have no idea what that spec means." The same applies to statistical data - method matters.
I didn't bother reading the aforementioned link because of animosity towards BoLS, which is admittedly not helpful to me...but did BoLS lay out the methods by which it acquired its data? The limits on that data? Did it seek a neutral sampling of data points, or enough data points to have statistical merit? Or was it "Hey! Take our cool reader poll to help us figure out how an entire edition of D&D works, and then click on all the ads you see along the way so we get more revenue!"
Steg touched on it, I want to reinforce it: data is fantastic, but it's also very, very good at misleading people who don't know how to handle it, and also also not all statistics count as "data". I do not mean any of this as a direct attack on anyone arguing from the articles on BoLS (I do, however, mean it as an attack on BoLS itself. **** that website), as even editorials with only vague associations with facts can make for interesting talking points. But please don't hold up a BoLS article as a rigorously vetted and reliable source of data.
3.) Complexity vs. Versatility vs. "Interesting Decisions"
I'm going to quote Steg for this one, because this is a point I want to address directly:
The other side of the argument isn't saying 'fighters shouldn't make interesting decisions.' They are asking not to shut out players with complicated methods to make those decisions. A fighter can already make a lot of decisions. It might not be as obvious as it is with spells, but it is there. Wizards pick a few spells, but largely their equipment is unimportant. And once in battle, they mostly just try to be out of danger. Even at first level, a fighter chooses whether they focus on Strength or Dexterity, ranged combat or close combat, defensive or offensive kits, where to place themselves on the battlefield, how to draw enemy fire, who to protect, whether to attack as normal or grapple their opponent, what to do with them when they grab them, a weapon style focus, when to use second wind, when to make an attack of opportunity or risk waiting for a better target, etc. Their positioning and targeting often matters more than wizards using Sleep, or Bards handing out inspiration. And that's just the options that have rules specified at level 1. Their strength and durability also allows them to throw themselves into dangers that others can't. Something that isn't measured in short rest mechanics or slots Monks have even more options for positioning, battlefield control, and modes of attack. These are important, meaningful, and interesting decisions. They just don't have specific abilities associated with all of them. So they might not be as obvious. But the simple fighter advocates knows how much it matters, and how fun it can be. They just don't need or want complex mechanics to arrive at the same outcomes.
This all sounds awesome. But, and I'm sorry Steg, it's not nearly so cool and cut-and-dried as all that.
First of all, a wizard who ignores their mundane toolkit is a bad wizard. Everybody should be curating their kit and looking to carry the maximum number of useful tools for a minimum of weight investment. One of the reasons I loved the much-maligned 1DD Origins background system so much was that it simply handed me a sum of gold and said "buy what you need, friendo." It's freaking glorious. I will never again be without chalk or a signal whistle, and neither should any of you.
Secondly, a wizard who spends the entirety of a fight concentrating on one spell and hiding behind a rock is also a bad wizard. Mirage Over Burning Sands, my tabaxi wizard, is currently my highest-level active character. In a fight? She makes every last single decision Steg suggested belonged only to martial classes, and many more such decisions. She decides whether to focus on damage (Disintegrate, Crown of Stars, and similar spells) or defense/control (Telekinesis, Wall of Force, illusion shenaniganry). She chooses between ranged combat (Draconic Transformation, aforementioned Evocations) or close combat (Tenser's Transformation), since her party is relatively fragile and Mira herself, with her thicc (for a wizard) HP bar and myriad of defensive spells is the party's second most durable character. She decides where to be to maximize her durability and the effectiveness of the party, and she decides who to protect with spells like Resilient Sphere. Mira's positioning and targeting matters every inch as much as a martial character, and I would argue it often matters far more because Mira is drastically more capable than the average martial at her level and effective deployment of her spells is absolutely critical.
My own tactical ability is amplified by the massive array of additional options Mira's spell list gives me, and that amplified tactical ability is a springboard my party has used to Mario Goomba stomp encounters I strongly suspect the DM was planning on being significantly more dangerous than they ended up being. If I did nothing but vomit up Fireballs and hide behind a rock, my party's warlock would likely be dead and I wouldn't have great hopes for the party's second wizard, either.
Tactical positioning, maneuvering, and target selection are not exclusive to martial classes. What is exclusive to martial classes, at the moment, is a distinct lack of valid, viable tactical options beyond hitting the enemy with their hittin' stick of choice. Martials do not have even a fraction of the options that Mira does, but Mira has just about every option a martial character does in addition to the options her spellbook provides her. There is a reason she carries a pair of magic daggers; she can, has, and does use them to assault her enemies when the situation calls for a bout of Angry Kitty and a second frontliner catching aggro. Hell, with 1DD rules Mira can deal a terrifying amount of damage on the front line by casting Crown of Stars before Tenser's Transformation, should time permit; that's 10d12+3d4+4 potential damage every turn for seven rounds. No martial character can compete with that, and Transformationisn't even a good spell.
'Interesting Decisions' isn't about adding more rules. It's about adding more tools. More levers a fighter can pull, more ways for a fighter to Do Things and have an impact on battle. Because as it stands, a fighter cannot contribute to a battle beyond Hittin' Stick. If a battle requires something other than Hittin' Stick? That fighter is screwed, and there is dick-all bupkis nada he can do about it.
That sucks, and I don't like it. I'd rather it not be the case, if we can help it, ne?
I'm genuinely sorry you had that experience, Kaigen_42. I can see how that's part of the reason you want to see some meaningful change to the class.
I only made that long data post to show that these classes are still very popular. And whatever the reasons for that are, changes will affect a lot of people. Some of those people have shared their stories of how much they like the current fighter too.
The subclasses like Arcane Archer definitely need an improvement. No one is saying otherwise. And the base class is open to change too. I just want to respect everyone's experiences and hopes.
The new UA has already made some cool updates to combat rules that will help martials across the board. Unarmed Strikes are something anyone can do with their attack for interesting actions every turn. Two weapon fighting got a big boost. You can make some very nice combos with the feats. And they promise more weapon rules to come. The warriors UA might be a let down. Or it might be just what everyone was looking for.
Just to clarify one bit. BoringBard shared two articles. But they were both reporting on data straight from D&D Beyond. The data was all of the characters in their database and how they were used in parties. It's not perfect, but it's better than probably any other data we could have access to.
D&D Beyond's data is very old. Pre-pandemic old. I'm pretty sure it's pre-Tasha's Cauldron old. DDB's class/subclass breakdown data is from back when Adam Bradford was actually doing Dev Updates and occasionally shared data points. So yes, more reliable than a BoLS reader poll, but the same caveats apply - we don't know how the data was collected, collated, amalgamated, and any other-ated you want to apply. We don't know what their cutoff was for each category of data point, what qualified as 'real' characters and what didn't. The data can be a useful talking point but it should not be considered to be absolutely unequivocably uncontestably true. Especially when we have evidence in this very thread of DMs heavily steering their newer players towards Champion fighter regardless of what that new player actually wants to play because "Champion is the class for newbs!"
Okay, but to Yurei's point: how was that data collected? D&D Beyond doesn't know which characters on the site have been played and which were just made to play around with the character builder. How did it determine who was "in a party"? If it was looking at campaigns, do they have a way to distinguish characters that are only there to take advantage of content sharing?
"Bad data" isn't necessarily better than "no data," because it can be misleading.
Yeah I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to say that those tactical decisions were exclusive to fighters alone. I was just saying there is more to being a fighter than hitting someone with a stick. It's just not as obvious because it's not spelled out in an ability. There is a massive amount of the Players Handbook devoted to spells. But there is also a sizable chunk devoted to weapons, armor, feats, and combat too. People tend to overlook that because it seems like something everyone can do. And it is. But it's used more by martial classes. It just doesn't say so.
Can wizards get tactical on the battlefield? For sure. Can you make one that uses melee weapons? Sure. But every fighter makes these decisions in every fight. They just aren't specified abilities. And like I said, whether or not that's enough for a player is the core of this whole discussion.
Those options are "more used by martial classes" because martial classes don't have any choice. They have to try and wring maximum possible benefit from the bare handful of basic options presented to them for mundane combat because they're not allowed any other options. When a spellcaster also makes effective use of those options in addition to its "complicated" options, the martial is left in the dust.
That's what I was trying to state: if a wizard knows how to fight, it is better at fighting than a fighter. It is more able to win fights and achieve its objectives in combat than a fighter, because a wizard's profusion of options grants it vastly greater tactical flexibility. Until that is not the case, the system is borked and needs repair.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Please do not contact or message me.
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Classes do not have to be stereotypes and part of building a character is flavoring it. That is the whole idea of roleplaying.
The thing I love about D&D 5E is the game is SO flexible. You build just about any theme you want and have a viable character. Sure there are ideal ways to powergame and maximize your build, but there is nothing saying you must do it that way.
A Fighter can be EXTREMELY complex. The idea they can't be complex is just plain false. Nothing is simple about an Eldritch Knight or a Echo Knight or a Rune Knight. They are very complex characters and that is before you even consider backgrounds, races and feats. For that matter Battlemasters can be very complex. You can even have a battlemaster that does not even use maneuvers for weapon attacks at all.
Well then why don't we just take the angry man flavor out of barbarian. We rename the class and features change descriptions and then put a table in giving the suggestions for what your "battle trace" could be, Which would include Rage but also things like the Sherlock Holmes analysis or even something like Zeke's Eye of Shining Justice from xenoblade 2.
That way the new "barbarian" could be the simple Martial class and fighter could be the complicated one. No flavor defaults for either one.
The problem with 4e wasn't that it was balanced, it was that it was same-y and generally low on *wow* moments. RPGs absolutely need to be balanced, but balance doesn't mean everyone doing the same damage, it means everyone getting equal shares of glory. And that generally means doing ridiculous things, not being the mundane grunts while the spellcasters do ridiculous things.
You apparently have never played any game other than D&D (by RPG standards... it's a straightjacket), and your concept of 'viable' is distorted by the fact that D&D 5e's default difficulty scaling is "trivially easy".
I'm sorry for the time it takes to type all of these on my phone, but here's another thought.
I work with data daily. Data is great. It can tell you all kinds of things that our perceptions can't. But it's also important to know how it can trick us sometimes too. So I wanted to look at BoringBard's sources and go through it some, since we haven't really addressed it and it's pretty interesting.
In order from most popular to least popular classes on D&DBeyond:
13% - Fighter
11% - Rogue
9% - Warlock
8% - Barbarian, Cleric, Wizard
7% - Bard, Monk, Sorcerer, Paladin, Ranger
6% - Druid
Artificer came in at one percent, but that brings up things to look out for in data. I think this low rating has much more to do with availability than anything else. It wasn't a core class, and only came out in wide release officially very recently. It would probably be more popular if it was part of the PHB.
It's also not very useful to look at the subclasses. The most common choices for every class are the ones that D&DBeyond offers for free. That makes that data suspect at best.
So here we can see a pretty even spread of most core Classes. With such a large sample size, we should expect them all to be within a percentage of each other. The outliers could mean one of two things:
A - There is something wrong with the data - for example, if you were counting how long it took people to make a character, that's easy to graph. The points would be a bell curve with some number in the middle being the most common number of minutes. But the average can be thrown way off if one person spent 10 days in the character creation screen with their browser left open before coming back to finish. You'd have to throw that point out because it doesn't represent actual time working on the character. I don't think this is the case here. Though we can't rule out the idea of people just playing around with concepts and not using them. Yet.
Or B - The data shows statistically significant preferences. That's what this looks like. It's pretty safe to say that fighters are by far the most popular, followed by rogues, and with druids in last place.
How can we be sure? Well, we can't entirely. But we do have more data. And that helps us confirm that it is highly likely. We have the actual party composition most used by players. The top 10 party makeups for both 3 character and 4 parties. These are the characters that people are actually playing in games.
Of the top 10 parties of 3 characters, 8 had a Fighter or Barbarian and 6 had a Rogue. The rest of the slots were mostly some kind of healer, either a cleric, druid, or paladin. Out of 30 total players, only 3 were arcane casters of any sort. Almost half of the character slots were filled by Fighters, Barbarians, and Rogues.
In parties of 4, every single one has a Rogue. All 10 of them. 8 of them had a Fighter or a Barbarian. The only two that didn't, had both a Paladin and a Ranger to take up the combat slack. Out of 40 characters, even with an extra slot open, only 6 were arcane casters of any sort. Again, almost half of them here were also Fighters, Barbarians, and Rogues.
What can we infer from this? Well, for one thing, people seem to know how to make a balanced party pretty well. They know they need warriors, experts, and priests at the very least. Mages are an afterthought.
But we can also tell that people aren't just making the popular classes, they are actually playing them. The only exception is Warlocks. I suspect that might be because they are fun to mess around with builds, but ultimately aren't always chosen. In fact, they only appear 1 time in these lists at all.
Fighters and Barbarians seem to be pretty interchangeable. Rogues are almost always used. That means the three most common classes in the most common parties are all what we consider to be the 'simple ones.'
People like them. They are useful, meaningful to the party, and fun to play. Their being simple is not a deal breaker for a majority of players.
The most 'complex' classes are the least played. The arcane casters that everyone wants to match in power and flexibility aren't even often used. The druid is very unpopular, despite being one of the strongest classes in the game. It's also very complicated, with detailed subclasses, prepared spells, wild shape, and unclear role. It's overflowing with decisions to make.
The point is that people really do love these simple classes. And to be clear, that does not mean that anyone else who wants them changed is wrong or should be ignored. We should absolutely listen to everyone, welcome all requests, and do our best to make the best options available for every style of play. We should absolutely look for answers that can bring more players the same joy playing a fighter as the others already have playing them. We just have to also be respectful that a lot of people like where they are now. And note that complex is not always better. It's options and flexibility we need to find, not necessarily more rules.
4E had many problems, but BY FAR the biggest problem is it was balanced and to a large degree that balance caused the few "wow" moments.
Balance is great in a board game or video game but it sucks in a RPG.
If the fighter is doing the same thing as the wizard then there is no "wow" at all everyone can do the same thing because they are all balanced. If the classes are balanced then there is no such thing as classes, every class is just a reskined version of another class, that is what made it "same-y".
I have played every single version of D&D, Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Top Secret and Pathfinder 1E and 2E and I find 5E to be THE BEST at building a diverse character how you want to build it. Compared to 3E there are way more options to build a character in 5E, especially after Tasha's revamped racial bonus, languages and proficiencies providing more options. The ability to use any armor and not interfere with spells and level your classes at any rate you want.
The default scaling in 5E is much more difficult than is typically played. Default is 6-8 combat encounters per long rest. That is not trivial if those are medium or tougher.
Also there is gritty realism in the DMG. It is an optional rule and it will significantly tilt the game away from the casters. If you combine Gritty realism with an 8-medium encounter day, not only will the game be very difficult, classes like fighters will get much most of the "glory" and those are rules that already exist.
Balanced does not mean everyone does the same thing. It's the easiest way of balancing, but by no means the only one. 4e's theory of balance is "no-one can do ridiculous stuff". What I want is "everyone can do ridiculous stuff, but not the same ridiculous stuff". What you want is "some people can do ridiculous stuff, while other people are stuck being boring".
So... you've played lots of D&D (the only system there that isn't a D&D variant is Top Secret, and even that was published by TSR), nor is any of them especially flexible.
The most flexible game systems tend to separate effect and description -- if you want to blow up a bunch of mooks, you just acquire the "blow up a bunch of mooks" power, and it's up to you whether this is casting a fireball, or leaping into the midst of them and chopping through them all with lightning attacks, or calling in a strike from an orbital laser platform.
There are flaws to this style of game design -- frequently limits on what is possible make for a better game -- but D&D has always been at the extreme end of inflexible game systems.
If there's a character created on DnD Beyond, it doesn't mean this craracter is being played. I created dozens, if not hundreds, of characters to play around with builds and then delete them the next day.
I don't think you can ignore cultural influences either. There are a lot of fantasy protagonists that map easily onto the Fighter, Rogue, or Barbarian, so someone trying to use them as inspiration will gravitate towards those classes. Meanwhile, magic-using fantasy protagonists tend not to map easily onto the Wizard. The D&D Wizard is just very idiosyncratic compared to how magic-users tend to function in fantasy media, once you get beyond the surface aesthetics.
Can I just confirm we're not attacking the wrong thing here? I haven't read this whole thread sorry, nor the entirety of the other thread , so forgive me if I'm mistaken, but the issue seems to be to me that people don't want to just make bog standard attacks each turn in combat? They want complex options available each turn? The answer isn't, in my opinion, making it so the fighter has extra complexity baked in, but rather baking in more complex options to the combat system itself.
Consider that attacks are a resource like anything else, and fighter at level 11 (which is too late, but that's a different issue) has more attacks than anyone else. We can already trade an attack for a shove, and I know that's very unexciting for some (despite it being extremely effective), or a grapple, but why not hope for other, more interesting options available to EVERY martial? Because fighter has more attack resources to spend, they can take better advantage of these more complex options if they want, but if you prefer the simplicity of just bashing someone multiple times a turn then there is nothing stopping you.
I feel in some ways every class should be a simple base design, the complexity should come out of the options you have available within the game, so you can have your fighters being played as bashers, or you can have them running around the battlefield making amazing plays. The risk is of course adding too much and bogging the game down, so there will always be a middle ground that has to be reached, but there are, in my opinion, better ways to give complexity than gatekeeping it into a class.
For sure. Everyone does that. That's what I was saying. We have to be careful not to confuse characters created with characters actually used. Characters made just to theorize for fun are probably more evenly distributed across all of the classes enough to balance the influence out. If anything it might land more heavily on classes that have more complex option interactions to try combinations with, like Warlock. Which is why I mention later that might be a reason there are so many Warlocks made, but rarely played. It's the least represented class in actual parties.
But the whole second half of that post was explaining that we do have more data. We know what people are playing in their parties. That's the other chart they gave us. So we can see by the party compositions that people aren't just making fighters, barbarians, and rogues. They are actually playing them. Half of the most popular party combinations are 3 of the most 'simple' classes.
In a game with 12 classes to choose from. If all other things were equal, you would expect every class to be played about the same amount. Considering how much people point to wizard as the height of power and versatility, you would expect them to dominate even. Or bards with their conceptual appeal to so many people and their wide range of abilities. Even for melee combat, the common wisdom is that Paladins and Hexblades are the superior choice.
In parties, you would expect that people would play each kind of character about 8% of the time, or even lean in favor of the more powerful or 'interesting' classes. But that's just not what we see in the data. Almost every single party has a Rogue. Almost every single party has either a Fighter or a Barbarian. These are very popular classes, even if they are simple. Possibly even because they are simple.
I doubt many DM's think to tell every new player they meet that they should ignore what is written and the concept their class is supposed to be. That being said, yes, reflavoring abilities without changing anything mechanically takes time and understanding that new players wanting to play a simple class may just not have. Hours for level 1? No, it would take a decent amount time and understanding, but it wouldn't take that long.
However, I was talking about reflavoring the whole class, and judging by the amount of abilities in the base-Barbarian class that relate to the Barbarian concept, yes, that might take hours.
Not only that, but you seem to have missed my most important point: players who like simplicity like Fighter much better than Barbarian. So why do you want to take Fighter away from players who like simplicity and push them into a class those players like far less? I mean, you can literally put all that complexity in any other martial class, so why are you so determined to put it in the class that is mot beloved for being simple?
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.You're right, we can't ignore any possible influence on people's choices. But that includes the complexity of the character.
We don't know what everyone is thinking when they make their characters. But we know that people say wizards are the strongest and most versatile class. And we know people love Warlocks and think Hexblades are broken. And we know how many classes that optimizers prefer over the basic ones. We know the ones people talk about the most. And then we look at the data and see it is the simple classes that dominate the field of characters, both created and actuality played.
Data never tells the whole story. That's something I was trying to make sure to explain. But it does tell us some of the story. And this data tells us that half of all the characters being played in actual games are the 3 simplest classes.
So if we know nothing else about the reasons why, we know that any changes to these classes will affect a lot of people. It's not the end of the conversation by any means. But it's definitely worth consideration when we talk about it.
Right, but you also have party composition tropes that say "You need a Rogue to deal with traps and locks, you need a meat shield, and you need a healer." Those are mainly less true than they used to be, Rogues no longer have a monopoly on trap removal, for instance, but the tropes persist.
I mean, I played a Rune Knight for a while, and I tried hard to make her interesting to play in combat. I took Shield Master, thinking the bonus action Shove would give her more options, and Prodigy to make sure those Athletics checks would stick. First combat I ran up to the lead enemy, hit it with my sword, and then knocked it to the ground. Then it just stood back up and hit me back. Runes gave me a couple extra options, but since I only had three of them and they only recharged on a short rest, I had to ration them out. So mainly I ran around hitting things with my sword, occasionally throwing a shove in for the hell of it, and once per fight I would do something cool and actually feel like a Rune Knight.
I had it good compared to the Arcane Archer in the same party. She should have just made a Ranger. She still would have been standing around shooting arrows and using Sharpshooter, but she could have had actual spells and abilities that came into play more than twice per rest.
We sure helped give the Warlocks "wow factor" in comparison, though, so mission accomplished there I guess. Glad that not having nice things allowed the other characters to shine.
A few thoughts, in no particular order.
1.) The Badass Normal
Speaking to Pantagruel's point, people who are huge fans of the fighter class are often also not fans of the magic classes, with lines like "they just don't interest me" or "they feel like cheating." The note about D&D players wanting martials to suck was a big one, because it's true. Players looking for the Badass Normal experience want martial characters to be at a huge disadvantage compared to spellcasters, because when they overcome that disparity it's the biggest possible dopamine hit. Nothing is as cool for those players as finding a chance to say "**** your magic!" and using talent, training, wit, and superior preparation to accomplish something most people only ever solve with magic. it's the whole "Batman is better than Superman!" bit, and for a lot of people that's what they actively chase in their D&D. A chance to stick it to the (magic) Man and show that earning your power is better than being born with it or cheating to gain unnatural abilities.
And not just in an intra-party sense - the fighter stabbing a beholder to death with nothing but the aforementioned Talent, Training, Wit and Prep is showcasing the superiority of human ingenuity over the forces of chaos and evil, and a lot of people find that to be infinitely cooler and more fun than "I cast Solve Problem." All of which is why they push back so violently against "supernatural" abilities for martial characters, why the various [Something] Knight subclasses of fighter are not only less popular but also generally shat upon by fighter adherents, and why they welcome the Caster/Martial Divide. Overcoming it and proving that no weaver of the dark arts can overcome a foot of steel in their belly is what those players are here for.
It's simply too bad that D&D is one of those games where it's just not really feasible to do.
2.) Bell of Lost Souls.
If your source is a BoLS article, you need a new source. BoLS is a clickbait adbot website concerned with driving up views and ad revenue rather than reporting true and accurate stories. Nothing is false specifically because BoLS reported it, but one can consider the website nothing but a collection of editorials with only the vaguest association with facts. The other thing to consider is that data is useless if one does not know how the data was acquired. Much like Steg, my day-to-day work is based in technical data and details. I don't work with statistics, but I do work with testing data, and one of the most important truisms of Reading A Datasheet is "if you don't know the testing parameters by which a spec was obtained, you have no idea what that spec means." The same applies to statistical data - method matters.
I didn't bother reading the aforementioned link because of animosity towards BoLS, which is admittedly not helpful to me...but did BoLS lay out the methods by which it acquired its data? The limits on that data? Did it seek a neutral sampling of data points, or enough data points to have statistical merit? Or was it "Hey! Take our cool reader poll to help us figure out how an entire edition of D&D works, and then click on all the ads you see along the way so we get more revenue!"
Steg touched on it, I want to reinforce it: data is fantastic, but it's also very, very good at misleading people who don't know how to handle it, and also also not all statistics count as "data". I do not mean any of this as a direct attack on anyone arguing from the articles on BoLS (I do, however, mean it as an attack on BoLS itself. **** that website), as even editorials with only vague associations with facts can make for interesting talking points. But please don't hold up a BoLS article as a rigorously vetted and reliable source of data.
3.) Complexity vs. Versatility vs. "Interesting Decisions"
I'm going to quote Steg for this one, because this is a point I want to address directly:
This all sounds awesome. But, and I'm sorry Steg, it's not nearly so cool and cut-and-dried as all that.
First of all, a wizard who ignores their mundane toolkit is a bad wizard. Everybody should be curating their kit and looking to carry the maximum number of useful tools for a minimum of weight investment. One of the reasons I loved the much-maligned 1DD Origins background system so much was that it simply handed me a sum of gold and said "buy what you need, friendo." It's freaking glorious. I will never again be without chalk or a signal whistle, and neither should any of you.
Secondly, a wizard who spends the entirety of a fight concentrating on one spell and hiding behind a rock is also a bad wizard. Mirage Over Burning Sands, my tabaxi wizard, is currently my highest-level active character. In a fight? She makes every last single decision Steg suggested belonged only to martial classes, and many more such decisions. She decides whether to focus on damage (Disintegrate, Crown of Stars, and similar spells) or defense/control (Telekinesis, Wall of Force, illusion shenaniganry). She chooses between ranged combat (Draconic Transformation, aforementioned Evocations) or close combat (Tenser's Transformation), since her party is relatively fragile and Mira herself, with her thicc (for a wizard) HP bar and myriad of defensive spells is the party's second most durable character. She decides where to be to maximize her durability and the effectiveness of the party, and she decides who to protect with spells like Resilient Sphere. Mira's positioning and targeting matters every inch as much as a martial character, and I would argue it often matters far more because Mira is drastically more capable than the average martial at her level and effective deployment of her spells is absolutely critical.
My own tactical ability is amplified by the massive array of additional options Mira's spell list gives me, and that amplified tactical ability is a springboard my party has used to Mario Goomba stomp encounters I strongly suspect the DM was planning on being significantly more dangerous than they ended up being. If I did nothing but vomit up Fireballs and hide behind a rock, my party's warlock would likely be dead and I wouldn't have great hopes for the party's second wizard, either.
Tactical positioning, maneuvering, and target selection are not exclusive to martial classes. What is exclusive to martial classes, at the moment, is a distinct lack of valid, viable tactical options beyond hitting the enemy with their hittin' stick of choice. Martials do not have even a fraction of the options that Mira does, but Mira has just about every option a martial character does in addition to the options her spellbook provides her. There is a reason she carries a pair of magic daggers; she can, has, and does use them to assault her enemies when the situation calls for a bout of Angry Kitty and a second frontliner catching aggro. Hell, with 1DD rules Mira can deal a terrifying amount of damage on the front line by casting Crown of Stars before Tenser's Transformation, should time permit; that's 10d12+3d4+4 potential damage every turn for seven rounds. No martial character can compete with that, and Transformation isn't even a good spell.
'Interesting Decisions' isn't about adding more rules. It's about adding more tools. More levers a fighter can pull, more ways for a fighter to Do Things and have an impact on battle. Because as it stands, a fighter cannot contribute to a battle beyond Hittin' Stick. If a battle requires something other than Hittin' Stick? That fighter is screwed, and there is dick-all bupkis nada he can do about it.
That sucks, and I don't like it. I'd rather it not be the case, if we can help it, ne?
Please do not contact or message me.
I'm genuinely sorry you had that experience, Kaigen_42. I can see how that's part of the reason you want to see some meaningful change to the class.
I only made that long data post to show that these classes are still very popular. And whatever the reasons for that are, changes will affect a lot of people. Some of those people have shared their stories of how much they like the current fighter too.
The subclasses like Arcane Archer definitely need an improvement. No one is saying otherwise. And the base class is open to change too. I just want to respect everyone's experiences and hopes.
The new UA has already made some cool updates to combat rules that will help martials across the board. Unarmed Strikes are something anyone can do with their attack for interesting actions every turn. Two weapon fighting got a big boost. You can make some very nice combos with the feats. And they promise more weapon rules to come. The warriors UA might be a let down. Or it might be just what everyone was looking for.
Just to clarify one bit. BoringBard shared two articles. But they were both reporting on data straight from D&D Beyond. The data was all of the characters in their database and how they were used in parties. It's not perfect, but it's better than probably any other data we could have access to.
D&D Beyond's data is very old. Pre-pandemic old. I'm pretty sure it's pre-Tasha's Cauldron old. DDB's class/subclass breakdown data is from back when Adam Bradford was actually doing Dev Updates and occasionally shared data points. So yes, more reliable than a BoLS reader poll, but the same caveats apply - we don't know how the data was collected, collated, amalgamated, and any other-ated you want to apply. We don't know what their cutoff was for each category of data point, what qualified as 'real' characters and what didn't. The data can be a useful talking point but it should not be considered to be absolutely unequivocably uncontestably true. Especially when we have evidence in this very thread of DMs heavily steering their newer players towards Champion fighter regardless of what that new player actually wants to play because "Champion is the class for newbs!"
Please do not contact or message me.
Okay, but to Yurei's point: how was that data collected? D&D Beyond doesn't know which characters on the site have been played and which were just made to play around with the character builder. How did it determine who was "in a party"? If it was looking at campaigns, do they have a way to distinguish characters that are only there to take advantage of content sharing?
"Bad data" isn't necessarily better than "no data," because it can be misleading.
Yeah I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to say that those tactical decisions were exclusive to fighters alone. I was just saying there is more to being a fighter than hitting someone with a stick. It's just not as obvious because it's not spelled out in an ability. There is a massive amount of the Players Handbook devoted to spells. But there is also a sizable chunk devoted to weapons, armor, feats, and combat too. People tend to overlook that because it seems like something everyone can do. And it is. But it's used more by martial classes. It just doesn't say so.
Can wizards get tactical on the battlefield? For sure. Can you make one that uses melee weapons? Sure. But every fighter makes these decisions in every fight. They just aren't specified abilities. And like I said, whether or not that's enough for a player is the core of this whole discussion.
Those options are "more used by martial classes" because martial classes don't have any choice. They have to try and wring maximum possible benefit from the bare handful of basic options presented to them for mundane combat because they're not allowed any other options. When a spellcaster also makes effective use of those options in addition to its "complicated" options, the martial is left in the dust.
That's what I was trying to state: if a wizard knows how to fight, it is better at fighting than a fighter. It is more able to win fights and achieve its objectives in combat than a fighter, because a wizard's profusion of options grants it vastly greater tactical flexibility. Until that is not the case, the system is borked and needs repair.
Please do not contact or message me.