Amusing thought: What if fighters/barbarians/whatever could yell gibberish/warcry to try to mess up a spell with a verbal component being cast?I'm... not really sure. I mean as a concept it seams fine, but would you be making this a standard part of the game so spellcasters are ALWAYS running into this problem, or is it locked behind yet another feat?
Does it use the Concentration mechanic?
If it's a cool and actually useful ability I wouldn't say it would be "locked behind a feat." A phrase like that implies things like "ugh, guess I can't trip without provoking even though 3 int wolves do because Improved Trip is locked behind Combat Expertise" or "I'm never going to take Spring Attack because it's locked behind two bleh prerequisites."
As for how this would work, I'd say something like:
Immediate action, spell being cast within X feet. Make an intimidate check, DC = 10 + base enemy concentration check + Y for every Z feet you are from target. If successful, spell fails. If successful by 5 or more, this failure also provokes an attack of opportunity. Once per target per day. Or maybe make it a fortitude save based on your BAB.
I'd see that more as your war cry scares the hell out of them at a pivotal moment and their concentration slips. Once per day per target because now they are expecting it. Just don't make the Disruptive line prerequisites and you are good.
The problem you present is it's own solution: feat "Bonus Fighter Feat", allows taking a feat from the (adjusted) fighter list that is in all ways (such as unlocks) treated as a fighter bonus feat.The addition of the feat unlocks would make feats a better power for the fighter much as rage powers are better than regular feats for a barbarian.
So I'm taking the feat Extra Feat to get a different feat? I would object to that on the grounds that it would just confuse the uninitiated. A change in terminology for the Fighter bonus feats class feature would be required for clarity.
My issue with your previous statement was that I took it you meant the theoretical "Bonus Fighter Feat" shouldn't be a thing.
Good point. What were fighter bonus feats would be called battle training. Battle training is a bonus feat selected from a list, that comes with a feat unlock.
What I was suggesting was that the fighter bonus feats would be the only ones that got the feat unlock. (To preempt cries of "lol dip") However you pointed out a good idea, to give an option to trade regular feats as well, so "Extra Battle Training" will be the name of that feat. Yes, it would be a feat to get a feat, but it would be a feat unlocked feat.
If it's a cool and actually useful ability I wouldn't say it would be "locked behind a feat." A phrase like that implies things like "ugh, guess I can't trip without provoking even though 3 int wolves do because Improved Trip is locked behind Combat Expertise" or "I'm never going to take Spring Attack because it's locked behind two bleh prerequisites."
Or make it like they did for the Ranger and their combat style feats. You can take them even if you don't normally qualify for them.
You'd have to, at a minimum, double the number of fighter feats AND have them scale to make a fighter minimally viable.
And that does nothing for his out of combat feats stuff. You know, things like Saves, Movement, Leadership/Social Skills, and Crafting.
==Aelryinth
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Regarding early entry to feats for fighters, when I was GM'ing the Fighter added his Fighter level to his BAB for the purposes of meeting prereq's. So a straight 20 Fighter essentially had double BAB and could qualify for feats twice as fast as anyone else.
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5-ft step?
5-ft step?Eh, if the martial character in this scenario has reach, then a five-foot-step wouldn't help. There are issues with the 'walk up and ready an attack' method, but 5-ft step isn't likely to be one of them except at low levels.
I would be more worried about the caster...y'know...moving out of the way. Ready actions are pretty obvious - "Hmm, that guy can hit me, but instead he does nothing. GEE I WONDER WHY". The caster can literally just take a move action, eat the AoO and possibly the ready action, and in exchange for this they deny the martial both their full attack and the opportunity to disrupt the spell. There are ways around this, but then you are looking at a few very specific examples of martial character.
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Of course, you could go the other way and let martials move+attack. In any case, there is a disparity there and at least one of them should be changed.
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You could turn "Fighter Bonus" feats they gain as class abilities into something along the lines of weapon training.
You could allow them to group up to 3 feats into one feat choice and example would be.
Improved Trip
Greater Trip
Vicioius Stomp
I know that it looks like just making the feats progressive but it allows the fighter to diversify the things they do faster and more efficiently. Make it so ONLY fighters can do this, not classes that have some of their levels count as fighter levels.
Allow them to do this at 4 and every 4 levels after, would open up more abilities faster and at better intervals.
Also the feats have to work together you cannot just pick 3 at random and they all have to be "combat" feats.
Just for note, if the fighter has Lunge, a 5 step won't stop a readied action.
On the readied action, it's the fighter's turn, so the 5' reach bonus would apply. Hopefully surprising the heck out of the caster.
==Aelryinth
I've only looked through half of these posts...So I am almost certainly bringing up points already made.
At any rate...I don't deny that their is a caster-martial disparity, or that they need to be boosted (scaling feats, greater diversity of feats, changes in movement and attacks). But it seems a lot of the disparity is more being driven by the caster side of things, where spells provide basically a limitless resource that can trivialize encounters with no real cost, and allow a well prepared caster to take over any job of everyone else in the party practically.
If that is the case, it seems than that the biggest things that needs to happen is to reduce the power level of 9th level casters while still leaving them playable.
That could be probably accomplished by:
revising spells, both to remove ambiguity and to tone down the more powerful spells, like Simalucrum. This could be done by changing some spells into something more like multi-round rituals (Gate), or just nerfing the ability of the spell (Simulacrum not copying spell like abilities).
Adding real draw backs to magic. If we look at a lot of fantasy fiction, Pathfinder spellcasters are way way way more powerful than their counterparts in books and film. High level magic should have a degree of risk to balance its awesomeness. Resurrection magic should include a risk of coming back wrong, teleportation combining with objects, clones gaining consciousness, etc. By all means let there be feats, items, or other options to reduce these side effects, but they should require meaningful investment of spell slots, feats, etc.
Make specialization a built in feature of spellcasters. No more generalist wizards. Start them off with universal cantrips and make them pick a school. That school is then the only school they can access 9 levels of spells for. Let them later on have an option to add another school for three levels, or a third school for three levels or boost the secondary school to 6 levels. This would cut down immensely on the jack of all trades aspect of casters. You want to dominate that monster? Fine. But you won't be summoning powerful monsters, or shooting someone with a meteor swarm. Granted you are going to have to play around with spells to give everyone equal access to the same number of spells (not all schools have the same number available spells), but I think this would be worth pursuing. I think this also would free up the design space for more non spell level perks and class features, something that wizards and clerics are not the greatest on.
Finally...make concentration checks matter and reign back some of the layering of spells.
I think these options would still make casters a fun choice while reducing their game breaking ability.
5-ft step?Eh, if the martial character in this scenario has reach, then a five-foot-step wouldn't help. There are issues with the 'walk up and ready an attack' method, but 5-ft step isn't likely to be one of them except at low levels.
I think he/she meant the lost of attacks for moving more than 5 ft.
What's kind of funny about Pathfinder spellcasters is that in general conflict resolution, they're FAR more powerful... but against the environment/setting in general they tend to be pretty lackluster.
Many of the most powerful mages in fantasy [Wheel of Time, Sword of Truth, etc etc] have massive mass destruction capability, able to level a village or even a whole town with the casting of very few spells. [Note of course that I'm talking about the most powerful casters in these settings, not your standard mage in them.]
Yes and no, in Pathfinder, RAW Wizards are usually more powerful than Story/Fluff Wizards (with a few exceptions here and there).
But in comparison to RAW Martials, Story/Fluff Martials are characters from Exalted (Rogues/Ninja/Thieves often being Sidereal Exalted).
@ Gars DarkLover
Your comment regarding Wizards depends in part on how you define power. Like I said, their conflict resolution is pretty much Godly, their setting destruction... not so much.
Compare Meteor Swarm to... say... a Forsaken-tier Balefire that vaporizes a full size castle and erases it from spacetime.
Or Positive/Negative Magic Lightning Bomb wiping out something on the order of 10,000 men at once.
True, might be some kind of intentional "nerf".
5-ft step?Eh, if the martial character in this scenario has reach, then a five-foot-step wouldn't help. There are issues with the 'walk up and ready an attack' method, but 5-ft step isn't likely to be one of them except at low levels.I think he/she meant the lost of attacks for moving more than 5 ft.
He.
Also reach weapons can't attack adjacent or are we doing the spiked gauntlet/reach weapon thing now?
Can we do it without turning every martial class into into weird magus/jedi/ninja/wizards?No.I think your best bet might be creating ONE martial class that can be your 'super lucky badass normal who overcomes the fantastic without obviously becoming fantastic himself.'
This martial class is available for those who don't want to be fantastic, while the rest of them are available for those who do.
I think Anarchy meant no as in "can't make Martials Quadratic without it".
In regards to encounter design, I know people say materials have no as their resource but so does everyone else and materials have a lot more and ways to protect it, or at least I give them ways to protect it. So the day ends when casters run out of juice which I found annoying because time exists. So I design adventureswhere enemies aren't vacuum sealed in a room before you get there but are things that react to time and may have some evil plans to do, fortify their defenses because some dudes came in and killed a bunch of them, get reinforcements, buy some nets and thunderstones, leave, anything instead of waiting for them to come back.
And of course what this encourages isn't bringing more martial characters with their 'inexhaustible' resource. It's bringing more casters, with their more powerful and more versatile range of resources, solving the 'problem' of limited uses by bringing more people with the resource in question. If you've got to have a spell, then you need the caster or at least their scroll and the fighter doesn't cut it where another caster might. Whereas the reverse simply isn't the case.
Agreed. If I need to drive across the desert, and I'm worried I'll run out of gas, I need to bring a jerrycan or two with spare fuel, not a horse. Yes, sure, a horse can do horse-like things all day without need for gasoline,... but it doesn't do car-like things particularly well, and it introduces its own resource depletion issues (like the two cans of water that are taking up the space the gasoline would take).
I've always wondered why, if it's that easy to fortify and reinforce, more monsters don't do that before they're attacked rather than in response to it.
To be fair, it's because fortification and reinforcement takes time and resources away from other, more long-term important tasks.
That's like asking why warships only go to battle stations when a battle is actually about to happen. In fact, one aspect of "battle stations" is that all sleeping or off-duty crew are awakened and put to work -- and this works in PF, too. This now means you've got three times as many monsters to deal with as you would have otherwise, since the swing and graveyard shifts are now awake and in armor.
But, of course, the crew need to sleep eventually. The actual important job of my Legion of Terror is not to stand around looking menacing, but accomplishing my goal of World Domination. Battle Stations interferes with that.
Can we do it without turning every martial class into into weird magus/jedi/ninja/wizards?No.
yesCan we do it without turning every martial class into into weird magus/jedi/ninja/wizards?No.
As problematic as the Barbarian and Paladin can be from some people, they're actually pretty close to solving this specific problem. The Barb's damage could actually be toned down a little bit if they were able to do more incredible acts of physical prowess and maybe make most of their most popular optional abilities (totems, superstition, etc.) more standard abilities for the class.
The Paladin's needs its role-playing straight-jacket to be removed or at least loosened, gain stronger roleplaying abilities, and have a couple of bonuses that aren't related to dealing with Undead and Evil enemies. I think that they already have very nice utility powers with their mount/weapon & swift action healing.
The Fighter and Rogue are more complicated because they are so reliant on feats and skills for their abilities, and those aren't class-specific abilities. They will need to be rebuilt from the ground up IMO. The Unchained Rogue is a good start.
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Sure, it's especially amusing that a fatigued/exhausted caster has no problems casting.
You'd think they would lock him out of using his highest (and second highest at Exhaustion) spell slots or something like that.
Of course, martials have very few ways to inflict status conditions (shaken is an option, but it's very inefficient unless you dedicate building for it, then boom, a lot of monsters are immune to fear), so it may not necessarily help them.
Once we start re-writing conditions though, we're moving away from the quick-fix the TC wanted. Then again, I don't think there is a quick-fix.
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There is definitely no "quick fix" but there are lots of options that already exist. They're just mostly 3pp stuff.
The problem is that 3.x in general is so hilariously stacked against mundane classes that you have to completely change the base assumptions of what players should be able to do before you can really start fixing anything. There's also over a decade of Ivory Tower Design ridiculousness that you have to overcome, as well.
I rather question the point of this undertaking in general. It's a fun mental exercise to discuss what would be cool, but Paizo isn't going to print it. And since Paizo won't print it, it'll be 3rd party at best.
If someone does make a complete "fixed" edition of Pathfinder, who will actually get to play it?
One of the big appeals of Pathfinder for me is the huge playerbase relative to most other RPGs I like (some of which already have more awesome martials/weaker casters). It's one of the easiest systems to find a game you can join in. That gets lost of you have a bunch of houserules you're trying to bring with you.
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What I find funny about this thread is that of all the 636 posts (637 give or take once mine goes up) not to many are actual suggestions of what to do to help out the fighter/rogue.
Most are people keeping up their arguments with others from other threads where they don't agree with someone.
Less complaining about why it can't be done or what would not work and more helping each other expand on suggested ideas and offering up your own.
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Raltus, it's been fifteen years since 3.0 came out. If they haven't fixed Fighters and Rogues since then, it can't be done. It's long past the time to bury both classes and just let them rest, already.
Now that the Unchained Rogue, the Slayer and the Investigator exist, there's really no reason for the CRB Rogue to still be a thing. The Fighter never had a real niche, either mechanically or fluff-wise, so removing it wholesale would change exactly nothing.
There is no short, simple answer to this problem other than "Don't play Pathfinder." It's too cooked into the base assumptions of the game: that spellcasters can do whatever the hell they want, and martials are lucky if they can do things other than whacking things with their weapons.
yesCan we do it without turning every martial class into into weird magus/jedi/ninja/wizards?No.As problematic as the Barbarian and Paladin can be from some people, they're actually pretty close to solving this specific problem. The Barb's damage could actually be toned down a little bit if they were able to do more incredible acts of physical prowess and maybe make most of their most popular optional abilities (totems, superstition, etc.) more standard abilities for the class.
The Paladin's needs its role-playing straight-jacket to be removed or at least loosened, gain stronger roleplaying abilities, and have a couple of bonuses that aren't related to dealing with Undead and Evil enemies. I think that they already have very nice utility powers with their mount/weapon & swift action healing.
The Fighter and Rogue are more complicated because they are so reliant on feats and skills for their abilities, and those aren't class-specific abilities. They will need to be rebuilt from the ground up IMO. The Unchained Rogue is a good start.
but what does that have to do with the price of tea in china?
I rather question the point of this undertaking in general. It's a fun mental exercise to discuss what would be cool, but Paizo isn't going to print it. And since Paizo won't print it, it'll be 3rd party at best.
If someone does make a complete "fixed" edition of Pathfinder, who will actually get to play it?
One of the big appeals of Pathfinder for me is the huge playerbase relative to most other RPGs I like (some of which already have more awesome martials/weaker casters). It's one of the easiest systems to find a game you can join in. That gets lost of you have a bunch of houserules you're trying to bring with you.
Paizo might print it, but not as Pathfinder/Pathfinder Compatible.
What I find funny about this thread is that of all the 636 posts (637 give or take once mine goes up) not to many are actual suggestions of what to do to help out the fighter/rogue.
Most are people keeping up their arguments with others from other threads where they don't agree with someone.
Less complaining about why it can't be done or what would not work and more helping each other expand on suggested ideas and offering up your own.
i'll post this until people start telling me to stopWhat I find funny about this thread is that of all the 636 posts (637 give or take once mine goes up) not to many are actual suggestions of what to do to help out the fighter/rogue.
Most are people keeping up their arguments with others from other threads where they don't agree with someone.
Less complaining about why it can't be done or what would not work and more helping each other expand on suggested ideas and offering up your own.
Please Stop with the advertizing!
The Fighter never had a real niche, either mechanically or fluff-wise, so removing it wholesale would change exactly nothing.
Hey now, Fighter fills the "I really need to cram in another couple combat feats into my -insert not Fighter class here- build and I guess a little boost to fortitude and BAB would be cool too" niche quite well. It's one of the best dips in the game, only slightly behind Monk, for a lot of classes.
I guess that's a rather dubious distinction though.
Please Stop with the advertizing!i'll post this until people start telling me to stopWhat I find funny about this thread is that of all the 636 posts (637 give or take once mine goes up) not to many are actual suggestions of what to do to help out the fighter/rogue.
Most are people keeping up their arguments with others from other threads where they don't agree with someone.
Less complaining about why it can't be done or what would not work and more helping each other expand on suggested ideas and offering up your own.
k
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Seranov I totally agree that it has been a long time with out a fix for either class but maybe now is the time for a change? The Unchained rogue is rather nice, the skill unlocks are a step in the right direction, not the fighter just needs something like this.
Also taking some of the more less useful feat and adding them in to skill unlocks or just at certain skill ranks you get them.
the fighter's skill unlocks were the stamina system...
The Fighter never had a real niche, either mechanically or fluff-wise, so removing it wholesale would change exactly nothing.
Hey now, Fighter fills the "I really need to cram in another couple combat feats into my -insert not Fighter class here- build and I guess a little boost to fortitude and BAB would be cool too" niche quite well. It's one of the best dips in the game, only slightly behind Monk, for a lot of classes.
I guess that's a rather dubious distinction though.
The Fighter fights, as opposed to the other classes.
The problem, inherent to this argument, is that people equate martial with mundane, which is a steamy crock of meadow muffins.
If people stopped with the false dichotomy, we would not have the problem.
Su and Ex deserve far more love than they get.
With 20+ editions of DnD, + Pathfinder, + other D20 systems, + other systems out there, making a balanced game should theoretically be easy, in practice however...
Well, LawfulNice's Dungeons: The Dragoning 40 000: 7th Edition kinda tried.
The problem, inherent to this argument, is that people equate martial with mundane, which is a steamy crock of meadow muffins.
We don't compare them to our world, we compare them to freaking SpellCasters.