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And as everyone knows, only good things can come from bargaining with an efreet.
If I've learned nothing else from these forums, it's this. Bargaining with efreet is 100% pure upside, and is a magic fountain of free wishes and extra xp.
Or maybe... all the other posters are secretly efreet, and that's just what they want us to think...
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And as everyone knows, only good things can come from bargaining with an efreet.If I've learned nothing else from these forums, it's this. Bargaining with efreet is 100% pure upside, and is a magic fountain of free wishes and extra xp.
Or maybe... all the other posters are secretly efreet, and that's just what they want us to think...
Please, no one actually bargains with a REAL efreet. We bargain with an ice sculpture of an efreet with the same powers until we can rule the universe from atop a mountain of the dead, lording our power of the mundanes with a cruel and tyrannical iron fist until some erstwhile hero with a sword, a shield, and some courage takes us down due to our impossible hubris.
Actually talking to an efreet, now that's rich...
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Pshhh...
Ya'll can bargain with an efreet if you want.
I, on the other hand, will simply devise a paradox wherein I wait for a Ring of Three Wishes to appear in my hand, and then use one of the Ring's Wishes to make the Ring have already appeared in my hand when it did.
Causality can suck it.
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I have to say, I've always agreed with Jiggy's post, but I always played martials because I never thought it was a big deal.
I'm playing a cleric for the first time, and just recently got access to my Construct domain ability and 5th level spells.
I understand now. I don't think I can ever play anything with less than 6th level casting again.
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Yeah, that power to cast just one spell and turn an entire battle is just something a melee doesn't get to experience much. Melees are the baseline of combat. Casters take that baseline to the next level and more.
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I have to say, I've always agreed with Jiggy's post, but I always played martials because I never thought it was a big deal.
I'm playing a cleric for the first time, and just recently got access to my Construct domain ability and 5th level spells.
I understand now. I don't think I can ever play anything with less than 6th level casting again.
Yeah, that power to cast just one spell and turn an entire battle is just something a melee doesn't get to experience much. Melees are the baseline of combat. Casters take that baseline to the next level and more.
I think the only thing that comes close to how a full caster sets the stage is the Stunning Irruption+Terrifying Howl Barbarian, and that only works when the combat is in the next room.
It does but Barby Von Wallbuster's party is usually built to handle it.. the real problem is frightened enemies bumblefarking around being terrified dim dooring double moving and teleporting away from you is very rarely as helpful and cowering with a +4 AC can sometimes make the fight last longer further wasting per round resources
Stunning irruption hits your own team as well
Right, I forgot how terribly written Stunning Irruption is. It's obviously intended to only affect people on the other side of the door.
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I've never done any editing, although I've done a reasonable amount of proofreading. It seems to me that, no matter how many passes you do, whatever remains will contain some error you can't believe you missed.
I think it would be a terribly frustrating job.
Again, the issue with C/MD IS NOT COMBAT. In combat martial characters shine. The issue is the vast power of narrative altering power that the casters can bring out of combat. Invisibility, Flight, Teleport, Wish, Create Demiplane... They can tell the laws of physics to sit down and shut up.
That is something that until very recently could not be replicated at all by martials, and that is the problem.
Without the same narrative power, martial characters are really nothing more than glorified NPCs, you act as bodyguards for the casters who do all the real work of moving the plot along.
If it's really that way in your games, than try eliminating all the spells you just mentioned as well as magic items that use those spells. or any spell that gives a caster narrative power that a martial does not ever get. And see if it's that much more enjoyable. Fantasy in which magicians don't have the most commonly mentioned spells in threads like these is real and viable.
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I've never done any editing, although I've done a reasonable amount of proofreading. It seems to me that, no matter how many passes you do, whatever remains will contain some error you can't believe you missed.
Greater skill at technical writing generally produces a draft with clearer meaning and reduced verbiage. This is typically followed by proofreading by someone who was not involved in the writing/design process, to check for inconsistencies, errors, and ambiguity creeping in. That gets you a pretty good Alpha product. Following that with destructive playtesting or the equivalent by yet another independent party (i.e., actively trying to find exploitable loopholes), and further editing in response, is the necessary next step to get to where a technical report (or game) generally needs to be. If you skip any of those things, the final copy suffers.
I've never done any editing, although I've done a reasonable amount of proofreading. It seems to me that, no matter how many passes you do, whatever remains will contain some error you can't believe you missed.Greater skill at technical writing generally produces a draft with clearer meaning and reduced verbiage. This is typically followed by proofreading by someone who was not involved in the writing/design process, to check for inconsistencies, errors, and ambiguity creeping in. That gets you a pretty good Alpha product. Following that with destructive playtesting or the equivalent by yet another independent party (i.e., actively trying to find exploitable loopholes), and further editing in response, is the necessary next step to get to where a technical report (or game) generally needs to be. If you skip any of those things, the final copy suffers.
Yeah, I'm sure it's possible to edit well or to do it badly (no doubt it's further complicated by the competing goals of containing costs and meeting deadlines). My expectation is that, no matter what you do, the end result is going to contain errors that you can't believe you missed the first, second or third time around.
I just wouldn't be able to do a job where, even if I'd done it well, I'd end up disappointed in my own work. Editing is not the career for me.
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If it's really that way in your games, than try eliminating all the spells you just mentioned as well as magic items that use those spells. or any spell that gives a caster narrative power that a martial does not ever get. And see if it's that much more enjoyable. Fantasy in which magicians don't have the most commonly mentioned spells in threads like these is real and viable.Again, the issue with C/MD IS NOT COMBAT. In combat martial characters shine. The issue is the vast power of narrative altering power that the casters can bring out of combat. Invisibility, Flight, Teleport, Wish, Create Demiplane... They can tell the laws of physics to sit down and shut up.
That is something that until very recently could not be replicated at all by martials, and that is the problem.
Without the same narrative power, martial characters are really nothing more than glorified NPCs, you act as bodyguards for the casters who do all the real work of moving the plot along.
So basically, all spellcasters would be kineticists. Just blast and move on and everything else risks granting narrative power.
If I wanted that, I would just play a video game.
If it's really that way in your games, than try eliminating all the spells you just mentioned as well as magic items that use those spells. or any spell that gives a caster narrative power that a martial does not ever get. And see if it's that much more enjoyable. Fantasy in which magicians don't have the most commonly mentioned spells in threads like these is real and viable.Again, the issue with C/MD IS NOT COMBAT. In combat martial characters shine. The issue is the vast power of narrative altering power that the casters can bring out of combat. Invisibility, Flight, Teleport, Wish, Create Demiplane... They can tell the laws of physics to sit down and shut up.
That is something that until very recently could not be replicated at all by martials, and that is the problem.
Without the same narrative power, martial characters are really nothing more than glorified NPCs, you act as bodyguards for the casters who do all the real work of moving the plot along.
So basically, all spellcasters would be kineticists. Just blast and move on and everything else risks granting narrative power.
If I wanted that, I would just play a video game.
For the folks who are going to piss and moan about casters and this "narrative power" thing, the only way to make them happy is either do this or give magic spells to every single class. Or one could run casters the way things go in the various Book of Swords books, where just even drawing blades shuts down every wizard in the immediate area.
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For the folks who are going to piss and moan about casters and this "narrative power" thing, the only way to make them happy is either do this or give magic spells to every single class.
Or.... you could increase the narrative power of martials....
For the folks who are going to piss and moan about casters and this "narrative power" thing, the only way to make them happy is either do this or give magic spells to every single class.Or.... you could increase the narrative power of martials....
by......... What will meet that standard for the folks who are complaining about what wizards can do?
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by......... What will meet that standard for the folks who are complaining about what wizards can do?
Have you ever seen the mythos classes like Teramach by Xefas? They are attempts at making tier 1/2 martial classes and inspired by the Exalted game... and he succeed. Teramach for example is his barbarian, and they can tear apart obstacles (even walls of force) just by walking through them with enough strength and determination, leap ridiculous distances, you can kill creatures so thourghly that when they arrive in the afterlife they are effectively dead inside and it's pointless to resurrect them, you can destroy a castle or a mountain in a single attack or you could lift the mountain out of the earth, you can eat the top of a tower or an armies worth of weapons or a collection of storm clouds, they can eat the bloody sun.
Or you can just give them tier 3 reasonable stuff like manipulating nations, being able to be useful in investigations, being able to socialize and stuff rather than going full tier 1... People would be fine with that too.
by......... What will meet that standard for the folks who are complaining about what wizards can do?Have you ever seen the mythos classes like Teramach by Xefas? They are attempts at making tier 1/2 martial classes and inspired by the Exalted game... and he succeed. Teramach for example is his barbarian, and they can tear apart obstacles (even walls of force) just by walking through them with enough strength and determination, leap ridiculous distances, you can kill creatures so thourghly that when they arrive in the afterlife they are effectively dead inside and it's pointless to resurrect them, you can destroy a castle or a mountain in a single attack or you could lift the mountain out of the earth, you can eat the top of a tower or an armies worth of weapons or a collection of storm clouds, they can eat the bloody sun.
Or you can just give them tier 3 reasonable stuff like manipulating nations, being able to be useful in investigations, being able to socialize and stuff rather than going full tier 1... People would be fine with that too.
So how would you stat such abilities then?
So how would you stat such abilities then?
Which ones, paragraph 1 or 2?
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"Here's some ideas for martial narrative power" probably deserves its own thread, eh?
We've had those threads, usually they devolve into complaints of this ability or that ability being "too anime" by page two.
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We've had those threads, usually they devolve into complaints of this ability or that ability being "too anime" by page two.
Which then lead to threads about "how do we fix martials without it being too anime" and threads about "what is too anime exactly?"
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Hmm... what are the primary areas of agency?
In my mind, they are:
* Combat
* Downtime
* Investigation
* Social
* Terrain Manipulation
* Travel
are there any I'm overlooking?
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I've looked at a bunch of these caster/martial disparity threads over the past couple of weeks, and I keep finding it odd that nobody mentions something that seems to me self-evident - why does no one talk about buffs to saves?
I mean, as someone who plays a lot of martials, I find that the vast majority of the gear I can buy buffs my AC. You know, the stat that casters do not give a crippled crab's crutch about? If my weaksauce Will save can't meet the DC, and it usually can't, I become that caster's buttmonkey until they decide otherwise. Never mind eating AoOs - if I'm a melee martial, I'm built to withstand those, and if I'm a ranged martial, I should never be in a threatened square to begin with. But if I've got a low Will save, my 100 AC means diddly-squat.
Meanwhile, guess who's got a killer Will save? Bocephus Bootylicious III, the wizard who's softer than Swiss Miss pudding. This is made worse by the fact that old Bocephus, should he manage to fail his save, is still a more efficient party-slaughtering machine than yours truly. A reasonably well-optimized PC can stand up to a few whacks from my greatsword, but Bocephus can shoot a couple of fireballs out his ass and inflict a TPK. Or he can just cast dominate person on another martial PC and watch us eviscerate the rest of the party, at which point the original caster can dump us both in a pit of acid while casually perusing his copy of Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Supreme Overlords.
So why can I buy items and gear that temporarily buff ability scores and stuff, but not my actual saves? Yes, I realize ability scores tie into saves, but that just forces me to waste a fortune on gear that shores up ability scores which have no bearing on my class or character concept, and I'm still not going to have the Will saves Bocephus gets just for drawing breath.
Maybe I'm missing some loophole in the rules or whatever - wouldn't be the first time, won't be the last. But it seems to me that solving the disparity starts with giving martials the ability to directly affect the math that actually matters to them in play.
EDIT: Oh, and I think that should also include being able to debuff casters' saves. A dude with a big sword should make casters sweat no matter what their saves are.
I've looked at a bunch of these caster/martial disparity threads over the past couple of weeks, and I keep finding it odd that nobody mentions something that seems to me self-evident - why does no one talk about buffs to saves?
I think because it's so self-evident. I think I've seen a fighter fix that lacked at least two good saves, and many had all three as good saves.
One of the newer books added a feat that looks like it would do great at helping close the wide gap of C/MD.
Painful Blow from Arcane Anthology! Requires the often hated Vital Strike, but if you hit a caster with Vital Strike that damage counts for a whole round and forces a concentration check every time they cast... sadly it's limited to times per day, but shutting down a caster twice per day is still pretty damn good.
@Josh-o-Lantern: The C/MD isn't just limited to combat or Martial vs Caster scenarios (as stated by Jiggy). Granting ways for martials to shut down casters in combat isn't what's needed, a Barbarian can already do this, and it still doesn't level them with the higher casters.
Oh I know, but it's just a new things that might help the number of people talking about being Dominated and the such. I didn't see much chatter about the feat at all and I don't have much else to add to this conversation since it really can't go anywhere so I thought I'd drop my two cents in the form of a cool feat.
Wizards and Sorcerers and Oracles are quite prone to dropping dead or being rendered harmless by failed Fortitude saves. Monks and Paladins and superstitious Barbarians tend to have pretty good saves. There's definitely a saving throw disparity, but it's not clearly divided along caster/martial lines.
The only real cm/d I see in the games I run and play in is that casters get to different things at high level than they did it at low level. The others tend to be the same at high level as the were at low level only you are dealing with dishing out more damage against high hit points and with a high attack bonus and higher AC. Skills are much the same but become irrelevant at some point in the high levels except for opposed tests. So if you struggle to acrobatics into position at level 2 you struggle at level 18 as well.
None of this breaks the game but if find it more fun to play casters even if they are only a bit of caster like a ranger. Fighters are fun at the low level but I get bored of them at the high levels. I have friends who love playing a fighter from high to low level though as they don't want options to think about, they just want beat on monsters like legendary heroes (think Hercules). Me I like having interesting tool kit to solve puzzles at high level. I find with Pathfinder there are enough class and options to give me what I want and enough classes and options to give my friends what they want. So cm/d mostly doesn't show in the games we play.
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7. "I can still have fun playing a fighter/monk/rogue." (Missing from Jiggy's list)
Answer: I can have fun playing a Commoner. That doesn't mean it's a viable class compared to the others.
Agree with everything on this list but wanted to reframe this example a bit. I think it's less, "I can have fun playing a Commoner. That doesn't mean it's a viable class compared to the others." and more like, "I can have fun playing a Commoner but that doesn't mean every martial noncaster should have to go the Commoner route in order to see that mechanically."
A bit of a split hair but the issue I think is less that you can do it and more that there are a lot of people that feel that is what the disparity pigeon holes you into and I think the second verse shows that a little better.
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The only real cm/d I see in the games I run and play in is that casters get to different things at high level than they did it at low level. The others tend to be the same at high level as the were at low level only you are dealing with dishing out more damage against high hit points and with a high attack bonus and higher AC. Skills are much the same but become irrelevant at some point in the high levels except for opposed tests. So if you struggle to acrobatics into position at level 2 you struggle at level 18 as well.
None of this breaks the game but if find it more fun to play casters even if they are only a bit of caster like a ranger. Fighters are fun at the low level but I get bored of them at the high levels. I have friends who love playing a fighter from high to low level though as they don't want options to think about, they just want beat on monsters like legendary heroes (think Hercules). Me I like having interesting tool kit to solve puzzles at high level. I find with Pathfinder there are enough class and options to give me what I want and enough classes and options to give my friends what they want. So cm/d mostly doesn't show in the games we play.
Actually, you just said that the C/MD DOES show up in the games you play. Your group just accepts it and doesn't let it bother them, which is totally cool.
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One of the biggest causes of the disparity is that in Pathfinder there is a very limited case of extended confrontations. Very few GMs and basically no APs require you any sort of endurance. You can always stop, go home, rest up, and continue on. That changes the game from "how many times a day can my caster cast a spell" to "how many encounters per day can we have before we rest".
If we had more encounters per day, more rounds of combat per day, the disparity would mitigate itself. But no one does that. Instead, they scale the adventuring day around the wizard because he whines when he's out of spells and is reduced to shooting of 1d3 blasts of acid.
I can feel on that but like other people said it's not all about combat but also if that is an inherent design issue in the game then it's still a problem exacerbated by the disparity. As casters get to be higher level the amount of challenges both in and out of combat has to increase exponentially compared to a noncaster just to keep them under control at the table. A Wizard needs something to eat up his combat spells, challenges that chew through his transportation spells to keep him from just poofing to the bad guy, a few challenges to eat up some of those utility spells so he doesn't just have his pick of options when you really want to make him sweat burning that invisibility scroll, and some constant pressure that keeps him from feeling safe to just nap it off and start up again. In contrast a martial can need to spend a whole series of sessions handling each of those which fundamentally changes their importance.
In other words, a rogue could spend 3 games looking for clues to get the special key he needs to get into the kings vault, casing its hiding place, and then stealing the thing, a wizard could just look at a picture and fabricate it in 10 minutes or call on an earth elemental to roll through the floor and steal it.
My GM is basically threatening to kill everyone in the party (by ramping up encounter difficulty) because my paladin is trivializing end-level encounters (who are mostly evil caster types who can't 5' step to get away from me). He's been rolling poorly on concentration checks and complains a lot about not being able to Do Anything.
This is a funny story to me because he doesn't get it. That's pretty much how anyone who accepts that CM/D is A Thing feels any time a caster steps up and does what needs to be done and the non casters just shrug and wait for another opportunity to roll a d20.
Invincibility disparity is A Thing.
While GMing, if a PC seems invincible, it can feel like the player broke the game. Why are these monsters bothering to attack him? Can't they see that they'll never hit his AC? If the last two spells just bounced off his saving throw, why the evil caster try a third time?A character with powerful narrative agency (but no invincibility) can break a campaign, but generally only by doing clever things the GM didn't think of, and they have to be careful because if they slip up they could die at any moment.
A character with unhittable AC and high saving throws can simply kick down the door, kill everything in the room, and move on, without needing to do anything interesting. From the GM viewpoint, that's a more serious problem.
I've looked at a bunch of these caster/martial disparity threads over the past couple of weeks, and I keep finding it odd that nobody mentions something that seems to me self-evident - why does no one talk about buffs to saves?
I mean, as someone who plays a lot of martials, I find that the vast majority of the gear I can buy buffs my AC. You know, the stat that casters do not give a crippled crab's crutch about? If my weaksauce Will save can't meet the DC, and it usually can't, I become that caster's buttmonkey until they decide otherwise. Never mind eating AoOs - if I'm a melee martial, I'm built to withstand those, and if I'm a ranged martial, I should never be in a threatened square to begin with. But if I've got a low Will save, my 100 AC means diddly-squat.
Meanwhile, guess who's got a killer Will save? Bocephus Bootylicious III, the wizard who's softer than Swiss Miss pudding. This is made worse by the fact that old Bocephus, should he manage to fail his save, is still a more efficient party-slaughtering machine than yours truly. A reasonably well-optimized PC can stand up to a few whacks from my greatsword, but Bocephus can shoot a couple of fireballs out his ass and inflict a TPK. Or he can just cast dominate person on another martial PC and watch us eviscerate the rest of the party, at which point the original caster can dump us both in a pit of acid while casually perusing his copy of Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Supreme Overlords.
So why can I buy items and gear that temporarily buff ability scores and stuff, but not my actual saves? Yes, I realize ability scores tie into saves, but that just forces me to waste a fortune on gear that shores up ability scores which have no bearing on my class or character concept, and I'm still not going to have the Will saves Bocephus gets just for drawing breath.
Maybe I'm missing some loophole in the rules or whatever - wouldn't be the first time, won't be the last. But it seems to me that...
I've don't have problem with saves. I can have a fighter with a +14 will save at level 11 when average save DCs are 14-22 and I get two rolls with Iron Will. We use hero points so I can add +8 if I really need to make the roll, +4 after roll. So DC 22 or be dominated, I need to roll 8 or high. If fail I get to roll again, due to greater iron will.
You just need to build with will save in mind. I generally find reflex saves are my lowest with my fighters. My average fighter usually has F:13 R: 10 W: 14. So it's more a build thing, in my case it cost me 2 feats and low chr score as I drop CHR to 8 to get Wis 12 and all 20 pts on physical stats.
@Rub-Eta:
Oh, I know. My post certainly wasn't an attempt to solve the disparity entirely. But, you know, the game runs on math. The characters with the most math-affecting agency tend to be full or partial casters. Thkse characters tend, not coincidentally, to have the most agency in and out of combat. Making the math more equitable by giving martials more agency to affect it is step one in solving the disparity.
Have you ever seen the mythos classes like Teramach by Xefas?
I hadn't seen those before. Interesting.
Thanks for the heads-up!
All I can say is that I have not personally experienced any particular caster/martial disparity in all my years of 3.5 OGL or PFRPG gaming. This is true on either side of the GM screen.
In fact, it's been my experience that martials tend to dominate combat.
Caveat: My players and I prefer low-to-mid-level play, with our "sweet spot" at level 5-9. I've never played in or run a PFRPG game beyond level 12.
My conclusion is that if there is indeed a martial/caster disparity, it probably only happens at high-level play.
Again, I'm basing this solely on my own anecdotal experience of the past dozen years. Your experiences may vary based on play style and level of system mastery.
My conclusion is that if there is indeed a martial/caster disparity, it probably only happens at high-level play.
Again, I'm basing this solely on my own anecdotal experience of the past dozen years. Your experiences may vary based on play style and level of system mastery.
Perceived disparity varies according to:
Character levelSystem mastery
Powergaming (a player with high system mastery could choose to make a caster with built-in limitations, or could try to make the most powerful one possible)
Party class choices (Fighter & Wizard have more noticeable disparity than Inquisitor & Oracle)
House-ruling
Interpersonal relationships (if the Fighter player tells the Wizard player what spells need casting, and the Wizard goes along with it, it doesn't mean the Wizard isn't more versatile than the Fighter, but it does shift the balance of player agency)
Attitude to magic (a Wizard who uses magic only when strictly necessary is less likely to create disparity than one who uses casually uses mind control spells rather than try to win the trust of NPCs the polite way)
Adventure design: Is the adventure full of problems that only magic can solve?
Adventure design: Does the GM force the PCs to fight so many battles in a day that casters run out of spells?
Etc.
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All I can say is that I have not personally experienced any particular caster/martial disparity in all my years of 3.5 OGL or PFRPG gaming. This is true on either side of the GM screen.
In fact, it's been my experience that martials tend to dominate combat.
Caveat: My players and I prefer low-to-mid-level play, with our "sweet spot" at level 5-9. I've never played in or run a PFRPG game beyond level 12.
My conclusion is that if there is indeed a martial/caster disparity, it probably only happens at high-level play.
Again, I'm basing this solely on my own anecdotal experience of the past dozen years. Your experiences may vary based on play style and level of system mastery.
Um...
Myth #1: The Caster-Martial Disparity is primarily a combat issue.
This myth is usually not stated like this, but rather couched in some sort of imperative aimed at the person complaining. Something like, "Just tell your casters to stop optimizing so heavily for combat" or "Remember that the game is about more than just combat". Generally, it's a statement that if the other person and/or their group/GM would just put less emphasis on combat, then the C/MD would more or less disappear. This, in turn, indicates that the speaker believes the C/MD is a combat-oriented complaint.It is certainly true that the C/MD includes combat; however, this is only perhaps 20-30% of what the C/MD is actually talking about. The primary complaints actually center around out-of-combat situations and how the characters are able to interact with the setting and narrative.
For example, where a martial has to make multiple saving throws per day against extreme weather, a simple 1st-level spell completely bypasses that obstacle for 24 hours. A wizard with the 2nd-level spell invisibility active is better at Stealth (even with no ranks) than a rogue with several ranks and a high DEX. The complaint is that for any given non-combat task, the magical solution is typically faster and more likely to succeed than the nonmagical solution (if a nonmagical solution even exists at all), and at a relatively trivial cost compared to what's being accomplished.
Combat is practically an afterthought.
Myth #6: The Caster-Martial Disparity assumes a "Schrodinger's Wizard" who somehow manages to always have just the right spell prepped for any given situation...Second, for the spells that truly are situational enough that guessing which ones to prepare could be a real limiting factor, that potential limit is sidestepped by the scroll economy. Lots and lots of situational spells (like invisibility, remove blindness, lesser restoration, see invisibility, etc) are of relatively low level (usually about 1-3). This makes them relatively affordable as scrolls, which can be carried around until needed, without having to make the kinds of tough decisions referenced earlier. On top of that, casters typically have less need of magical weapons or armor, opening up a huge chunk of their budgets for the collection of these situational scrolls. Even in campaigns with relatively low access to the necessary markets for purchasing these scrolls, any spellcaster can take the Scribe Scroll feat and make their own. (Wizards even start with Scribe Scroll for free!)
Myth #7: The Caster-Martial Disparity only exists in theory; in actual gameplay, it doesn't really happen.
Closely related to Myth #6, this myth gets tossed around a lot. Unfortunately, it's difficult to discuss because the people who say it tend not to give much to go on. Often, they just sort of declare it and expect that to settle the matter. It's also difficult because it usually comes alongside other myths.For instance, someone might start by declaring that C/MD is just the work of theorycrafters and isn't present in actual gameplay. Then someone tells a story of a caster ending a fight in the surprise round, and the original speaker then invokes Myths #1 and/or #4 ("the game is more than combat"/"stop trying to compete with your friends"). Then someone else offers another story, and the speaker dismisses that one too by invoking another myth. Then another story, and another myth-based dismissal. This repeats over and over. The speaker might hear six different stories and dismiss each with a different myth. If he were to look at the big picture, he would see that he just encountered six different stories from six different people who encountered something he thought wasn't real.