Big B's page

You have to think past the Idea that the NPCs are dumb and the wizard can whole hardly run over them. the wide variety of trick a wizard has is the same wide variety of trick high level NPCs have.

Are all high-level NPCs also high-level Wizards? How boring. I thought they were stuff like Balors and Solars and advanced monsters and such. And I doing DnD wrong?

And ofcourse the melee is running up and hitting everything.. that is their job.. I don't see a problem there..

I'll let CoL handle this. I like how he talks.

And you keep assuming a NPC who is not getting into reach is non tragetable from everyone other then the wizard.

Part of the job of a group working together is using tactics to get what they are facing within range.

If said enemy is not in reach, how are the non-casters (not a cleric, druid, wizard, etc) managing to get them into reach? The casters don't care if the fighter can't reach the enemy, because they're too busy pegging the target with SoD or SoL spells.

They're happy to ignore years of gaming experience, they completely misrepresent the players at your table (I play with people who have multiple degrees and at least one of them has a PhD, but apparently they're dumb and we have no idea what we're talking about).

The extent of my knowledge of biological science is 9th grade AP Bio. I suppose I wouldn't look like a complete idiot if I attended some sort of PhD-level biology conference?

Apples and Oranges, people. Come on.

Some people refuse to see problems in the system, and will gladly shove their fingers in their ears and sing "LA LA LA THE DM WILL FIX IT LALA LA." This does not work. You cannot ignore a problem and simply hope it "goes away." Casters who can own and subdue reality are an actual problem in the system (See the various guides on Clerics, Druids, Wizards, et al), and can (and do) fill the melee and skillmonkey roles ("healbot" is a Timmy Role) just as well as the non-spellcaster classes do, if not better.

How would you fix this power disparity? You rewrite the system. The WHOLE thing. If you nerf spellcasters, then party power drops, and the CR system becomes all kinds of crazy. If you buff non-spellcasters...well, you'd have to buff them far enough to match the spellcasters (which just makes the problem worse) or leave them below spellcasters in power (which doesn't fix the problem, just cover it up a bit). What you have to do is let fighters have nice things, reduce the power of spellcasters (via spell rewrites or a change in the magic system), and somehow get the CR system to line up with these changes. Unfortunately, due to the stated design goals of PRPG (full backwards compatibility), this can never happen, since 3.5 splats would become wholly unusable with the new system. Personally, if someone tried to do this, and made it modular enough to be standalone with just a "core trio," I'd be very likely to lay done some greenbacks for it.

PS: 4e takes this philosophy too far. It's fun in its own right, but instead of actually rebalancing the system, it simply used the meleers as the baseline for power, then designed spellcasters (if you can call them that anymore...) and monsters around that.

You could if you wanted to. But that's not the point.

The point of JaronK's tier list is to demonstrate, in the setting of "all system resources," which classes have an innate disposition to power- usually through versatility (wizard, sorc, archivist, cleric), or occasionally raw power (druid). Thus, we can see that a wizard (past yet-to-be-undeniably-defined Point of No Return Level) will always outclass a fighter because he has a large repertoire of spells, which he can change day-to-day, or sometimes even in just fifteen minutes. The fighter usually ends up "hitting the thing with the other thing," as it were.

[EDIT]: Also, roll = "to roll a die"; role = "character role." I wouldn't usually bother to correct something with such an obvious intent, but the "roll v role" bit has a dark past in the RPG community, ya know?

Crusader of Logic wrote:

Stormwind Fallacy: Being good at roleplaying or optimizing means you are bad at the other due to drawing a false and inverse correlation between the two.

Admittedly ths getting more and more OT, but:

The Stormwind Fallacy is not really a fallacy. There actually is an inverse correlation between certain aspects of optimization and certain aspects of roleplaying.

The greater the priority you place upon mechanical optimization, the narrower the range of possible characters you can play. The more options you rule out as unacceptably sub-optimal, the greater the similarity between the fewer acceptable character 'builds' becomes, and the less room you leave yourself to explore flaws and vulnerabilities. And those are a part of good roleplaying.

Now, within the shrinking subset of character builds you give yourself as your prioritization of mechanics increases, you can still portray characters reasonably well, its just that these characters become increasingly uniform and cliche. Range is definitely an important factor in being "good" in roleplaying, even though in any given game you may only play one role.

If you compare pen and paper roleplaying to movie actor role playing, an extreme character optimizer would be akin to Arnold Schwarzenneger. Arnold only played two types of roles: quasi-superhuman action-hero badasses and funny roles that played off his unusual physique. And he knew it; that was pretty much the entire point of "The Last Action Hero."

Now, Arnold played those two types of roles really well, and he was one of the greatest box-office draws of all time. I enjoyed the bejeezus out of his performances. But no way in hell would I call him a great actor, because that was all he could do.

Contrast Arnold with, say, John Malkovich or Liam Neeson, who are comparable to roleplay gamers who are willing to trade-off mechanical superiority for interesting and fun roleplaying. They've played semi-superhuman action-movie badasses well also, but...

The Stormwind Fallacy is a specific application of the Formal Logical Fallacy of "False Dilemma."

A false dilemma is when two option are considered to be the only two possibilities- in this case, either you're a "powergamer/optimizer/rollplayer" or a "roleplayer"* (a 1-dimensional scale of position). Obviously, this is not the case, because one can in fact be a good optimizer and a good roleplayer (a 2-dimensional scale of position). Thus, the Stormwind Fallacy

*: I find it interesting how there are so many ways to refer to someone who attempts to make a mechanically powerful/viable character, and yet only one way (that I could think of) to refer to a player who prefers the roleplaying aspect of the game. Note also that 2 of the 3 I used here carry a negative connotation in the gaming community.

The opposite side is, to be honest, not so creative and is reduced to repeateding over and over that they would like to play a fighter which can contribute to the fight at high levels by himself. They also spitefully claim that wizards and clerics can buff as well eg druid's animal companion or an animated undead.

This thread is definitely not biased.

Perhaps. But seeing as his buddy can mumble jibberish for about 3-4 seconds, and create a Fireball roughly the size of an average house as one of his weakest tricks... Is using an exotic weapon really that big a deal?

My thoughts/point exactly.

Fighters are Tier 5. Why do so many people freak out about Spiked Chains? Aside from misunderstandings, or the you don't get nice things mentality.

Fluffwise, I'd guess because it doesn't their concept of "medieval fantasy with swords and sorcery." A spiked chain is definitely a very exotic weapon compared to a longsword or a rapier.

Mechanics-wise, I'd guess because a spiked chain actually can get ridiculous compared to other melee characters. Of course, this feeds back into the "fighter doesn't get things" category when a DM sees a spiked-chain Lockdown character, compares him to a Monkey-Gripped SaB build, and decides to ban spiked chains, Expansion, Improved Trip, et al.