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It seems difficult for fighters to be buffed to be on par with other classes. Other than making them REALLY good at melee, what else can be done?I've given the fighter class all good saves, and fighter talents analogous to rogue talents (weapon training and armor training are fighter talent options, but are superior to the Pathfinder versions). Advanced talents provide actual class features, like expanding your threat range, full attacking after moving, ingoring debilitating conditions, and ignoring magical protections/illusions.
More importantly, I've monkeyed with the basic combat mechanics. Iterative attacks can be traded for additional movement. Attacks and/or movement can be tactically reserved for use as immediate actions later in the round. Concentration DCs scale with the threatening character's BAB. Spellcasting is a full attack action, not a standard action. Etc.
As VV pointed out earlier, all this requires a lot of work and even more playtesting. There are easier ways of getting a balanced 3e/PF game; this is just the method our group chose (probably because 2/5 of us are major 1e grognards).
Me being the other 1/5th.
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Kyrt, maybe I should just send you my 1e PHB and DMG. The answers you seek lie within...No, they don't. Those are horribly written books which can only be appreciated with the benefit of nostalgia.
If you take the advice of the 1e PHB and DMG, then the solution is to TPK the party repeatedly until they figure out what it is you're trying to make them do.
Actually, considering fighters were rather relevant past level 12 in AD&D (as opposed to 3x without using Bo9S), and magic users had to seriously consider consequences to casting (aging effects tended to cut down on the "wish economy", one mote of dust made a wizard a summoned critter's lunch, a kobold with a rock could disrupt an Arch Mage's spells), I'd have to say AD&D has quite a few things D&D, The Rolemaster Edition, could have benefited from.
As to the TPK thing, yeah, funny thing, we actually wanted to earn our high levels back in the day, not become 20th level in six months so we could help our DM write a crappy novel...
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Kyrt, maybe I should just send you my 1e PHB and DMG. The answers you seek lie within...Hey houstonderek, if your going to be sending people cool old books i'd love them. And i won't be sarcastic about them either :D
I know you wouldn't. :)
They're a good read, and I'll probably dust them off for a game soon, but I really do like Kirth's 3x/Pf game filtered through the AD&D prism. I don't know what I'd do without feats and skills and stuff anymore, got too used to them, frankly.
Although I do try to get away with saying "C'mon, why should I have to ROLL for that?" from time to time ;)
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Heh, I never said I wouldn't appreciate it, Derek and I just have sort of a... I don't know how to put it. He's kind of like this crabby old uncle who's somehow still cool most of the time :)Kyrt, maybe I should just send you my 1e PHB and DMG. The answers you seek lie within...Hey houstonderek, if your going to be sending people cool old books i'd love them. And i won't be sarcastic about them either :D
This is one of the nicest things anyone has said about me in a long time.
*sniff*
:)
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Kyrt, maybe I should just send you my 1e PHB and DMG. The answers you seek lie within...LOL, lot of hate for the Holy Books of Gygax. Still a kick-ass group of books (Though you can't forget Deities and Demigods). It's amazing how we ever managed to have fun playing those unbalanced characters oh so long ago HD, we must have been total idiots!
I mean ... WTF?
Love. That. Link.
Yeah, we were insane. Should have just kept playing Monopoly and not blazed trails for the ingrates today.
:)
Kyrt, maybe I should just send you my 1e PHB and DMG. The answers you seek lie within...LOL, lot of hate for the Holy Books of Gygax. Still a kick-ass group of books (Though you can't forget Deities and Demigods). It's amazing how we ever managed to have fun playing those unbalanced characters oh so long ago HD, we must have been total idiots!
I mean ... WTF?
Love. That. Link.
Yeah, we were insane. Should have just kept playing Monopoly and not blazed trails for the ingrates today.
:)
Derek, step away from the time machine....
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Derek, step away from the time machine....Kyrt, maybe I should just send you my 1e PHB and DMG. The answers you seek lie within...LOL, lot of hate for the Holy Books of Gygax. Still a kick-ass group of books (Though you can't forget Deities and Demigods). It's amazing how we ever managed to have fun playing those unbalanced characters oh so long ago HD, we must have been total idiots!
I mean ... WTF?
Love. That. Link.
Yeah, we were insane. Should have just kept playing Monopoly and not blazed trails for the ingrates today.
:)
It's called a "Wayback Machine". :P
;)
Derek, step away from the time machine....Kyrt, maybe I should just send you my 1e PHB and DMG. The answers you seek lie within...LOL, lot of hate for the Holy Books of Gygax. Still a kick-ass group of books (Though you can't forget Deities and Demigods). It's amazing how we ever managed to have fun playing those unbalanced characters oh so long ago HD, we must have been total idiots!
I mean ... WTF?
Love. That. Link.
Yeah, we were insane. Should have just kept playing Monopoly and not blazed trails for the ingrates today.
:)
It's called a "Wayback Machine". :P
;)
Stop that dog!
Not so much, since defenders still don't have significant abilities to force attention on themselves, even in 4e. If you build a really defensive defender, you're still hoping the GM is polite enough to have enemies beat on you because it's not really up to you where they go.
The defender schtick is still non-functional, after all this time.
Really? I've often found myself in a very penalizing situation when I want to attack a party member who isn't a defender. My RotR game has a paladin, and attacking someone other than her is a -2 to the attack and a whopping 15 damage to my monster whether I hit or miss. Even if I do decide it's worth ignoring her, the monsters feel it in a very real way.
Not so much, since defenders still don't have significant abilities to force attention on themselves, even in 4e. If you build a really defensive defender, you're still hoping the GM is polite enough to have enemies beat on you because it's not really up to you where they go.The defender schtick is still non-functional, after all this time.
Which forces the enemies to fight at a statistical disadvantage and/or suffer extra attacks and/or take automatic damage. The enemy can do it but it penalizes them. Sometimes the baddies get enough from their move to make it worth while (ability to concentrate attacks on a vulnerable Invoker that has moved forward for example) but their is a trade off in that the party as a whole will be taking less damage and doing more if the monsters make this choice.
That has more to do with the fact that people get emotionally attached to whatever their favorite character/concept is.
It also speaks to the fact that the answers really are not that clear cut.
You just run over there.Stopping someone from doing something is nearly impossible in 4e, because everyone is so very hard to kill.
Depends on the DM. As I pointed out on another thread this presumes that the DMs bad guys always lay off on targets that have fallen down thus switching the action to the three saves or your out rules. If the monsters instead choose to beat up on downed characters until their well and truly dead they usually can reach that point with one or two hits that they will have a difficult time missing. Considering how limited healing can be the DM can easily ratchet up combat to truly lethal levels simply by always focusing on downed characters - here might be an example of when its a good plan to suck up the penalty the Defenders are laying out so that a few extra monsters can wander over and make certain that the PC dies.
This is actually what I mean by parties that are getting the stuffing knocked out of them gravitating toward healers and defenders. Its not so much that the defenders have defending abilities - though that helps. Its really that they have better AC and more hps backed up by multiple healers in a situation where its critical that a healer gets to go before group #2 of monsters takes their turn and focus' their attacks on any character that has gone down.
In fact the one example that I am following on the boards of this sort of thing the players (after the third time they had been pulverized in two adventures) rebuilt the party as two clerics, a paladin and an avenger and the players seem fairly happy with the robustness this grants them.
I'm not saying this is the best possible build for a party - its clearly a build that focuses almost everything on the ability of the party to make use of a huge number of healing surges and one with healing on demand for 3 quarters of the party. Its a reaction to the situation this group has found itself in where living through an adventure had so far seemed to be a coin flip at best.
Obviously this group is designed to handle circumstances that don't seem to be cropping up in your game where you rank potent strikers as one of the optimum builds and operate under the belief that characters don't die so don't worry about that too much. It makes a lot of sense to me that if death is a rarity then speed and damage output is going to be considered much more useful.
My personal experience has been something different then each of these circumstances - strikers really are good but their rarely good except operating under their own terms and most of the really hard encounters we have been in have set the stage were we don't get to operate under our own terms - where the circumstances are dictated to the party by the DM and we have to come up with a way of handling this - under this paradigm any kind of a true focus by the party spells disaster in encounters where that focus has been nerfed. Party design in my group has been reactionary and meant to handle party deficiencies. Our group really has to operate as a Swiss Army Knife because our encounters have been so diverse and often force the group to split up to take care of multiple different issues.
I'm not sure what your contending the best party design is though you've left some hints to that but I can make some guesses for the first group as its actually been laid out - the party presumably has not faced a lot of artillery enemies as their range is lacking nor are minions a major foe (not enough area effect). Likely encounters have tended to be smaller groups of very potent melee enemies that could be handled while the group mostly stays in a tight block. Good design for that but it'd have not worked in the last encounter I was in as the lack of range and area effect powers would have been to detrimental. My point in all this is the best party depends on what your dealing with most of the time. The Barbarian might be a fantastic asset to one group and be usually useless dead weight a significant portion of the time in another - it all depends on the types of encounters your DM is tossing your way.
What I was referring to is the fact that it's exceedingly hard to get the good guys down in the first place.
If no one one your team ever goes down either your group is made out of healers or your DM is not pushing you hard enough. In the end big BBEG fights are wars of attrition and the enemy attack ratings are good enough that no one has a build with enough defenses to avoid being hit. This means that its in the DMs hands as to whether or not your going to go down - just keep adding enemies until you run out of hps.
One of the recent combats we were in (last one in Bordin's Watch) features infinite minions (arriving at the rate of 6 every round) as well as some other defenders - if you can get to the top of a tower (about 150 squares away on circular catwalks) you can do a skill challenge to utilize a mechanism to shut the various doors into the room thus ending the minion influx. We got through this on the parties trump card of twelve potions of healing between us (pretty good for a 3rd level party) - we used every last one of them up to pull off this encounter.
Fundamentally in a war of attrition if your not going down its because the DM is not making the big final encounters hard enough.
Building a defensive party in 4e is unnecessary and draws the combats out even more, making every combat even more of a grind.
Now this is a different issue altogether. I agree that the more defenders there are in a group the more grindy the combats get. We try and limit the number of Defenders down to just a few - but my experience has been that having access to some characters in the party with the traits that Defenders have (generally the highest AC and very good hps exceptional passage clogging abilities) gives the group more options then one without those abilities on tap.
This is especially so because Defense is more versatile then good Offense. Strikers are generally either ranged builds or melee builds (certain ranger builds excepted) - if one of these options is taken off the table then the striker is suddenly a major under performer but defense is always relevant.
If no one one your team ever goes down either your group is made out of healers or your DM is not pushing you hard enough.
DING!!
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Me being the other 1/5th.It seems difficult for fighters to be buffed to be on par with other classes. Other than making them REALLY good at melee, what else can be done?I've given the fighter class all good saves, and fighter talents analogous to rogue talents (weapon training and armor training are fighter talent options, but are superior to the Pathfinder versions). Advanced talents provide actual class features, like expanding your threat range, full attacking after moving, ingoring debilitating conditions, and ignoring magical protections/illusions.
More importantly, I've monkeyed with the basic combat mechanics. Iterative attacks can be traded for additional movement. Attacks and/or movement can be tactically reserved for use as immediate actions later in the round. Concentration DCs scale with the threatening character's BAB. Spellcasting is a full attack action, not a standard action. Etc.
As VV pointed out earlier, all this requires a lot of work and even more playtesting. There are easier ways of getting a balanced 3e/PF game; this is just the method our group chose (probably because 2/5 of us are major 1e grognards).
Hey! A player can fiddle around with basic game mechanics and be pedantic and overly analytical about the game without being a 1e grognard!
:P
Hey! A player can fiddle around with basic game mechanics and be pedantic and overly analytical about the game without being a 1e grognard!
... and that's one of the reasons we love having you in the game. :)