Ashiel |
Four characters.
One class.
High-Fantasy point-buy (20 points).
Standard wealth-by-level.
Use the Core Rulebook, the GameMaster's Guide, all the Bestiaries, the Advanced Player's Guide, Ultimate Combat, and Ultimate Magic.You can build characters at any level, and I will produce level-appropriate results. Keep in mind that the mid-level range is where most people spend most of their time playing. It's also where the alleged problems start.
I'd really like to see this get off the ground; I'm deeply curious. I'm also open-minded. I think summoners would fare exceptionally well, for example. But on the whole, I hope to demonstrate that martial classes fill necessary roles, and fill them well.
What do the forums say to my proposition?
I had a party of players, 4 of them, who rocked Red Hand of Doom with strait clerics. The campaign goes from 5th to 15th level (roughly, you might end it as early as 12th, IIRC). We had played the campaign some years prior, with a party of bard/fighter, druid, rogue/ranger/assassin/wizard/cleric, cleric, and wizard but it was much harder and had a few deaths. This time it was just 4 Pathfinder clerics, and they stomped face, kicked some names and took some ass. :P
Coriat |
Absolutely they will take the trap to the face. I'm looking at the traps section right now. The worst CR 9 trap is the Hail of Arrows which does 6d6 to the whole party (I mean the one guy checking the corner). 21 Damage, once, from a CR 9?
And the worst CR 10 trap is energy drain. Average five, up to eight negative levels that will probably become permanent.
The sample traps are poorly designed, often wildly mis-CRed, and don't compare well to each other, sure - I don't think that section of the rules has been particularly changed since the early days of 3.x - but that's not the same as saying all of them are trivial to encounter. There are traps, particularly spell traps, that will punish you horribly for assuming you can walk around and take anything that you trigger to the face.
(As an aside, the worst CR 9 trap for pure damage potential is actually the shocking floor trap - I believe that you missed that it does its 4d6 every round for 1d6 rounds, not only once).
shallowsoul |
First off: There are a lot of people here that have apparently never played a fighter.
I agree with the OP on some things but I really really disagree with some others.
When it comes to spellcasters people often seem to describe their scenarios as if everything fails their saving throws and they have no items or feats etc that grant any sort of protection from magic, and the best one is they some how have every spell known to man and they come into battle with 500 buffs up.
There are "LOTS" of factors that come into play during normal gaming sessions such as dice rolls, campaign setup, monster setup, magic items etc...
A wizard can kill a fighter and a fighter can kill a Wizard as well so what's the point?
All people are going to do is create scenarios where team Wizard will shine and scenarios where team Fighter will shine. When we create scenarios they always tend to favor the side that we are trying to argue for.
There is no martial inferiority. The fighter and other martial classes work just fine and actually do exactly what they were designed to do. There have been many many martial builds on these boards that are great.
Oh to the person who said something about fighters not being able to do anything out of combat, well that's the biggest pile of crap I have ever seen. The fighter is fully capable of doing things outside of combat thanks to skills being for every class, not to mention several archtypes.
The Drunken Dragon |
I agree with the OP on quite a few things, and would like to add one addendum to the whole "role-filling". Yes, it is true that wizards tend to overshadow a fighter in a party, but then again, fighters (and similar martial classes) are one of the only classes in which you can't really take their abilities away. Wizards can run out of spells, or have magic denied him due to SR or antimagic field. But a fighter will be doing what they're doing no matter what. They may not exactly be the most impressive, but at least they're dang reliable, and you know what? That's enough in my book to make them a worthwhile contribution.
Ashiel |
I agree with the OP on quite a few things, and would like to add one addendum to the whole "role-filling". Yes, it is true that wizards tend to overshadow a fighter in a party, but then again, fighters (and similar martial classes) are one of the only classes in which you can't really take their abilities away. Wizards can run out of spells, or have magic denied him due to SR or antimagic field. But a fighter will be doing what they're doing no matter what. They may not exactly be the most impressive, but at least they're dang reliable, and you know what? That's enough in my book to make them a worthwhile contribution.
Just tossing this out there but antimagic kind of screws everybody over. Martial and caster alike. Of course, it's also generally only used by casters or anyone who wants all their magic items and the like to shut down; so generally that just leaves suicidal mages; and there's always the pointy wizard hats preventing wizards from getting locked down by AMFs.