Why are d6 classes a thing?

[Davia D]

RJGrady wrote:

I learned to play in a version of the game where thieves got a d4...

I always thought it was weird that such a physical class was lower than clerics....

[RJGrady]

Well, they leveled a little faster, and at higher levels, got better bonus hit points. But yeah, thieves were fairly fragile. They mostly existed to bypass otherwise very dangerous obstacles.

[Quentin Coldwater]

PossibleCabbage wrote:

Rub-Eta wrote:

Oh, but you ARE trolling here. And it's not even funny.

I could see this as an honest opinion. The "spells" section in any given hardcover with a sufficient girth of magic is invariably the most opaque and hard-to-read part of that book, at least in my experience.

So if someone read the classes really closely, read the feats really closely, and skimmed the spells might be grossly underestimating how much mystic power one can bring to bear.

Cabbage is right, I sort of underestimated how powerful the spells were. Well, I didn't really underestimate them, I more or less overvalued class features. I thought spells were a compensation for a lack of class features, but I've got it the other way around: class features are to make up for a lack of spells, apparently.

I do agree I could've worded that title differently. It sounds a little too... clickbait-y.

[UnArcaneElection]

Another weird one from old times (AD&D 1st Edition to be precise) was the Monk -- a martial class, but with d4 hit dice (except it got 2 of them at 1st level) and terrible Base Attack Bonus (although they didn't call it that back then, and didn't even yet have the name THAC0 introduced by 2nd Edition). And only a limited number of them were allowed to exist starting at 8th level.

[ryric]

UnArcaneElection wrote:

Another weird one from old times (AD&D 1st Edition to be precise) was the Monk -- a martial class, but with d4 hit dice (except it got 2 of them at 1st level) and terrible Base Attack Bonus (although they didn't call it that back then, and didn't even yet have the name THAC0 introduced by 2nd Edition). And only a limited number of them were allowed to exist starting at 8th level.

There was even an argument in the class description that the d4 HD was okay because by 17th level the monk would average 45 hp, which is obviously plenty for a 17th level PC.

IIRC the 1e bard had levels where they literally gained no HD.

[JosMartigan]

ryric wrote:

UnArcaneElection wrote:

Another weird one from old times (AD&D 1st Edition to be precise) was the Monk -- a martial class, but with d4 hit dice (except it got 2 of them at 1st level) and terrible Base Attack Bonus (although they didn't call it that back then, and didn't even yet have the name THAC0 introduced by 2nd Edition). And only a limited number of them were allowed to exist starting at 8th level.

There was even an argument in the class description that the d4 HD was okay because by 17th level the monk would average 45 hp, which is obviously plenty for a 17th level PC.

IIRC the 1e bard had levels where they literally gained no HD.

1ST Ed was MUCH different than 3.5 or PF. Characters stopped getting HD rolls after 9th level (getting only 1 or 2 HP per level and no help from Con). Everything (including dragons) had half to one-quarter of the HP they do now. Also AC and hit bonuses were at best half of what they are now. A D4 martial was roughly equivalent to a modern D8 martial. Not the best option, but flavor should be considered over sheer power.

[Tacticslion]

And that's also why a fireball was always so daggum deadly.

[Tacticslion]

My Self wrote:

Roll a handful of characters, then hope they get to high enough level that they actually get a name!

Ah, the lofty heights of ninth level...

[MichaelCullen]

Thanks to charm person and marionette possession, why would a wizard even care about hitpoints past level 5? Going someplace unsafe, use someone else's hitpoints while your body is safely carried nearby.

[Calybos1]

Don't feel bad, OP, there are posters who complain "Why can't my wizard automatically cast ALL types of spells, divine, arcane, AND psychic? Oh, and wear armor too."

And that's no misunderstanding; they really don't see the point of playing if they can't be the best at everything.

[JosMartigan]

Tacticslion wrote:

And that's also why a fireball was always so daggum deadly.

That makes me think I should house rule fireball and lightning bolt as 1d8 per level. LOL

MAKE FIREBALL AND LIGHTNING BOLT GREAT AGAIN!!! :)

[Bill Dunn]

JosMartigan wrote:

Tacticslion wrote:

And that's also why a fireball was always so daggum deadly.

That makes me think I should house rule fireball and lightning bolt as 1d8 per level. LOL

MAKE FIREBALL AND LIGHTNING BOLT GREAT AGAIN!!! :)

My solution is to return to the 1e solution and remove the damage caps. Imposing a cap may have made sense back in 2e when they were introduced, but 3e removed any caps on hit dice for classes and added Con bonuses for monsters devaluing direct damage spells. Removing the caps would help redress that issue.

I'd even consider setting all evocations as standard action spells and all save-or-die/sit/lose spells as 1 round casting times.

[TarSpartan]

RJGrady wrote:

Well, they leveled a little faster, and at higher levels, got better bonus hit points. But yeah, thieves were fairly fragile. They mostly existed to bypass otherwise very dangerous obstacles.

That's a good point -- every class advanced at a different rate, so at some extremes two characters with identical XP could be two levels apart. The thief/rogue leveled the most quickly, as I recall, so if you could survive a few encounters you at least had a chance to roll more HP faster.

[Bluenose]

Bill Dunn wrote:

JosMartigan wrote:

Tacticslion wrote:

And that's also why a fireball was always so daggum deadly.

That makes me think I should house rule fireball and lightning bolt as 1d8 per level. LOL

MAKE FIREBALL AND LIGHTNING BOLT GREAT AGAIN!!! :)

My solution is to return to the 1e solution and remove the damage caps. Imposing a cap may have made sense back in 2e when they were introduced, but 3e removed any caps on hit dice for classes and added Con bonuses for monsters devaluing direct damage spells. Removing the caps would help redress that issue.

I'd even consider setting all evocations as standard action spells and all save-or-die/sit/lose spells as 1 round casting times.

Bear in mind that saving throws in all earlier versions of D&D worked rather differently to 3.x/PF, so high-HD monsters were unlikely to be affected by a spell that would stop them fighting and would probably also take half damage from the fireball. A 20d6 Fireball that's saved against (and then halved due to fire resistance) isn't quite as impressive as it seems. And compared to a spell that kills (or cripples to the point that any fight is trivial) regardless of hit points, it's not obvious that it's valuable. To really make Fireball worth using, the alternatives need to be worse, which means either making SoD/SoS spells less likely to work or slashing hit point totals so damage spells can eliminate enemies as/more reliably.

[doc roc]

I dont have a prob with a Wizard being able to fireball a regiment into next week but they should be seriously squishy....

Thats why D4 was appropriate becuase it was accurate.... if some scrawny old nerd gets hit with anything he absolutely should go down in a heap of blood and guts.

In PF the balance between power and vulnerability just doesnt exist for Wizards and it causes serious knock on effects....

[ryric]

In 1e/2e, Con bonus hp were capped at +2 unless you had fighter, paladin, or ranger levels as well, so a wizard could at most get 6 hp per level.

Also characters had to walk uphill in deep snow to the dungeon each day. While pushing a stubborn mule. Said mule could probably win in a fight.

[swoosh]

doc roc wrote:

In PF the balance between power and vulnerability just doesnt exist for Wizards and it causes serious knock on effects....

Not really, 3.5 wizards had a d4 and on the whole tended to be much stronger than their pathfinder counterparts.

[PossibleCabbage]

I have to say "you are at much greater risk of just dying due to unlucky die rolls" is probably a bad way to balance classes. Since "you don't get to play anymore/ make a new character" is sort of the least entertaining failure mode conceivable.

[My Self]

PossibleCabbage wrote:

I have to say "you are at much greater risk of just dying due to unlucky die rolls" is probably a bad way to balance classes. Since "you don't get to play anymore/ make a new character" is sort of the least entertaining failure mode conceivable.

Kineticist is pretty nice in this regard, since you have a really hefty buffer of "unconscious" between "living" and "dying". With Barbarians, if you've been hurt so much you're unconscious, you're probably in the deep end of dying as well, if you're not straight-up dead. But Barbarians do a lot of living, since they have a lot of HP. With Wizards, you're basically a strong papercut or an irate cat away from death. If you aren't at full health, then you're mostly dead and busy dying. Luckily, Wizards are really, really good at preemptively avoiding death.

Part of the high death risk is from the way Pathfinder plays. Damage amounts have gotten bigger and bigger over the editions, while HP has not scaled to match. And it's a convention that HP won't be equal. One would think that your stereotypical heavily armored warrior would be physically more difficult to injure than some scrawny old guy with a stick. I guess you could make it so that everyone has a large health buffer between "living" and "Go through his clothes and look for loose change", but that basically means you just get to spend longer bleeding out. Or you run into problems where basically anybody on the team can tank a hit in incredible fashion. It would take tricky balancing to get it to work. If you accumulated middling-term injuries that required more than a quick wand of Cure Light Wounds to patch up (maybe 8 hours of rest?), then gave everybody a large ability to resist dying to bad luck, perhaps it could work. Although the people most likely to sustain serious injury are the ones who put themselves in the line of fire, so maybe it wouldn't fairly benefit big HD vs. small HD classes.

At the very least, you'd need a massive HP overhaul to get this to work. This could possibly necessitate a damage overhaul as well. Between the extent of the two of these, a new system might be best.

[PossibleCabbage]

I think "making it harder to die when you're unconscious" (like other d20 games have done) is a reasonable step to trying to extend the distance between "you are out of the fight" and "roll a new character" and aren't that hard to bolt onto Pathfinder.

But from the perspective of making class A about as good as class B, a bad way to keep a class's power range down is "you die a lot" because there's nothing fun about that.

I mean, hypothetically a class that gets 1 HP/level and has better spellcasting than the wizard (say, it has two separate 9 level casting tracks for wizard and cleric spells) would be a terrible class from a design perspective. The way you're supposed to keep it from destroying games is by killing it a lot?

[My Self]

PossibleCabbage wrote:

I think "making it harder to die when you're unconscious" (like other d20 games have done) is a reasonable step to trying to extend the distance between "you are out of the fight" and "roll a new character" and aren't that hard to bolt onto Pathfinder.

But from the perspective of making class A about as good as class B, a bad way to keep a class's power range down is "you die a lot" because there's nothing fun about that.

I mean, hypothetically a class that gets 1 HP/level and has better spellcasting than the wizard (say, it has two separate 9 level casting tracks for wizard and cleric spells) would be a terrible class from a design perspective. The way you're supposed to keep it from destroying games is by killing it a lot?

I think the design is that you can be similarly durable as other characters, with the option to double down on the offense and skip some of your defensive buffs. It's a bit flawed, since offense is generally better than defense. As a side-note, hit dice doesn't factor into unconscious health in any way except in an indirect design-philosophy way (most full BAB classes have good Fort saves, no d6 classes do). But I agree that other games have been trending towards unconscious toughness and this is a good thing.

[Joe Hex]

This topic got me thinking about something that probably has been covered, but I can’t recall… Could a d6 psychic who spent the feat for the proficiency, theoretically, get to lunk around in magic plate armor and unleash hell? I’ve considered sorcerers and psychics to be pretty much on equal foot power wise, but sorcerers have arcane spell failure when it comes to armor.

[PossibleCabbage]

Joe Hex wrote:

This topic got me thinking about something that probably has been covered, but I can’t recall… Could a d6 psychic who spent the feat for the proficiency, theoretically, get to lunk around in magic plate armor and unleash hell? I’ve considered sorcerers and psychics to be pretty much on equal foot power wise, but sorcerers have arcane spell failure when it comes to armor.

Don't even need the proficiency.

A psychic wearing full plate will suffer-
- –6 to attack rolls (which you probably won't be making)
- –6 to Str and Dex based skills (which you probably won't be focusing on)
- A 35% failure chance of any of your spells with a somatic components (you have no spells with somatic components).

Taking the heavy armor proficiency just removes the first item (the penalty to attack rolls.) This might be considered abusive by some GMs (who are fully within their rights to make you try to swim), but it's totally legal.

[Cyrad]

From a game design standpoint, it's a meaningful weakness intended to create gameplay.

The low Hit Die is meant to force the spellcaster to utilize their spells effectively in order to stay alive. These classes have access to some of the most powerful battlefield control and protective abilities in the game with offensive abilities capable of being cast hundreds of feet away - sometimes not even in the same plane of existence. A wizard played smart should be virtually unassailable.

Also, the low Hit Die helps mitigate the balance issue of these classes being dependent only on a single ability score. If wizards had a higher Hit Die, they'd become even more less MAD since Constitution is more valuable on a class that has a low Hit Die.

[My Self]

PossibleCabbage wrote:

Joe Hex wrote:

This topic got me thinking about something that probably has been covered, but I can’t recall… Could a d6 psychic who spent the feat for the proficiency, theoretically, get to lunk around in magic plate armor and unleash hell? I’ve considered sorcerers and psychics to be pretty much on equal foot power wise, but sorcerers have arcane spell failure when it comes to armor.

Don't even need the proficiency.

A psychic wearing full plate will suffer-
- –6 to attack rolls (which you probably won't be making)
- –6 to Str and Dex based skills (which you probably won't be focusing on)
- A 35% failure chance of any of your spells with a somatic components (you have no spells with somatic components).

Taking the heavy armor proficiency just removes the first item (the penalty to attack rolls.) This might be considered abusive by some GMs (who are fully within their rights to make you try to swim), but it's totally legal.

This is 100% possible. Also note that you'll be taking a 5-10 ft. movespeed penalty. Overall, nothing a dip in some martial class won't fix, if you really want to go that way. Somewhat similar to a Cleric, Druid, or WIS Sorcerer dipping Monk for the AC (although now CHA Sorcerers can do so too), albeit with a lot more immediate and cheaply scalable bonus.

[Snowlilly]

Joe Hex wrote:

This topic got me thinking about something that probably has been covered, but I can’t recall… Could a d6 psychic who spent the feat for the proficiency, theoretically, get to lunk around in magic plate armor and unleash hell? I’ve considered sorcerers and psychics to be pretty much on equal foot power wise, but sorcerers have arcane spell failure when it comes to armor.

He could lunk around in full plate without proficiency if he was willing to accept the to-hit penalty.

Given most psychics don't make very many to-hit rolls, most could just wear the armor without spending feats, if they can overcome the encumbrance.

[Joe Hex]

PossibleCabbage wrote:

Joe Hex wrote:

This topic got me thinking about something that probably has been covered, but I can’t recall… Could a d6 psychic who spent the feat for the proficiency, theoretically, get to lunk around in magic plate armor and unleash hell? I’ve considered sorcerers and psychics to be pretty much on equal foot power wise, but sorcerers have arcane spell failure when it comes to armor.

Don't even need the proficiency.

A psychic wearing full plate will suffer-
- –6 to attack rolls (which you probably won't be making)
- –6 to Str and Dex based skills (which you probably won't be focusing on)
- A 35% failure chance of any of your spells with a somatic components (you have no spells with somatic components).

Taking the heavy armor proficiency just removes the first item (the penalty to attack rolls.) This might be considered abusive by some GMs (who are fully within their rights to make you try to swim), but it's totally legal.

It makes me think of the other PCs rolling in the psychic in full plate like a siege weapon, then a head shot like Tony Stark in the Iron Man armor yelling, “I’m crushing your head!”

I’m glad the players I game with, are either to stupid, or too smart, to try something like that.

[Snowblind]

PossibleCabbage wrote:

...

A psychic wearing full plate will suffer-
...
- –6 to Str and Dex based skill and ability checks (including initiative (a dex based ability check) which you most definitely will be making)
...

Walking around in full plate non-proficient is painful. Not totally unfeasible, but painful.

[PossibleCabbage]

Snowblind wrote:

Walking around in full plate non-proficient is painful. Not totally unfeasible, but painful.

Very much in character for, say, a Psychic Dwarf with the Self-Perfection discipline though. Think of it as resistance training, or "pain is weakness leaving my body."

[Brother Fen]

Gotta love "Convince Me" threads that try to refute forty years of gaming. If ya know better, lead by example and publish your own RPG.

[Lorewalker]

Snowblind wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

...

A psychic wearing full plate will suffer-
...
- –6 to Str and Dex based skill and ability checks (including initiative (a dex based ability check) which you most definitely will be making)
...

Walking around in full plate non-proficient is painful. Not totally unfeasible, but painful.

That's why you take a feat to make initiative a charisma check and then get a circlet of persuasion.

[UnArcaneElection]

JosMartigan wrote:

Tacticslion wrote:

And that's also why a fireball was always so daggum deadly.

That makes me think I should house rule fireball and lightning bolt as 1d8 per level. LOL

MAKE FIREBALL AND LIGHTNING BOLT GREAT AGAIN!!! :)

Wait . . . I thought the in thing these days was to make Wall spells great again . . . .

[My Self]

UnArcaneElection wrote:

JosMartigan wrote:

Tacticslion wrote:

And that's also why a fireball was always so daggum deadly.

That makes me think I should house rule fireball and lightning bolt as 1d8 per level. LOL

MAKE FIREBALL AND LIGHTNING BOLT GREAT AGAIN!!! :)

Wait . . . I thought the in thing these days was to make Wall spells great again . . . .

Really? Isn't Banishment the new hottest thing? Either that, or alternative Wishes.

[Leedwashere]

My Self wrote:

UnArcaneElection wrote:

JosMartigan wrote:

Tacticslion wrote:

And that's also why a fireball was always so daggum deadly.

That makes me think I should house rule fireball and lightning bolt as 1d8 per level. LOL

MAKE FIREBALL AND LIGHTNING BOLT GREAT AGAIN!!! :)

Wait . . . I thought the in thing these days was to make Wall spells great again . . . .

Really? Isn't Banishment the new hottest thing? Either that, or alternative Wishes.

Why not both? :D

[UnArcaneElection]

My Self wrote:

{. . .}

Really? Isn't Banishment the new hottest thing? Either that, or alternative Wishes.

In 1st Edition they used to call the latter Alter Reality.