| Matthias W |
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As Jiggy explains here, caster superiority over noncasters is most salient outside of combat. Paizo says they're interested in lessening caster/martial disparity. And the previews nicely break down gametime into Encounter, Exploration, and Downtime modes, implyng that each will have robust support.
So presumably an obvious thing to focus on is: what are some ways to give noncasters - but especially fighters, who have been historically pigeonholed into, uh, fighting - some utility in these parts of the game?
A passive way in which disparities can be attenuated is if there's significant out-of-combat utility gained from non-class choices, like ancestry, background, and skill unlocks: then, in the worst case scenario, even if your 20 fighter levels do nothing for you when you're not someone on an initiative table, the fact that you're an elven gangster or whatever might be helpful in some concrete mechanical sense. Likewise, just giving fighters more skills shouldn't, I hope, be controversial.
Some classes, like the fighter, might also potentially leverage these extra-class resources by simply getting more of them (more ancestry feats, or more powers dependent on background), partially on the grounds that "fighter" has been saddled with a very wide array of possible character types, and so fighter-universal bonuses may not make sense for all characters. For the same reason, you could add a lot of out-of-combat utility to fighter (etc) archetypes: think of what you could grant a knight that wouldn't necessarily apply to knights AND mercenaries AND pit fighters AND farmboys with a bit of talent and so on.
In terms of downtime activities, crafting and leadership are two areas where martial characters could be declared to have special skills. Additionally, if downtime relies on time resources, it could be that casters have to spend a certain amount of time keeping up with their laboratory/prayers/etc, meaning martial characters have more points to spend or whatever.
At the exploration level, military training might also be relevant to things like the logistics of hauling loot, setting up camp, and managing hirelings. Additionally, an intelligent tactician might be able to buff everyone's "stances" that they're taking as they explore (granting greater latitude to group stealth, or improving the degrees of freedom people have in selecting what stances to take, and so on.) I don't want to rekindle any "martial healing" debates from the ancient past, but that's another pretty obvious utility that a trained soldier can provide.
But I'm probably missing a bunch of obvious stuff!
(I'm also ignoring the question of how or how much to nerf casters; this topic here is enough of a can of worms, and I'd rather the thread end up in another debate about How Big Of An Issue This Is, rather than concrete ways a new edition could expand noncaster's noncombat abilities.)
| Knight Magenta |
I think that the fighter's main problem is that his theme is not deep enough. It's hard to think of cool stuff for the fighter to do other then get +X bonuses. When designing for classes like the barbarian, you can always say "He gets so angry that he does thing" where the thing can be pretty much anything, like growing wings, or breaking a wall or making your horse angry.
The vigilante has the best solution to this, I think. It takes the fighter and outright staples a completely unrelated theme onto him. The vigilante is functionally "fighter + master of disguise". I could easily see a "fighter + dragon bloodline" or "fighter + diplomat" or "fighter + military leader" being things you can build into a fighter class. Sort of like sorcerer bloodlines.
Boojumbunn
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Well, one good thing would be to move magic items traditionally crafted by a smith out of the hands of a spellcaster. Allow a Fighter to take "Craft Magic Weapons and Armor" and let them use their time between games to create their own while wizards are creating wands/haversacks/etc. This particularly works well if you add Strength or Constitution bonus to whatever roll might have to be made to create something.
I have never liked that all the magical crafting seems to fall to wizards when smiths were the ones who made magic weapons in most of the fantasy I've read.
Boojum
| Cyouni |
Well, one good thing would be to move magic items traditionally crafted by a smith out of the hands of a spellcaster. Allow a Fighter to take "Craft Magic Weapons and Armor" and let them use their time between games to create their own while wizards are creating wands/haversacks/etc. This particularly works well if you add Strength or Constitution bonus to whatever roll might have to be made to create something.
I have never liked that all the magical crafting seems to fall to wizards when smiths were the ones who made magic weapons in most of the fantasy I've read.
Boojum
That's already automatic in 2E. There's no restriction of "need to be a caster" anymore.
In the Playtest, items have levels. You can craft items of your level or lower, and you must be skilled enough at crafting, reflected in your proficiency rank, to craft an item of that quality (trained for standard items, and expert, master, or legendary for higher-quality ones). Crafting an item requires you to spend half its Price in crafting materials. You might find or acquire these sorts of materials, and most of them you can buy directly with currency, if you need to.
A trained smith would likely have the Blacksmith background as well, which would give them Specialty Crafting as a free feat.
| Stone Dog |
I had a Fighter that I dumped points into Heal, ride, and survival and I called him a Knight Hospitaler. He was acually pretty usefull in Downtime it saved the cleric resourcess and was a huge help when the cleric got downed.
From what it looks like in PF2 you can do the same thing with the fighter here and you won't have completely crippled skills at high level.
You can have some of those trained, kick up some to expert eventually, and the base proficiency bonus lets you be fairly competent at "everyman" sorts of things in the other skills.
I'm hopeful that the fighter will wind up shaking off some of the stigmas from 3.x days of limited skill resources.
| Paradozen |
I'd like to see some stuff for martials that involves leveraging retraining with ease. Trade some feats around to mix up fighting styles or skill expertise with a decent discount on what casters can do regarding time and money.
Also, rituals that aren't just for casters. Maybe some that have rangers or barbarians or monks in mind.
| Unicore |
One thing that looks like it will really help boost exploration mode is the idea that your characters have to commit to the specific purpose they are trying to fill outside of combat, which will mean that a party of 4 can't just have one person who is good at all of the skills doing everything. Fighters will inherently be decent at perception now, so even just being able to say, my fighter stays vigilant, keeping an eye out for trouble will be useful, especially if the rogue has decided to focus on staying in the shadows and avoiding detection instead of keeping their eyes open for trouble.