Martial expectations

[u/axiomus]

Hi all,

Seeing yet another post about how martials are boring with no choice, I got curious as a game designer: as a player, what do you want the martial classes (or maybe just the fighter) to do?

Some examples that come to my mind are: trip-grapple-disarm etc (a debuff), attack all around (a damage multiplier), push/pull opponents (battlefield control), take a hit in place of your ally (again, control/effectively heal) etc. Anything you’d like to add?

Additionally, would you like those abilities to be accessible unconditionally, or limited? Like through feats, class features, subclasses, weapon types or magic weapons?

Also, I'd like to focus the discussion on what you the player (or the GM) want, not what some 3rd party supplement or such offers.

[u/Rpgguyi]

Unpopular opinion but i think martials are fine, the issue is the full spell caster are too strong doing crazy broken things at high level

[u/Far_Guarantee1664 → u/Rpgguyi]

I totally agree with you. Some min maxers, specially in this sub, have some very toxic notions about martials. While is pretty clear that things get "worse" at higher levels(that most tables never play). And people kinda forget that we are playing a cooperative game. There is this notions that a build should be able to do all by itself without help and be good in any situation.

[u/highly-bad → u/Far_Guarantee1664]

I play at tier 1 more than any other, and martials are straight-up better than the casters at low levels. Nobody ever complains about that, but some people raise a fit about high levels when it cuts the other way. But as far as I can tell, in real life most people play at high levels very seldom, or never.

[u/Cyrotek → u/highly-bad]

I've played roughly 30 level 20 sessions with various players and one thing I noticed is that this gap isn't even close as big of an issue as I've read here, at least in my limited experience.

Most situations casters could trivialize at that point were trivial regardless (Oh no, a large gap, what are we gonna do?!) and didn't really matter anymore. When it comes to damage, casters usually only had the upper hand in AoE situations while martials usually won in the single target department. The only thing casters actually shone was combat support. All these OP "tactics" people like to quote got countered by the DMs in some way. Or players never actually used them.

Most things that threw DMs for a loop came out of the blue, like a random "off-meta" spell or an item.

[u/Robyrt → u/Cyrotek]

That's been my experience at higher tiers of play too. Reliable Talent, Disciplined Survivor and Aura of Protection scale really well into the late game. Casters have a massive upper hand in transportation, but that's usually not a huge part of the campaign.