[Quests] Why People Never Pick "Fighter" or "Thief", and Should Anything be Done About it

Background Information

This discussion started with this, over in the [NSFW] Quest Interest Check thread:

The meat of the debate starts with this post.

What is the Question?
There are actually several questions here:

1. What makes a character a Fighter or Thief?
2. Why do people generally choose other character types?
3. Should we do anything about this?
4. If yes, what?

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I'm too sleepy to put more here tonight.

Spoiler: Tagging people related to the original discussion

• Smuthunter
• powerofvoid
• Nekraa
• iamnuff
• Oni
• Guile
• kinglugia
• pepperjack
• Heaven Canceler
• Mu-Sensei
• Valette-Serafina
• macdjord
• SwiftRosenthal

 

It's because wizards can go "Fuck you" to both fighters and thieves and use/make spells that causes those people to be redundant.

 

Just to weigh in on the terminology discussion: rather than "psion" (which as iamnuff noted gives the wrong impression entirely), the punchy phrase you want for "supernatural martial artist" is probably "ki adept".

 

People choose wizards because they are lead to believe that the magic is more effective, more applicable, more glamorous, or if nothing else potentially earthshaking.
If one wanted to make being a straight wizard less attractive than being a different thing, they might base the scope and ease of magic on things like the rituals at the player's disposal in the Unreal World RPG (but nerf Hunter's Request to Catch A Fox), and on spiritualism steeped medical traditions, but with actual spirits.

 

The problem is, that, frankly, magic - at least any type of magic that resembles D&D or HP - is straight-up better. It is better the same way guns are better. In any fair fight between buff dudes with swords and those who can reshape matter with their thoughts, guess what? Mages gonna win.
You can try to make the fighters and rogues competitive by giving them their own bullshit reality-hax powers. But really? That's magic. It may be sword-themed, it may not be called magic, and it may come from 'superior skill' rather than hand-waving and willow bark, but if you're cutting solid stone, travelling from place to place without passing through the space in between, concealing objects larger than your torso under your cloak, or stealing the air from their lungs, you are doing magic. And if the battles are going to be decided by reality-warping supernatural powers anyway, why would I not go with the class that actually specializes in that?

 

I can safely say as someone who played many years of DnD pen and paper, there are PLENTY of people who pick warriors/paladins and thieves/rogues.
Plenty of warriors and paladins in WoW... and that's the limit of my experience with the concept. I've just never noticed a shortage.

 

I GMed Exalted. Everyone is mandated to take Fighter-level, unless you want to go splat. If you go Sorcery, it is because you want more flexibility... but Exalted has supernatural Martial Arts, which is Fighter's version of Sorcery. Kinda.

 

While this was been posted why too many times on Gitp, it is relevant to the discussion here.


In video games and MMORPGs every class already restricted to what was programmed in. With most abilities just being bigger numbers from previous abilities.

 

Part of the problem is that people automatically seem to think about D&D wizards and Clerics and such which also implies the "Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards" problem. The wizards get lots of cool powers that do everything the other guys do while the fighters and thieves are stuck just getting bigger numbers which don't help anyways because the wizard does everything better. Off the top of my head, D&D wizards can learn spells like "Detect Traps" and suddenly the party rogue is that much more redundant.

One solution to this is to do what Exalted does and link magic to different abilities so the thief has magic that makes him a better thief, the fighter has magic that makes him a better fighter, etc. The wizard, meanwhile, maybe gets to pick and choose which types of magic he uses but has no ability outside of those schools, so you're forced to choose between being a summoner or throwing fireballs or crafting illusions and so on.

 

As I see it, there are two reasons to limit a PC to having only a subset of the available "schools of magic":

• So other PCs can get time in the spotlight, in an MMO or TRPG
• For replay value, in a CRPG

Quests have neither of these things.

 

There's a third one too: to force the players to improvise and accomplish their goals with a limited skill set. If all you can do is throw fireballs then the players are challenged to use fireballs intelligently to solve problems that fireballs aren't meant to solve.

 

I disgree. Limiting the kinds of magic any one person can do increases the total variety of cool things on display, because some kinds of magic are inevitably better at certain tasks than other kinds.

There are a dozen ways to use a necromancer's skillset to "heal", but if you have an actual healer it's worthless. An artificer can make an item to do almost anything, given time and money, but if you can take that time and money and invest in a spell that does the same thing, what's the point?

By allowing players to pick the most applicable tool out of their Big Box of Bullshit, you've made many interesting but not ideal solutions irrelevant.

 

Limiting the amount of magic a PC can learn is not the same thing as limiting the variety of magic a PC can learn.

 

I... don't grasp the distinction you're trying to make, when we're talking about

Necromancy and regular healing generally don't mix. You can fudge or it make it irrelevant for some purposes, but you'd have to use a entirely different magical paradigm to accomplish actual healing.

 

Cure [FOO] Wounds and Inflict [FOO] Wounds were originally the same spell.

... or were you talking about actual Necromancy? (i.e., getting information by talking to dead people)

 

The idea that "narrower" spellcasting classes like the Beguiler and Dread Necromancer are better for the game than generalists like the Wizard does seem to be the prevailing school of thought, yes.

 

I don't know how relevant this is, but a while back, I ran a quest where players picked a "fighter" option for their MC. (Not on the SB/SV/QQ cluster, so no clue on relevance to the local culture.) It's dead now, but I think part of the key is not to call things "wizards." The word wizard has implications of breadth and depth that "fighter" just doesn't, and players are looking for breadth and depth in character generation. If you say "Wizard, Fighter, Rogue," who's going to pick Fighter? Chumps, that's who. But call the options "Pyromancer, Knight, Assassin," and you're implying a much reduced level of breadth and depth to the magic user, and a higher level of starting skill and ability to the warrior and the skillmonkey. Okay, he works with fire, and maybe he has some breadth in his talents there (melt locks, burn towns, heat swimming pools), but the Knight and Assassin presumably have some versatility in their own skill sets. The Knight knows how to sword, he also knows courtly manners, maybe he can call on his station, etc. Assassin knows stealth, poison, locks, information gathering, etc.

That's what I think, anyway. You say "Wizard," people hear "Charm, Magic Missile, Ghost Sound, etc etc etc." You say "Fighter," people hear "Great Cleave."

 

I'd prefer a martial artist myself, if only due to the fact that they're always armed (unless they're literally disarmed) Plus...I like supernatural kung-fu

 

One Major Problem that has been mentioned is that Magic becomes the key to everything. A skilled wizard in many crunch Settings can basically learn anything whenever he wants. Detect Trap has been mentioned, summon giant Monster, huh the Barbarian is kinda useless as a fighter? Rain of Fire/Ice/Whatever... huh the Bowshooting guy is really not that useful compared to that etc...

What I personally prefer when thinking of D&D is the fluff style wizards. The type that really sacrifice stuff for their cosmic power. You know, they can warp reality and kill you with their mind, but a stick over the head and they are out because they don't work on game-physics. Surprise them while they try to use their spells and they end up with an Eldritch Monster in their own face, or worse. Hit them with an arrow and they bleed out like nothing. etc... I read Dragonlance and that is what I feel a wizard should be like. Cosmic powers aren't impossible on the high Levels, but if you get hit while distracted, bad luck.

There is also a distinct lack of Counters to Magic in many settings. If there is a spell to detect traps, you would think that People invent protections to that spell and force People to check with mundane skills for example.

Of course there is the Problem that in High Fantasy a Wizard often has so much Magic tricks that if this way to do it doesn't work, he can just try something else. Unlock Magic doesn't work? Blast the door with a firebolt, or freeze it and make it break that way etc... Really nothing short of a Anti-Magic field can stop a creative wizard with the intelligence to use his powers effectively.

I think the amount of Special powers a non-straight up Magic character Needs is equivalent to how far away the wizard is from the "Squishy easily killed" type that has spells blow up in his face if he gets distracted etc... If he is high Fantasy, you basically Need the Thief/Warrior/Archer type characters to be super-duper to stay relevant.

 

Yeah, I know that counter-Magic exists, I just haven't seen them very often in fiction, quests or much of anywhere. It just seems to be uncommon to the Point where I question how some People managed to get into high positions like King or Duke without having some way to protect from the random old wizard getting angry and killing him.

I feel that the power of spells should be equivalent to how far a character spreads himself. If they just grab stuff from all over the place they should have a harder time since they lack much deeper knowledge of each School. Sacrifice power for versatility would be much more suitable for a fair Setting.

I agree, the ability to just take a single skill like summoning and basically having Access to everything forever is broken.

I have never played D&D myself, but I absorbed some stuff through osmosis and fanfiction that involved game mechanics.

The important Thing to remember is that a Wizard (Or most Magic using classes.) has Access to a great number of spells that do anything from creating matter to stopping time.

Rogues, Warriors etc... get better knifes, swords and Warhammers.