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It literally needs to consider ALL of those definitions of effort, unfortunately
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HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
Build-optimization complexity and tactical-complexity are considered positives for the higher-crunch subclasses, so long as they don't actually have a lot of power variance. This does require fairly rigorous balance between the high-crunch options, though.
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I definitely agree that martials doing cool things at high levels is desirable. I want mid-teens-level Fighters ripping adamantine bars out of their sockets. I want He-Man used as one of the models for what a really high-level fighter should be like.
Ryumancer
Dragons Are Romance
Yeah. The reason they're all plausible readings is because they're all important. 'Effort' is the crossroad where all of those definitions intersect, in the context of game design.
In regards to this question, though... Tracking a heat mechanic is actually dead simple. As a player or a GM, you can just set aside a die or a few coins or similar and there's your heat tracker. Add one whenever the condition to heat up is met, remove one whenever the condition for that is met, damage bonus equals the amount of heat you have, it's actually pretty low-crunch, low-bookkeeping, which is why I mentioned stuff like stance systems, resource systems, and multiclassing later in the post. The stuff with damage per turn averages and such are something you-the-game-developer have to calculate, rather than you-the-player, and are something only certain parts of your playerbase will even bother to calculate... But bother they will, and thus guides and viability rankings are born. In this case, Heat's just an example on how even small differences in the amount of crunch involved drastically change the viability of a class or subclass due to all sorts of external factors.
As for simply copying over the spell system as fancy moves... Spellcasters aren't exactly complex. Sure, they're marginally more complex than Goodswing guy, and it can be a good idea for a subclass, but it is by no means enough to satisfy players that like a lot of crunch, because anyone who'd be satisfied playing a spellcaster usually already is.
So that brings us to your definition of crunch. System interconnectivity is part of crunch, yes... But it is not the only part of crunch. 'Complexity' and 'number of viable options' are both also factors that need to be considered.
(As an aside, the Duelist class from Pokemon Tabletop United is an excellent example of this type of Heat mechanic.)
HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
I've never seen He-Man - can you provide some specific examples of what you'd like to see? (I have seen gameplay videos of Metal Gear Rising, though.)
*deep sigh*
They are in fact all important. But you know how overusing the word 'average' leads to average-as-in-most common challenges having average-as-in-50/50 success chance, for the type of character most likely to take that sort of challenge (an in-fiction expert), leads to the downright slapstick situation where the world's strongest man has a 50% chance of failing to open a mildly stuck door?
Same problem here. Clarify your specific objection, lest even a well-meaning and cooperative conversation partner do the literal opposite of what you wanted them to.
If you're meeting face-to-face, and have a spare die or a small enough heat range for coins or pebbles to work, and - crucially - the players know this is an option, because I absolutely might've gone through the whole obnoxious erase-and-rewrite routine if I was playing one.
Why not just tell the players my own calculations? D&D is historically terrible at explaining its assumptions, but why would I follow their bad example?
I guess so? It's absolutely not convincing me that crunchlevel is inextricably tied to power, though.
Couple things going on here:
*Flavor, crunchlevel, and powerlevel are three distinct axii. Setting power aside as something I want to equalize, there are presumably a lot of people who would like to play martials with the crunch levels available to casters, and there are definitely a lot of people who would like to play casters with the crunch level available to martials.
*If you want something more crunchy than 5E casters, that's fair, but what are you hoping for? 3.X casters? One of those mech RPGs with stats for every bodypart? I wasn't actually expecting to go higher than spells-as-consumable-heist-gadgets, i.e. Vancian casting.
I actually said interconnectedness for a reason, which is that unlike interconnectivity (the capacity to be connected), interconnectedness means how much something is connected to other stuff. Which I think encapsulates complexity, at least, quite nicely.
Viable option range is also arguably a type of connection, but point taken there.
Huh, never heard of it. I've been disappointed with Pokemon basically since Generation 2 - just expanding the pokedex and doing incredibly superficial plot rehashes instead of following up on the ~7 technological revolutions in Gen 1. Maybe a TRPG would be better for that?
Of the top of my head the Tower scene from the Second Skin episode of Masters Of The Universe is probably the biggest feat of pure strength.
TLDR he rips a tower out of the ground and yeets it directly up into space.
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HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
That sounds considerably more like Superman than I was expecting.
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I mean, He-Man is basically a superhero in a fantasy setting, so that's not that surprising.
Ryumancer
Dragons Are Romance
Despite being the first thing in this reply, it's actually the last thing I'm answering, so pardon me if this is a bit... Well. Trying to boil it down as far as I can...
- The amount of effort required to do something (in this case, to match other classes in power level) will always result in an opportunity cost of some kind.
- Because there are multiple things that count as or require effort, that results in multiple different opportunity costs.
- Because there is a varying level of crunch, the amount of effort of any or all types varies, and thus the opportunity costs vary.
- However, in trying for a variable amount of crunch but consistently equalized power level, you have a varying severity of opportunity cost(s) despite equalized results.
- Because some routes to those results have more severe costs than others, but the results are the same, some routes become less practical than others, and thus, less viable.
- Conversely, there are options which will end up more viable than others, due to their opportunity costs being more manageable, less relevant, or simply nonexistent.
- There is thus a difference in power level (viability) despite the attempts to equalize power level (results), due to differences in the amount of effort needed to achieve that 'average' equalized power level, said level being whatever the developer thought would be balanced.
- As there is a difference in power level (viability), there is a difference in results despite the attempt to equalize such, and so by this logic it is impossible to achieve game balance through 'variable crunch, consistent power level'.
The Heat guy vs Goodswing guy example then played around with trying to vary the results to match the effort required, but found/showcased that even then, the differences between Heat guy and Goodswing guy made equalizing them similarly impossible for many of the same reasons/bullet points as above.
Counterpoint. If you're not playing face to face, then you're usually going to have access to a text chat of some kind, or can still use a die or a stack of coins irl while sitting at your computer. And stuff like Roll20 actually has functions built into their token system to keep track of effect durations or stacks.
I mean, you can, yes. There's nothing stopping you-the-game-developer from doing that. It's just a difference in the stuff a developer has to account for that a player wouldn't necessarily, whereas it seemed to me like you were looking at things from the perspective of a player and not a dev... Or worse, conflating the two.
That's generally what gishes like Cleric, Druid, or PF Magus are for. Or stuff like the dozens of ways you can build a PF Oracle, or whatnot.
There's not much of a difference in terms of 5E casters and 3.X casters, in terms of crunch and playstyle, actually. But in terms of crunch... I guess the best comparison I can make is that Pathfinder feels like being handed a tub of Legos and told to make something interesting, whereas 5E is more like being handed one of those Gundam models that's mostly pre-assembled and only needs paint. The former is overwhelming to some people, while the latter is utterly stifling, and if you're going to try appealing to a range of complexity levels, you're going to need to appeal to both, y'know? You can still give that Gunpla a really high effort paint job and maybe steal a few parts from other models if you're really clever, but personally, the tub of Legos is far more appealing to me.
We're just going to have to agree to disagree on that one, I suppose. The emergent complexity from being able to combo something with half a dozen other possibilities is more of a factor in my eyes than just how many rules something makes use of, hence interconnectivity rather than interconnectedness.
PTU is basically, hmmm... Somewhere between 5E and PF1E in terms of crunch, using d6 pools+modifiers instead of d20+modifiers, and semi-mandatory multiclassing due to classes just being a short feat tree. As a system, there are parts of it that completely flop (Contest rules, and some notoriously underpowered classes and strategies), but overall it's an excellent one. Just... It's designed with the anime in mind moreso than the games. As such, you've got the classes focused on training your pokemon really well... But you've also got classes that expect the trainer to step onto the battlefield and start kicking ass, like Aura Guardian. So always check with your GM to see what kinda game they're planning to run, and keep an eye out for situations where your Pokemon might be able to solve a problem you couldn't!
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HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
I had Roll20 in mind, actually - unless it's changed a lot in the last four years, a character-specific number like that is something you have to keep updated manually, there are a limited number of slots for it on your token and they compete with things like HP and AC, and the button-functions that you can write for things like that aren't super well tutorialized.
Sorry, this is still too distant from the at-hand object level for me to model-check properly. You're not necessarily wrong, but you don't seem intuitively right yet.
Would it be fair to rephrase you as saying 'the sort of crunch I find meaningful is an opportunity for system mastery and thus necessarily also an opportunity for system incompetence, which itself necessarily affects the game's skill floor and/or skill ceiling'?
I think you need to work on not insulting people thoughtlessly.
As for your actual point, I'm pretty sure you're not claiming that devs shouldn't think about their games from the player end. What are you saying?
The least crunchy Cleric is significantly crunchier than the crunchiest available Fighter. It also bakes in several flavor assumptions that not everyone wants.
I disagree less than you might think - but we probably do need to distinguish fixed crunchiness from crunchy optionality. A twelve-step attack resolution subsystem is probably the former, while a hand-building heist plan where you choose tools from a wall of gadgets is more the latter.
Ah, one of those awkwardly-hybridizing-D&D-with-a-popular-media-franchise projects. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon could work great for that, actually, but not the main games. Maybe if the PCs were one trainer's pokemon. (Which could give a neat in-character reason for someone not showing up that week.)
I've heard that Pokethulu is actually pretty good at mimicking how the anime works, incidentally. Can't confirm due to avoiding the anime and not having played it, though the rules are free. Might be something you're interested in?
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I think a lot of the issues come back to this: edition after edition of D&D has operated on the design assumption that magic can do anything but non-casters can only do very mundane things.
When it comes to spellcasting, there's no limit to what can be done. They don't operate by the standards of fantasy fiction: there's no "rules of magic" that limit what's possible, there's no upper bounds of power. You can do anything with spells, all the way up to altering reality itself. No dev ever says "that's too powerful a thing for a spell to do." Gandalf can't do what a D&D wizard does. Harry Dresden can't. Merlin can't. Power far in excess of what you'd usually see magic in fiction being able to do, at least as the usual capability of a protagonist rather than a plot device, is available by default.
But when it comes to fighting skill, they don't operate on the standards of myth or legend. They don't operate on the standards of high fantasy or adventure stories. They don't operate on the standards of action movies or anime. They don't even operate on the standards of "realism" because there are times when what D&D will allow a non-caster to do actually falls short of what people have done in real life. They operate on the standards of mundanity. Anyone without magic is only allowed to be unexceptional and boring things.
grommile
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They kind of do, in that any injury that isn't an imminent death risk is non-impairing.
Sightedjt
Everlasting Flames
I still hold that the issue will never be fixed until martials get to interact with the system on the same mechanical level as casters, especially for out of combat stuff.
Because at the end of the day, you can give all the cool powers you want to them, but until they work like spells on the mechanical level where you can point to them and say "I do this, this thing happens" instead of having to say "May I try to do this" there's always going to be a disconnect. Give martials half damage on miss to match a casters ability to throw out half damage on successful save, give them the ability to just say "I do X physical feat", give them the ability to just say "I can break this magical effect on me or someone or something else with sheer will and muscle power"
Admittedly a second part of the issue that relates is how uninspired a lot of things to solve are: "this is problem A, it comes with a lost of seven spells that fix it, and anything outside of those spells will do anything." Is the enemy.
Because at the end of the day, you can give all the cool powers you want to them, but until they work like spells on the mechanical level where you can point to them and say "I do this, this thing happens" instead of having to say "May I try to do this" there's always going to be a disconnect. Give martials half damage on miss to match a casters ability to throw out half damage on successful save, give them the ability to just say "I do X physical feat", give them the ability to just say "I can break this magical effect on me or someone or something else with sheer will and muscle power"
Admittedly a second part of the issue that relates is how uninspired a lot of things to solve are: "this is problem A, it comes with a lost of seven spells that fix it, and anything outside of those spells will do anything." Is the enemy.
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Sure, but prior to 5E, trying to heal any of that non-impairing injury without magic was basically a joke.
And you'll take plenty of injury, because "defending yourself" is one of those things that D&D thinks is beyond human capability without magic, so you have to just stand there and let people hit you instead of using your fighting skills to block or dodge.
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2e did introduce block and/or parry systems in several books (combat and tactics, Bladesong style in Complete Book of Elves, the various Fencing styles in "A Mighty Fortress", and I think there were parry options in the Swashbuckler (kit for any class) schools in the Red Steel/Savage Coast setting? but it didn't get passed on to 3e, *except* for Neverwinter Nights where they introduced a Parry skill that allowed you to block and counter melee attacks.
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FaeGlade Plural
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That's the case for plenty of fictional characters, especially one's with notable amounts of heroic willpower. Who may be impaired, but are then still perfectly able to fight, land that final blow, etc.
More importantly, it's not a special power that Martials have over Spellcasters. Spellcasters also treat any injury that isn't an imminent death as non-impairing.
It's a result of the game rules, where HP damage does not impair you - but plenty of other things can. And it's not like Martials can't be Stunned, Paralyzed, Frightened, or any number of other things - they are just as vulnerable as Spellcasters to that, getting no special protection against such effects.
So sure - a sword blow that only deals HP damage doesn't impair a Fighter.
But neither will it impair a Wizard - other than possibly breaking Concentration, but it's not like the injury prevents the casting of further spells.
But a sword blow that also happens to Stun does impair a Fighter.
You can try to argue that it's more likely to impair a Wizard - but at that point you've both deviated from your original arguments, and also ignore that saving throws are not equally distributed (sure if it's a Con save, the Fighter gets that natively, but a lot of Spellcasters take that save via a feat to maintain Concentration, and if it's another save who knows whether the Fighter even has it).
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Speaking of this, it should also be kept in mind that the 5e PHB clarifies that player HP can be interpreted in many different ways depending on your personal preference/power fantasy. Maybe it's your willpower, allowing you to soldier on no matter the injuries; it could be your fighter skillfully absorbing blows with his armor and reducing impact; it could be a rogue's reflexes, representing his ability to dodge blows by a hair's breadth.
None of this is tied to class, HP is a very shallow mechanic and what it actually means is more or less left to the player. It could be your PC's luck if that's what you want.
Mike "Shouting hands back on is dumb" Mearls should have read his own goddamned book.
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As an optional variant rule from a splatbook, sure. But in most RPGs, that's just how the basic combat mechanics function.
Every d20 System game that I've every seen that wasn't D&D or Pathfinder, whether from WOTC or under the OGL, gave characters a Defense bonus that increased as they went up in level. Nearly every non-d20 game that I've ever seen bases the difficulty of hitting someone on how good they are at fighting or dodging, either with an opposed defense roll or by using the target's appropriate skill to set the difficulty of the attack roll. Most of them also make it a factor in damage, such as increasing the damage of the attack based on how much the attack roll succeeded by.
D&D is really the odd one out in this regard, in the entire TTRPG industry. And what's really galling is that this would be easy to fix. Hell, it was fixed in 4E, and then un-fixed in 5E for the sake of nostalgia. It would have been easy to just add proficiency to AC like it adds to everything else that you're proficient in.
It used to be pretty clearly tied to physical injury by the nature of the mechanics. Like I said before, non-magical healing was nearly useless. In AD&D, you recovered one hit point per day of bed rest, so you were looking at months of recovery time without healing spells. In 3E it was one hit point per level per day, so recovery still took weeks, and First Aid only restored 1d4 hit points once a day. If you were just tiring yourself out, as some people would advocate, then it wouldn't take days to recover your stamina.
With 5E all the hit points are recovered with a night's sleep, so it seems like it doesn't really involve drawing any blood, and the "tiring yourself out" interpretation makes more sense. Which is ironic, for a game created by Mike Mearls of all people. The guy who said that the warlord was a stupid class because "you can't shout your hand back on" made a game where you can nap your hand back on instead.
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That take was super dumb because like, it's such a cool heroic moment? The heroes seem down for the count, bleeding, tired and broken.. until one of them stands up in defiance and inspires the rest to hold on a second longer and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. That's just quintessential epic fantasy stuff, and the fact it's not 'healing magic' but just the sheer will of heroes makes it even cooler! Why would you not want that?! I don't know what the fuck he was on about lol.
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Mike Mearls is a dumb asshole for numerous reasons (including doing terrible shit in real life that trumps anything that we're discussing here), but given his design choices, I think that he's very much a nostalgia-driven grognard who wanted a return to tradition and one of the things that he defines as "tradition" is caster supremacy.
HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
It might be one of those not-everyone-knows-the-source-media things, like... literally the entire sword and sorcery genre actually, but the only inspiring battle speeches I remember not cringing at were in contexts of mustering or rallying, not getting up after injury.
And that's a fair range - Henry V, Legend in Worm, Tanya Degurchaff, and Lord Hunger in A Simple Transaction I, just off the top of my head, and Tanya alone is enough to want it available - but I understand the dissatisfaction with 'the benefit of having a commander is that they shout at you and you can suddenly do things you couldn't before', in games that don't otherwise simulate decision paralysis, shock, lack of coordination, or difficulty self-motivating. It feels disconnected from the fiction, in much the same way squad-buffing bard music only makes sense if it's magical, whereas an army having wardrummers seems perfectly sensible.
(And an RPG about depressed soldiers going crazy as they shoot their way through the Call of Cthulhu monster manual might find 'CO who shouts at people which makes them better at stuff' a perfectly sensible character class.)
And that's a fair range - Henry V, Legend in Worm, Tanya Degurchaff, and Lord Hunger in A Simple Transaction I, just off the top of my head, and Tanya alone is enough to want it available - but I understand the dissatisfaction with 'the benefit of having a commander is that they shout at you and you can suddenly do things you couldn't before', in games that don't otherwise simulate decision paralysis, shock, lack of coordination, or difficulty self-motivating. It feels disconnected from the fiction, in much the same way squad-buffing bard music only makes sense if it's magical, whereas an army having wardrummers seems perfectly sensible.
(And an RPG about depressed soldiers going crazy as they shoot their way through the Call of Cthulhu monster manual might find 'CO who shouts at people which makes them better at stuff' a perfectly sensible character class.)
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I'll just take a moment to say that I am pro-Warlord. Heck, 3.5 even has the proto-Warlord that is the Marshal (and arguably also the White Raven discipline in Tome of Battle). The main issue that the Marshal had in practice, which the Warlord fixed, was a lack of active abilities. Personally, I'd love to try having them gain a Grant Attack ability 1/day at level 6, with one more use per day every four levels after that. It's a particularly popular capability of the Warlord, and slots right into three "dead levels" in the progression (and one other level).
This makes me think of how in 3.x, one of the little details that really lends itself to description is the difference between normal AC and Touch AC... and honestly, it would absolutely make sense for a warrior who was strong enough to deal half their regular damage if they hit Touch AC but not regular AC.
This makes me think of how in 3.x, one of the little details that really lends itself to description is the difference between normal AC and Touch AC... and honestly, it would absolutely make sense for a warrior who was strong enough to deal half their regular damage if they hit Touch AC but not regular AC.
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Reminds me of a feat from the 3e Oriental Adventures stuff that basically said if you miss while using Power Attack, but only because you used power attack, you still deal normal damage.
In general though, I still think Tome of Battle/Path of War is the way to go for Martials. Maybe rethemed a bit to have some schools that sound less Wuxia and more like the way D&D warriors are Just murderblenders in the novels and lore.
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I just wish Tome of Battle and Path of War were better balanced with each other! I'd gladly throw them all together in the same pot if it were easier to use them together.
...Also, IMO in the original Tome of Battle, really only the Swordsage is all that Asian-feeling. I have to wonder if the book would've been received any differently if the first discipline alphabetically wasn't the glaringly supernatural Desert Wind, but something more in the Charles Atlas Superpower range of things like Iron Heart.