Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

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If we're being real, all the weaboo sword books do in a balance sense is a) give martial classes a few more cool ways to hit thing with club so they don't die of boredom and b) hopefully make them more effective so they're not outshined by a druid's animal shape or a summoned monster so much.

They're still not going to outshine the big castys because the main reason said casty's are considered high ranking isn't just raw power; it's both power AND versatility- and without magic items, your regular 3.5 fighter or barb won't reach that sort of level.
 
I miss playing the original version of Paranoia. That's a game where you really don't (and shouldn't) get too attached to your characters- even though they have multiple clones available. A session of Paranoia is a failure if no one dies, and one of the most fun sessions I had was a total party kill of all six clones of every character before even coming close to arriving at the mission briefing.
 
The-Patriarchy said:
I miss playing the original version of Paranoia. That's a game where you really don't (and shouldn't) get too attached to your characters- even though they have multiple clones available. A session of Paranoia is a failure if no one dies, and one of the most fun sessions I had was a total party kill of all six clones of every character before even coming close to arriving at the mission briefing.
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I think my most memorable death was dying in a vehicle crash. I wasn't able to strap myself in because my arms were both broken.

Paranoia was great.
 
Sable said:
I think my most memorable death was dying in a vehicle crash. I wasn't able to strap myself in because my arms were both broken.

Paranoia was great.
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That's a game I've wanted to play a round of for a while.

I'd also comment on ToB classes, but it's been covered well enough. Yes, the martials are easily among the best of their kind. But they'd still lose IMO to a caster of their level once 2nd level spells come in. Wall of thorns and force comes to mind.
 
Adamska said:
That's a game I've wanted to play a round of for a while.

I'd also comment on ToB classes, but it's been covered well enough. Yes, the martials are easily among the best of their kind. But they'd still lose IMO to a caster of their level once 2nd level spells come in. Wall of thorns and force comes to mind.
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My GM and I talk about martials vs. casters a lot (it's our standard "shooting the shit over a beer" subject, and yes we are that fucking nerdy), and so far we have found only one solution that we think might work without requiring a full redesign of the system. Casters' problem is being too versatile compared to martials. Unfortunately, making martials more versatile usually results in them playing like casters, which was not our objective. So we thought about capping the upcasting benefits to only one or two levels (so a fireball would only be upcasted to a maximum of 5th level, dealing 10d8 fire damage), and somehow giving martials a better way to outlast casters and to power through things.

In short, better saving throws across the board and/or the ability to choose to have advantage on a saving throw X times per long rest (a nerfed version of Legendary Resistance) or choose to take half damage/no damage like in Evasion. Also, more Action Surge-type abilities in general. Casters can cheat the action economy something fierce: a Wizard can remove/disable up to a dozen threats with a single action, even if they can only do it a few times before a long rest. Martials should be able to keep going without performance loss with short rests or no rests.

Would that incur a whole lot of rebalancing? Probably. But it's not like 5e (or 3.5e for that matter) is balanced to begin with.
 
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Honestly the only real way to balance out casters in 3.x is to go 4e gimp magic.
Make spells harder to come by and really currate that spell list. Make it less reliable - add a high degree of randomness to the cast. Make casting expensive - to memorize spells a wizard has to snort residuum. Add backlash. Add misfire. Have memorization have a chance to fail. Make it so every spell has to be researched - spell books are illegible to all but the writer (which also means every time a wizard dies its like a library burns down). Have a 'magic economy' - the more a spell gets cast, the less powerful it is.
Turn it from something reliable that players can plan on to a complete yolo-gamble.

You can also do some "lore-based" tuning. I had a mult-shot in a post-magical apocalypse world where the people decided they had enough of wizards ending the world with Detect City and bucket of ice, so being seen casting would get everyone to focus on murdering you - and towns people at best would refuse to trade with you would inform on you to the Inquisition. At worst they might decide to form a murder mob and hope they had more people than you had spells and get you before you could end the world.
The Raven Queen was also re-lored so that her husband/consort was he God of Arcane Magic who was killed by the most recent OP wizard, so if you cast a spell greater than... I think it was level 2 (unless you purposely lowered the spell power) there was a chance that the grieving goddess would rip open a hole in reality to send her servants to rip you and your friends apart. Summon Monster or other persistent effects increased the odds of that happening.
Wands and Scrolls were still kosher so casters were still useful in combat, but it made busting out a spell require some thought and for them to terminate the effects as quickly as possible.

(the campaign started with the sorcerer, being an initate spell caster, being given the choice of execution or being put into a 'suicide squad' with a cleric (who secretly had wizard levels, and passed his wizard spells off as divine), a barbarian, and a ranger. Their small quest escalated and climaxed in them learning the Raven Queen, mad with grief, had busted notAcerak out of hell to resurrect her husband, and this ending up going about as well as you'd expect it to go. The end result was the sorcerer ascending to godhood as the new Goddess of Arcane Magic, the cleric being her Exarch and effectively casting wish to restore the world's arcane-blasted deadzones (after which the Sorceror-goddess made Wish illegal). [and the barbarian, who died buying time for the Sorceror finish her ascension, being judged 'totally radical and sufficiently sicknasty' by Moradin thereby atoning for her people's ancestral dishonor an gaining not just herself but all of their previously wandering dead admittance to Val Hallah, and the Ranger going off to the be the king of the forest and like fuck some dryads or something; the player had dropped out about 1/3 of the way through, so the Ranger spend most of the adventure as an NPC with occasional Multple personality disorder when we'd have a visitor.])
 
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Hey guys, I've got a fullproof way to balance out magic casters. Want to here it? Here it is....

Go play 5'th edition dibshit. 3.5 is unbalanced, own it
 
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Ghostse said:
Honestly the only real way to balance out casters in 3.x is to go 4e gimp magic.
Make spells harder to come by and really currate that spell list. Make it less reliable - add a high degree of randomness to the cast. Make casting expensive - to memorize spells a wizard has to snort residuum. Add backlash. Add misfire. Have memorization have a chance to fail. Make it so every spell has to be researched - spell books are illegible to all but the writer (which also means every time a wizard dies its like a library burns down). Have a 'magic economy' - the more a spell gets cast, the less powerful it is.
Turn it from something reliable that players can plan on to a complete yolo-gamble.

You can also do some "lore-based" tuning. I had a mult-shot in a post-magical apocalypse world where the people decided they had enough of wizards ending the world with Detect City and bucket of ice, so being seen casting would get everyone to focus on murdering you - and towns people at best would refuse to trade with you would inform on you to the Inquisition. At worst they might decide to form a murder mob and hope they had more people than you had spells and get you before you could end the world.
The Raven Queen was also re-lored so that her husband/consort was he God of Arcane Magic who was killed by the most recent OP wizard, so if you cast a spell greater than... I think it was level 2 (unless you purposely lowered the spell power) there was a chance that the grieving goddess would rip open a hole in reality to send her servants to rip you and your friends apart. Summon Monster or other persistent effects increased the odds of that happening.
Wands and Scrolls were still kosher so casters were still useful in combat, but it made busting out a spell require some thought and for them to terminate the effects as quickly as possible.
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If you want to keep it simple and true to the origins of the game, you could simply give martials followers by level. Back when 3.5e was still current, my GM experimented with that for a couple short campaigns. Giving the Fighter and Paladin a couple Warriors (the NPC class) 3 levels below them to boss around in a fight made things very interesting and opened up a lot of tactical possibilities. On the other hand, the player had to be quick on their feet when it came to their turn, since they were effectively controlling multiple characters.


That Guy George said:
Hey guys, I've got a fullproof way to balance out magic caster. What to here it? Here it goes....

Go play 5'th edition dibshit. 3.5 is unbalanced, own it
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Look at this moron over here, implying 5e isn't avowedly unbalanced.

Shit, it's probably even more unbalanced than 3.5e. In 3.5 you could, with a lot of splats, create some pretty silly martial builds. In 5e you're stuck with whatever archetype you're using, while the Wizard is still collecting spells like they're pokemon.

Besides, I was talking about 3.5e just as much as 5e. Some of us just like playing the guy with the sword. I'm already a nerd who deals with arcane knowledge in real life (seriously, most people see structural engineering like it's a dark art), why would I want to play a wimpy wizard?
 
Dunsparce said:
3.5 is an entirely different system from AD&D, so any experience prior to 2003 doesn't matter. The 3.5 community has long made a tier list for all base classes in the game, Wizard, Cleric, and Druid are tier 1. Sorcerer and Psion are tier 2. The ToB classes are all in Tier 3, alongside classes like Bard. All other martial classes are in tiers 4 and 5, so they are quite a bit stronger than them.

This is a tier system where people vote and give arguments/counter-arguments for tiering, and the large majority of 3.5 Players don't see ToB as overpowering, you are in the minority. At-will abilities don't matter if almost all of them are single-target damage abilities, aka what any non-ToB martial does when they swing their weapon, or even casters when they swing a weapon, the ToB classes just deal a lot more damage with it.

Edit: Also, Warlock is another 3.5 class that can use its spells an arbitrary number of times per day, and it is also tier 3
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You obviously haven't done a lot of research into ToB. There are quite a bit of forum threads dedicated to talking about the classes. One of the things that makes them broken is the per encounter which was brought to Saga and 4th Edition as I mentioned.
That Guy George said:
Hey guys, I've got a fullproof way to balance out magic caster. What to here it? Here it goes....

Go play 5'th edition dibshit. 3.5 is unbalanced, own it
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5th is great for low magic worlds, it's terrible in high fantasy. Doesn't seem to work in a Supers game, it's not bad for science fiction.
Jet Fuel Johnny said:
To limit spell casters I found the best thing to do was "Max spells in spellbook by Intelligence" and make it take longer to memorize spells.

Then by REAL careful about what spells they get access to.
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That's pretty much how they were like in AD&D limited spells and usually limited spells known. Bonus spells for spellcasters didn't become a thing until 3.X. Before that only priests could get bonus spells. Some groups though would home brew rules that Illusionists could get bonus spells since they had limited spells already and after sixth level they started to get pretty bad. The Shadowcat spell found in the Wizard Compendium one or two was always useful though.
 
Anonymus Fluhre said:
You obviously haven't done a lot of research into ToB. There are quite a bit of forum threads dedicated to talking about the classes. One of the things that makes them broken is the per encounter which was brought to Saga and 4th Edition as I mentioned.
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Most of the people that said it was broken just read the book or learned about it second-hand and never actually played with the class(which the tier list people actually did). Which was most people when it first came out in 2007, but it's been 14 years since then.

And as someone who still mostly only plays 3.5 even today, the ToB classes I have played with, both as my own characters and as other people in my party, have NEVER broke the game, no matter how min-maxed they were. It was always the casters that did. I keep saying this but you keep ignoring the main point:

MOST MANEUVERS ARE MELEE-RANGE, SINGLE-TARGET, DAMAGE BOOSTERS.

They just let you do what the Fighter already did but better. You keep bringing up the action economy, without talking about the actual abilities that are 1/encounter. At any-given Maneuver level, looking at Spells and Psionic Powers of the same level, the maneuvers are significantly weaker, enough so that being once per encounter instead of once per day still doesn't make them stronger, so casters(and psions) still overshadow them at any given level range outside of the very first couple of levels. Not to mention, with only a few exceptions, the effects of maneuvers do not increase with your level like spells do. If a low-level maneuver adds 2d6 extra damage to you melee attack, it will only ever do that much more. With the right spell selection, a Wizard can get use out of many level 1 spells in the late game, due to increased duration and/or effectiveness.
 
Dunsparce said:
Most of the people that said it was broken just read the book or learned about it second-hand and never actually played with the class(which the tier list people actually did). Which was most people when it first came out in 2007, but it's been 14 years since then.

And as someone who still mostly only plays 3.5 even today, the ToB classes I have played with, both as my own characters and as other people in my party, have NEVER broke the game, no matter how min-maxed they were. It was always the casters that did. I keep saying this but you keep ignoring the main point:

MOST MANEUVERS ARE MELEE-RANGE, SINGLE-TARGET, DAMAGE BOOSTERS.

They just let you do what the Fighter already did but better. You keep bringing up the action economy, without talking about the actual abilities that are 1/encounter. At any-given Maneuver level, looking at Spells and Psionic Powers of the same level, the maneuvers are significantly weaker, enough so that being once per encounter instead of once per day still doesn't make them stronger, so casters(and psions) still overshadow them at any given level range outside of the very first couple of levels. Not to mention, with only a few exceptions, the effects of maneuvers do not increase with your level like spells do. If a low-level maneuver adds 2d6 extra damage to you melee attack, it will only ever do that much more. With the right spell selection, a Wizard can get use out of many level 1 spells in the late game, due to increased duration and/or effectiveness.
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That was my experience playing with the ToB classes as well. They were fun, they were more powerful than a "normal", non-ridiculously optimized Fighter, and they certainly offered some interesting variety in things to do (hence why they were fun), but they weren't anywhere near broken.

Meanwhile, one of my friends was running one of the prestige classes from Complete Psionic and I don't know if it was just his build (he loved himself some combos) or the class itself, but that shit was just plain busted.
 
5E is definitely better than 3.5E when it comes to the martial/caster balance.

That being said, you're still damning with faint praise as 5E moves the slider back to around where it was at 2E -- where casters eventually outstripped martial classes, it was just a longer, harder slog.

3.5E on the other hand nerfed martials hard with the way base attack and multiple attacks worked. Both 1E and 2E gave the warrior class (fighters, paladins, and rangers) multiple attacks and weapon specialization (for fighters only). However, multiple swings were still at 'full bonus', as opposed to 3.5E where each attack was at a cumulative -5 penalty.
 
Corn Flakes said:
That was my experience playing with the ToB classes as well. They were fun, they were more powerful than a "normal", non-ridiculously optimized Fighter, and they certainly offered some interesting variety in things to do (hence why they were fun), but they weren't anywhere near broken.

Meanwhile, one of my friends was running one of the prestige classes from Complete Psionic and I don't know if it was just his build (he loved himself some combos) or the class itself, but that shit was just plain busted.
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I have to third this sentiment after you seconded it. The ToB classes were not broken in any way, shape, or form. If anything, fighters, samurai, and the like were broken in the other way, as in so brokenly awful only a fool would play them more than once.
 
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Boosting martial classes was difficult. Luckily, I play with people who are spergs or become spergs out of fun.

We did shit like change the amount of attacks by level (Fighters start getting multiple attacks at level 3 (+3/+1) and every 3 levels another (8th level = +8/+5+/+2) and if the casters and rogues and faggoty bards don't like that a fighter gets 7 attacks at level 20 they can eat shit with their spells and other abilities as a spoon. Specialists get extra attacks at the +5, but casters NEVER get additional attacks. Ever.

We also changed their saves.

Strength is limited to martial being above 18. (Racial bonuses can boost you above for 1/2 Orcs only)

Now for the REAL kicker. This one is a door kicker that makes people REEEEE!

Hit point adjustment

Only MARTIALS get a Con bonus to HP greater than +2. Everyone else can eat a dick.
Only MARTIALS get additional HD past level 9. That's right, not specialists (rogues, bards), not mages, not bards, not divine. They cap at 9+2, 9+1, 9+3 respectively. With NO CON BONUS. Enjoy the taste of that dick.


Casters find themselves with spells limited by Int/Cha/Whatever, in their max amount of spells known. Spells per day doesn't get a bonus unless you're divine and in good standing or better with your God. No athiest or agnostic clerics. No God, no divine abilities.

We've got a few more, most of which, as you can tell, are cribbed from 1E.

Sure, it nerfs the fuck out of the casters, BUT, I apply those rules to the bad guys too.

We also do "Chance to learn spell" and some chance of spell failure when cast. (Sorry, every spell requires a concentration check, blow that check, roll a Will save or take 1d4 points of damage per level of the spell you just blew)

It slows down combat sometimes, but you know what, my players are fine with it.
 
That Guy George said:
Hey guys, I've got a fullproof way to balance out magic caster. What to here it? Here it goes....

Go play 5'th edition dibshit. 3.5 is unbalanced, own it
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Hex, Bonus Action Scorching Ray, Eldritch Blast, Action Surge Eldritch Blast.

Also I saw from a certain grifting lawyer that Paizo did a fucky-wucky, what'd they do this time?
 
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Anonymus Fluhre said:
You obviously haven't done a lot of research into ToB. There are quite a bit of forum threads dedicated to talking about the classes. One of the things that makes them broken is the per encounter which was brought to Saga and 4th Edition as I mentioned.
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Only thing obvious here is you're collecting some of the worst hot takes on here repeatedly as of late. I also know given I've read ToB that this statement only comes from someone who hasn't, since you'd have noticed that most maneuvers are single target, and don't advance damage or save wise compared to spells.

Nine times out of ten it either just adds more damage, bypasses defense the one time, and said effects are only one one target. You also sacrifice your full attack too. There's a rare few that can hit more than one guy, but they're pretty rare and in mainly one single school, desert wind.

I've played with and as ToB classes for years, and at no point did they come close to matching casters. Hell, a good barbarian build can still outpace them at times. I know I felt as such with my Warblade compared to him at times, even with my bullshit build.

Very curious if you think psions are broken too since while I've never seriously cracked open that book, I've seen them in action, and they run out of steam a lot quicker.than casters.
 
derpherp2 said:
Hex, Bonus Action Scorching Ray, Eldritch Blast, Action Surge Eldritch Blast.

Also I saw from a certain grifting lawyer that Paizo did a fucky-wucky, what'd they do this time?
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They might be referring to the stuff starting here


For a possible sideline bit of TT drama an alcoholic robot posted that Evil Hat seems to be attempting some changes to their kickstarters

 
Morethanabitfoolish said:
They might be referring to the stuff starting here


For a possible sideline bit of TT drama an alcoholic robot posted that Evil Hat seems to be attempting some changes to their kickstarters

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They hired the faggot that bitched about being yelled at?
Why in the fuck are they this retarded?

Also they fucked up PF2? How? That system was so insular and simplistic the only way to fuck it up would be power creep.
I stop paying attention to this shit barring pf2builder and everythings fucked, and now I'm hearing WH40k is also fuuuuuucked.
 
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