Building An Even Betterer D&Dish Fighter

This video on D&D fighters popped on my feed, and since I’ve engaged in quite a bit of fighter design over the years—and continue to do so—I gave it a watch.

Most of the commentary for the first ten or so minutes seems to pertain to 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, where fireball damage wasn’t capped at 10d6 and wizards could memorize nearly 60 spells over twenty levels (as opposed to less than 40 in 2nd Edition), after which Pundit gets around to pitching his take on the class.

But, before I address that, I want to examine other “official” fighter iterations from the editions that matter, as I think it is useful to know what’s been done before (and how it failed).

In 2nd Edition, the fighter was both fairly boring and underwhelming, his only unique features being weapon specialization, something I don’t think fighters had in 1st Edition (though there might have been some odd weapon mastery rule tucked into another book from that era), and automatically attracting various other warriors or “men-at-arms”.

Weapon specialization requires you to spend extra proficiency slots on a single weapon to get +1 to hit and +2 damage, as well as getting extra attacks sooner than others. Useful, but it only applies to a specific weapon, meaning it could become less useful or even a waste if you find a magic weapon that doesn’t line up with your choice, or decide to switch weapons later.

Attracting followers only matters if you both hit 9th-level and build a castle, because in Dungeons & Dragons “lord” is apparently a title automatically conferred to every 9th-level fighter—lineage, connections, territory controlled, etc be damned—and no matter what you actually did during your time adventuring you somehow become famous and people want to serve you.

Well, so long as you also have a castle: no castle, no deal. Though, I have to wonder who is awarding these titles, and how is it proven? What stops any old fighter from declaring that he’s a lord? Not like there’s a detect level spell or whatever.

Otherwise, with a d10 Hit Die you probably had more hit points than other, non-warrior classes, and with how THAC0 worked you essentially got +1 to hit every level. I’ve heard people claim that fighters had good saves, but checking the table they start off mostly worse at everything, and maybe around 5th-level start to creep ahead of a few classes in a few categories. They do better further down the road, assuming you play/survive that long, buuut:

• It takes awhile.
• Not all saves are equal.
• Slightly better saves in some categories isn’t an interesting feature, and it’s one that every fighter of an equal or similar level will have, anyway.

Something else to keep in mind is that, in addition to the fighter receiving barely anything, is that spellcasters could have a variety of spells to choose from and memorize each day, especially clerics. In addition, many spells automatically scaled in a number of ways without incurring any additional cost.

For example, burning hands inflicts 1d3 damage, +2 per level, up to +20. Magic missile on the other hand inflicts 1d4+1 damage and is an automatic hit, and for every two extra levels you can fire off another (ie, at level 3 you could direct two for 1d4+1 damage each), up to five at 9th-level. A classic is fireball, which deals 1d6 damage per level to a 20-foot radius, up to 10d6.

Mind you, in many cases it was just spell duration or perhaps area of effect, but it’s still a notable enhancement that spellcasters get for free.

While 3rd Edition wisely abandoned THAC0 and the arbitrary title assignment and automatic followers by virtue of merely attaining a certain level, it also get rid of 1st-level weapon specialization and unpenalized extra attacks.

One of the many things it added that sounded great on paper, specifically in Dragon magazine previews, were feats, which were special features that either let you do something new or, more often, made you better at doing something you could already do. Everyone got them, one at 1st-level then another every 3rd, but fighters got a bonus feat at 1st-level, and then one every even level.

Ideally, this would finally allow for some meaningful character customization, something that Dungeons & Dragons oddly never really had. Now, instead of two fighters being differentiated by maybe stats (which, unlike 2E, had more of an impact over narrower ranges) and weapon selection, you could make the character tougher, faster, better with certain skills, more accurate with weapons, harder to hit, etc.

One problem was that feats typically conferred benefits that were minor, too weak to be worthwhile and/or too situational to the point where you might only rarely use them, if ever. For example, Weapon Focus granted a +1 bonus to hit with an individual weapon. Fairly tame but so long as you’re using that weapon, hey, +1 to hit all the time. But then there were ones like Snatch Arrows.

Snatch Arrows lets you use the Deflect Arrows feat to instead catch arrows, spears, axes, etc an then immediately chuck it back or keep it. Sounds cool, but you need a Dexterity of 15 or up and the Deflect Arrows feat. So what did that do? Whelp, if you have a hand free, aren’t flat-footed (ie, it’s not round 1 in combat), and are aware of the attack, then once per round you can auto-deflect a single ranged attack, excluding massive weapons like huge boulders and such.

That also sounds kinda cool, but to get that you need Dexterity 13+ and Improved Unarmed Strike. And what did Improved Unarmed Strike do? Weeell, when making an unarmed attack you are considered to be armed, which just means that other armed opponents don’t get to make a free attack when you try to kick or punch them.

That’s pretty lame, and I can’t imagine why anyone would bother taking that. Monks don’t even need to worry about it, because they get it for free at level 1, anyway. And if you’re playing a fighter you probably have both hands tied up, either because you’re using a two-handed weapon, a weapon and shield, or a bow: I can’t imagine anyone bothering to sacrifice damage output or defense on the off chance they’ll get to negate a single arrow attack.

This leads to the other issue, which is fighters getting nerfed and many other classes getting buffed.

Starting with the nerfs, Weapon Specialization became a feat that you couldn’t take until 4th-level, and instead of giving you +1 to hit, +2 damage, and increased the rate of extra attacks, it only gave you a +2 to hit (you also needed Weapon Focus to pick it, which gave +1 to hit). The upside I suppose is that you could take it multiple times for different weapons, and since you had lots of feats it might not be a big deal.

You also couldn’t attempt a second attack until 6th-level, and even then this additional attack suffered a -5 penalty to hit, which was a huge deal given how the math worked out and how encounters were assumed to be constructed. However it should be noted that all classes could eventually make multiple attacks, it just took longer level-wise to get there.

As for the buffs, clerics and wizards got more spells, including 0-level cantrips/orisons, bonus spells for high stats, clerics could turn any spell into a healing spell, meaning they didn’t have to specifically memorize those in advance, wizards could wear armor and cast spells (though spells with gestures had a nonsense spell failure percentage), and the sorcerer was added, which let you just “know” spells and cast them x times per day in any combination.

And that’s just the spellcasters. Others like the rogue were also buffed, such as by receiving a bunch of level-based, class-specific special abilities, and Sneak Attack was stupid easy to use virtually every round (and dealt way more damage).

Before, classes got so little that a fighter’s hit and damage bonus was at least somewhat meaningful. Now, they were so bad that people considered it better to just play a cleric and buff yourself (calling it a day when you ran out of spells), “prestige” out as soon as possible (ie, multiclass into another class with certain requirements), or as more and more splatbooks came out just play another class that was basically “fighter plus more stuff” (such as the warblade from Book of Nine Swords).

Frankly, even if fighters got free specialization and unpenalized attacks, they would still be underpowered. They would need a scaling damage bonus, something like the rogue just not as good since they’d be ideally dishing out multiple attacks each round, and instead of mediocre feats some noteworthy class-specific abilities on the side.

It wouldn’t be until 4th Edition when the fighter was finally at the least functional, but then virtually every class was in that edition, so really all you were celebrating was its rise to the level of competent.

Of particular note was the marking mechanic: the fighter would “mark” every enemy he attacked for a turn, hit or miss, and if the enemy tried to move away he got a free attack. If he hit, it stopped the enemy’s movement and wasted its action. If the monster tried to attack anyone else, it suffered an attack penalty and I think the fighter also got a free attack. It was a sort of “tanking” mechanic that, for the first time, actually allowed the fighter to keep enemies off the rest of the party.

The downside is that after a few levels you ended up having a good deal of “powers” to choose from (you basically got one each level, plus feats, plus many magic items had a power), so couple that built-in complexity with the absurd hit point inflation—kobolds with, say, 20+ hit points—and things got unnecessarily convoluted and combat would take forever.

Plus, the very rigid character and monster math meant there was little room for deviation and experimentation: you either took all the +x to hit and defense feats to bridge the flawed progression gap, or combat was going to take that much longer to resolve.

I think there’s a huge middle ground between both 3rd and 4th Edition, but there are also a number of other things that you’d need to modify with 4th Edition in order for it to run smoothly. Or rather, smoothly in a way that won’t take hours of time in order to vanquish like a couple wolves or goblins that everyone knew from the start you’d succeed against.

You know, eventually.

Now, with all that in mind, let’s see what Pundit did.

I’m familiar with Lion & Dragon, which I initially got to check out the so-called “medieval authentic” magic system, which was, well, pretty disappointing because you basically roll to cast, and if you fail can’t try again until the next day, though there’s no explanation why and the only thing about it that felt “medieval authentic” was that I recall seeing at least some of the spells while doing research on the topic myself.

I guess I was hoping more for a mechanical structure that at least somewhat evoked how magic was believed to work in medieval times, rather than severely watered down Dungeon Crawl Classics but I digress…

Anyway, fighters: they get 1d10 hit points + Con modifier, then +2 per level (without Con modifier). They also start with +2 to hit, which doesn’t scale unless you pick/roll that option on the fighter table, and have no save modifiers.

When fighting enemies with only a single Hit Die, you can make a number of attacks equal to your level, which is something I recall from 2nd Edition AD&D but I also think you had to have a greatsword or something like that.

Oddly, if fighting an enemy with 2 or more Hit Dice, you have to choose to attack all the level 1 guys or the higher level guy, which seems kind of silly and depending on how frequent level 1 guys are I think it would be fine to just let you make bonus attacks against level 1 guys.

Finally, you add half your fighter level to damage, rounded up, so at 1st-level you get +1. This I think is something sorely needed in bog-standard D&D, less so here, which I’ll explain in a bit.

When you level up, you can choose an option from the fighter table, or roll twice and get both. This is somewhat better then ShadowDark—which Pundit rightfully points out didn’t invent it (or anything of use), and as with other “inspired” mechanics Kelsey somehow implemented it worse—because there are more options and you can either play it safe and pick what you want—or something that at least makes sense—or gamble on two.

As for the options, you can get +1d8+Con modifier hit points, reduce all save DCs by 1 (dunno why this isn’t just +1 to all saves), +1 to hit with everything, +1 to hit with a specific weapon, +1 to do stuff on a horse, +1 to parry with a shield when fighting defensively, +1 initiative, +2 to a specific save type, and +1 attack with one weapon type.

So, nothing interesting or innovative but at least useful stuff. Of greater issue is that the only thing that meaningfully scales automatically is the damage bonus. This is good because that’s a big one that fighters normally need, especially when wizards and clerics have auto-scaling damage and can cast a bunch of spells…which makes it hilariously ironic because in Lion & Dragon there aren’t many combat spells, they don’t auto-scale, and you can’t reliably cast a bunch every day.

For example, if you roll a cleric there are eight miracles to choose from: blessing, divine inspiration, holy light, holy weapon, laying hands, sanctuary, turn undead, and visions. Of them, only holy weapon grants a +1 or +2 bonus to damage, depending on how high your prayer check is.

Blessing can grant a +4 bonus to a single d20 roll, so can be used for combat but can be done for anything, really. Divine inspiration specifies that you get a bonus to attack rolls and saves, and can work on a bunch of people so that’s cool. Holy light can deal 1-2 points of damage, but only to creatures of chaos, demons and undead and primarily functions as a light source. Turn undead causes undead to flee or destroys them, no middle ground and obviously only matters against undead.

The important thing is that, again, none of these abilities automatically scale. They can have slightly improved effects if you roll high on the prayer check, but we’re talking like +2 to damage instead of +1 or something like that. Additionally, you have to roll every time and if you roll badly you “lose” the spell for the day because, uh…I dunno, there needed to be some sort of limit to stop you from just rolling over and over and that was the best Pundit could come up with?

Wizards have six categories of magic, which grant access to several magical abilities each, one of which is battle magic. As with clerics you can only gain access to a category by picking it or rolling for it: I don’t think there’s a way to find a spellbook and just learn stuff. I’m also fine with this, because it means that wizards have to make an actual choice in terms of character growth.

Battle magic grants access to the ability to build a blasting wand, which costs money and takes some time, though I don’t know how big of a deal any of that actually is, or is intended to be, in context to Lion & Dragon. Anyway, you permanently burn a point of Constitution and then have an item that you can try to touch people with to hurt them.

Downside is that the damage is fixed and based on your level when you made it. So, make it too early and you’re losing out on some damage output. And this isn’t necessarily a minor amount, as it inflicts 1d6+1 “for every three levels the magister had at the time of activating the blasting wand”. Though, the examples are odd, as it states that a 5th-level magister would create a wand that deals 2d6+2, or 3d6+3 at 9th-level.

So, maybe it’s per three levels?

In any case, it can only hold a single charge at a time, and you have to make a spellcasting check each time to recharge it. If you fail, then you can’t try to recharge it until the next day for some reason.

Oh, wizards can also try to create earthquakes using battle magic, though its range is a mere 5 feet per level. It’s odd that this scales by level, and would have made more sense to have the range depend on your spellcasting check result.

Mostly it can knock you prone but it might also open fissures in the ground, cause rockslides or buildings to collapse, which can cause damage that way—assuming anyone is close enough to be affected by it—but unlike the range damage is fixed to either a certain amount of whatever the GM thinks makes sense (5d6 was mentioned a few times).

So if your wizard buddy picks battle magic and wants to risk a point of Constitution to build a staff or wand, he can maybe inflict 1d6+1 damage every other round, assuming he manages to touch an enemy with his wand/staff. The fighter on the other hand just has to make an attack roll and, assuming an arming sword, can deal 1d8+1 damage at the least every round, and he didn’t have to spend time and money and stats to do so.

And it gets even sillier if the fighter takes the extra attack option. He doesn’t even need to do it much, just maybe twice and even if the wizard waits until 9th-level to make a staff the fighter will still be outdamaging him by quite a bit, inflicting at least 1d8+5 damage per hit, or 3d8+15 if all attacks hit.

Every round.

Without needing to roll to see if he can’t try to do it again until tomorrow because when it comes to “medieval authentic” magic that’s how it worked, yeah? Oh, and the fighter can also divvy up his attacks against other nearby enemies.

It’s a pretty severe and poorly implemented overcorrection for a game that quite frankly didn’t even need it. At least not baked in: damage bonus could easily replace the +1 horse stuff perk. Or do that and give the class a scaling bonus to hit since clerics and wizards add their level to spellcasting checks. I’m not even sure the extra attacks are necessary because it’s not like spellcasters are routinely dropping multi-die AoE spells, or ones that don’t even care about your hit points at all.

Now, if you wanted to do the absolute bare minimum for a bog-standard D&D vapidware derivative, something to peddle to your typical OSR consoomer who is for some reason content buying a merely slightly modified version of a game that he likely already has a dozen or so slightly modified versions of—as opposed to mustering the brainpower to implement all of a few sentences of houserules—you wouldn’t want to go the Lion & Dragon route, because the random advancement gimmick is stupid and you can just freely choose the best options, anyway.

Instead, you want to provide a stable foundation and framework, giving the fighter what he needs in order to do what he is supposed to from the start, and remain effective as he advances throughout the course of the game. Here’s a basic rundown:

• Decent hit points. Or, at least more than everyone else. I’m not a fan of how D&Dish hit points tend to work but if you aren’t going to tweak or overhaul damage (and ideally also armor) then just do 10 + Con modifier, and maybe 6+Con modifier each level (every other class can also do max HD at first, and then average-rounded-up each level up as well). You can do random, I suppose, but it’s very silly for a warrior to possibly start with only a couple.
• Best starting attack bonus. If rogues and clerics get +0 start him at +1. Personally I think it makes sense for most adventuring classes to start with +1, because I expect them to be more capable at fighting then commoners (yes, even adventuring wizards), in which case the fighter should start with +2.
• Fastest attack bonus advancement. Assuming your D&Dish adventure game typically finds adventurers in combat and the spellcasters don’t have infinite magic that is almost always effective and therefore would need to resort to a weapon now and then, it makes sense for everyone’s attack bonus to scale over time, but fighters should advance the quickest. Typically, this is +1 every level.
• Damage bonus. To help further reinforce that fighters are better skilled with weapons, they should at least have a +1 bonus to damage. This bonus should also scale over time. Doesn’t need to be every level or even every other level, especially if you also give them…
• Extra attacks. Maybe. This entirely depends on if/how magic scales. If it scales as expected then fighters definitely need an extra attack now and then. Not so much that they keep pace with spellcasters, unless again magic is infinite and wizards can unleash multi-die damage spells without any cost or downside.

With Dungeons & Delvers we’ve found that, over a 20-level spread, +1 to damage at the start, and then +1 every 3-5 levels—aiming somewhere between levels 1-5, 6-10, 11-15, and 16-20, with a max of +5—worked just fine.

For extra attacks, fighters getting one at levels 5, 10, and 20 was more than enough, though in our game spells don’t automatically scale. They can, but each type of spellcaster uses a spell point mechanic, and boosting a spell beyond its base effect costs more points.

This includes range, duration, number of targets, save DC, area of effect, damage, etc. Some parameters have a limit, such as increasing a range several times, while others like damage are level-capped. However, how it works out is that if, say, a level 10 wizard tries to enhance a spell to deal 10dwhatever damage, that likely eats up half his Willpower points on average (most wizard spells use a random amount of points).

(There are ways to potentially offset the cost (such as with spell components), and you can sometimes burn hit points if you don’t have enough magic points, but then you’re basically exchanging money and hit points recover more slowly than Willpower, so there’s an additional downside.)

Finally, to avoid the issue of every fighter of a given level being effectively the same, instead of just, say, setting class features to shuffle or leaving most of the class table blank we actually did some work writing up a bunch of Talents to meaningfully customize your character.

Every class has its own Talent section, mostly, as some like the barbarian and paladin have the option to choose from fighter Talents at specific levels because it made sense for them to have access to some, and we didn’t just want to reproduce the entire fighter section multiple times (though for 2nd Edition we found a way to modify them so that now there’s no need to pull from another class).

For fighters, Talents are grouped into a handful of thematic categories to make it easier to build towards a concept: weapon and shield, two-handed weapon, ranged weapon, Exploits, and a “general” category for everything else.

Each category has at least seven, though most have 11 or more, and while that might not sound like a lot fighters don’t get many Talents because they are already quite powerful: by 10th-level you’ll have six, and by 20th you’d have 14. So, you can focus on a single category for about half the game, though even when you run out it’s not like you’d be hurting for options.

Mind you, you do make a Talent choice for the first three levels, and since all told there are around 50 to choose from (most don’t have requirements, either) this means that unlike most D&D derivatives you can have multiple fighters with actual, meaningful differences beyond “this guy has a bit more HP” and “that guy is 5% more likely to hit with spears only”.

We like the idea of controlled complexity, so if you don’t want to think much or don’t care, you can choose Talents that grant passive modifiers, like Slayer, which is +1 damage with two-handed weapons, or Deadeye, which grants +2 Armor Penetration with ranged attacks. But you can also go with more complicated stuff, like Brace For Impact, which grants temporary Vitality Points when defending with a shield and lets you use your Reaction against an attack to reduce its damage.

Then there are Exploits, which are Talents that can be triggered if your total attack roll is high enough. The idea was that the high roll reflected your fighter landing an especially potent attack, or managing to “exploit” an opening, and we wanted to avoid nonsense “per encounter” or “per day” bullshit.

To clarify, you don’t have to declare that you’re using an Exploit beforehand, nor does it take the place of your attack like in 3rd Edition: here, you roll to hit, deal damage if you hit, and if your attack total is also high enough can opt to trigger an Exploit that requires that number or higher (you can only use one Exploit per attack, in case you have two or more that would qualify).

For example, Dazing Blow forces a target to succeed on a Constitution save to avoid being Dazed, you just need to roll a total of 20 or higher. Another is Trip Attack, which requires an 18 or higher and forced a Strength or Dexterity check to avoid being knocked Prone. Mind you, not all Exploits allow saves or checks. For example, Create An Opening requires an 18+ and grants a +1 to hit and damage to the next attack made against the target, no save or check required.

It should be noted that Exploits aren’t required to attempt “special attacks”. You can still try to trip an enemy or disarm them. It’s just that Exploits help prevent you from wasting your turn, potentially allowing you to attempt such a maneuver for free. That said, something we’d do for 2nd Edition is to make it so that the Exploit lets you do it for free with an attack, but grants some sort of bonus if you just try doing that, making it useful no matter which way you want to handle it.

I think all of that makes for a much more interesting, useful, and unique fighter class—and I find it a bit amusing because it didn’t take much effort to put together. But given the kind of post-modern vapidware trash that’s routinely lauded, I’m not surprised by the lack of meaningful character customization or mechanical innovation, and suspect there’s a correlation between clinging to the OSR comfort zone and a general unwillingness—or, more likely, an intellectual inability—to venture beyond it.

Now, I wanted to address something from the video.

Around 14 minutes Pundit makes a very bizarre claim that in both 3rd and 4th Edition, the fighter “was basically a magic-user and was just pretending that he wasn’t because he would get special abilities that are clearly supernatural”.

This is bullshit, especially in 3rd Edition. Remember: in 3rd Edition the only things fighters got were Bonus Feats. Lots and lots of Bonus Feats.

Now, there were feats that interacted with magic and supernatural abilities, such as Extra Turning (gives you another four shots at turn undead) and Spell Mastery (prepare some spells without needing access to your book), but the former requires that you already have the ability to turn/rebuke undead, and the latter literally has “Wizard level 1st” as its prerequisite.

However, the Bonus Feats granted by the fighter class are limited to a very specific list, so even if you could already turn/rebuke undead, you couldn’t use the fighter’s Bonus Feat to pick up Extra Turning.

Now there were some prestige classes that you could pick up and could grant magical powers even if you initially had none, such as the shadow dancer: it only requires 8 ranks in Move Silently, 10 in Hide, and 5 in Perform (dance), and then the feats Combat Reflexes, Dodge, and Mobility.

But then this isn’t a prestige thematically intended for a fighter—more like the rogue, or perhaps a wizard themed around shadow magic—and you can argue that whatever magical powers are picked up are part of the whole shadow dancer training package, not much different than learning wizard magic by multiclassing into wizard.

As for 4th Edition, none of the fighter exploits come across as magical. You’ve got a variety of stuff that is basically “attack but more accurate” or “attack and knock enemy back” or “attack and knock target prone” or “attack and do a bit more damage than usual”.

There’s one called Covering Attack, which lets you attack and then an ally moves a bit, but it’s clearly intended to be a situation where your attack gives an ally an opening to move, as opposed to attacking and then magically transporting them.

I do recall people pretending that Come And Get It was effectively mind control, but it’s obviously supposed to be a sort of taunt that causes enemies to rush you. Really the only thing silly about it is because of how 4E worked, it could affect things like slimes, but then you could also knock them Prone so whatever.

At level 11 you had to tack on a “paragon path”, which was kind of like a mandatory prestige class that was restricted by class. None of the ones in the first PH come across as magical/supernatural, but there were a bunch and I suppose there could be at least one somewhere in the mix that gave the fighter access to magic.

Though, I don’t think this is what Pundit was referring to, because claiming that the fighter, especially the one in 3E, has “clearly supernatural” abilities is a strong indicator that he’s at best skimmed the books. And it can’t be that being able to pick a feat that gives you +1 to hit, or +3 with a skill, or +2 to a save is somehow supernatural, because static modifiers are basically all his fighter gets, too.