and 3) Actually Being Really Fragile, so that drawing attention with the Burn is a risk. The issue with (3) in 3.5 or 5e is that to facilitate 'magic knight' builds, casters often have enough self-buffs to turn into budget-fighters, so it becomes 'what is the fighter here for?' 11/ - ThreadSky

bretdevereaux.bsky.social • 159 days ago

and 3) Actually Being Really Fragile, so that drawing attention with the Burn is a risk.

The issue with (3) in 3.5 or 5e is that to facilitate 'magic knight' builds, casters often have enough self-buffs to turn into budget-fighters, so it becomes 'what is the fighter here for?' 11/

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bretdevereaux.bsky.social•159 days ago

But more broadly, I find it striking that while this is sort of the core pen-and-paper fantasy and has been for ages, it's actually the MMO context that delivers on it, mostly by 1) restricting what casters can do more sharply and 2) by forcing them to wait to do it. /end

sfkissinger.bsky.social•159 days ago

IIRC, the early wizards when Chainmail was becoming D&D used the artillery rules for determining what mass combat spells (fireball, lightning bolt, etc) did. They were basically a limited-ammunition cannon packaged in a human body.

silentsnowdrop.bsky.social•159 days ago

I think one of the reasons an MMO can deliver on it a lot easier is processing power+real time action. A. A GM can only keep track of so many things at once, so really good encounters are hard to build, and b. even if you DO manage to make the balance right there is always going to be a wait.

bretdevereaux.bsky.social•159 days ago

Actually, just to add: the reason i think this sort of design is worth attempting is that 'going full burn' on one of the classes is deeply satisfying, just a killer game experience.

But it's a question of managing resources and choosing a moment, rather than waiting on a timer.

elder-george.bsky.social•159 days ago

I have little-to-no TTRPG experience, but it should be absolutely possible to design a campaign where a high-Intelligence character had interesting role outside of battles, right?
In D&D, Lore and Arcana are pretty versatile skills

namehereguy.bsky.social•159 days ago

It's possible, but it becomes troublesome if they can't participate in battle and/or the fighter can't really participate outside of battle. Then you get half the players looking at their phone at any given time.

namehereguy.bsky.social•159 days ago

DnD can have issues with that because the mechanics for out of combat stuff are either spells or skill checks, and the fighter has very few skill points and a likely stat distribution that's skewed away from the more fancy skills.

namehereguy.bsky.social•159 days ago

The impact of this can be somewhat mitigated by table culture, if you don't enforce in-character talking and let players debate over what the bard should say in social encounters.

namehereguy.bsky.social•159 days ago

One of my fondest game memories is playing Mythender, entering the adventure's final battle with Thor, and proceeding to obliterate a charged blight and use my carried over-relics and a newly-selected power to blast him down to one die.

namehereguy.bsky.social•159 days ago

The other players tried to discourage me, saying we should do a more sustained attack, but I insisted on swinging at one-shotting the boss.

He then triggered a special ability to take an extra turn out of sequence to survive the follow-up by my party members, sadly.

namehereguy.bsky.social•159 days ago

Mythender is really set up for this, with its core mechanics being a charge-and-drain system where you roll dice to earn stocks of dice you roll to attack, and the fact that you've got the ability to take new powers at any time but may succumb to Myth if you do.

dr-floon.bsky.social•159 days ago

Agreed - DDO - did/does that so well - and as someone who generally plays a fighter or front-line type, I well remember running in circles or frantically backpedaling and shouting "now now NOW!" to the mage :)

twiceborn.bsky.social•159 days ago

I wonder if that is in part because the "low burn" activities are more engaging to players in mmorpgs due to the audiovisuals and pace of fights? I have to admit, in a tabletop session, it's a bit dull to plink away at enemies with one Cantrip attack a turn

bretdevereaux.bsky.social•159 days ago

Yeah, so I think damage cantrips are not an ideal version of this; I might aim for the low-impact constant interventions to be control or support abilities, honestly.

In a perfect world, abilities that could, cleverly used, produce the conditions for the Big Burn.

nudraxon.bsky.social•159 days ago

So, less firebolt, more vicious mockery?

matthulhu.bsky.social•159 days ago

One class where I think a smaller scale version of this idea was conceptually quite good was 13th Age's Monk, which had opening, mid, and finishing martial arts maneuvers in different styles that you could mix and match. Admittedly, this cycle is a once or maybe twice per encounter type buildup,

matthulhu.bsky.social•159 days ago

as opposed to the wizard building up to dropping a nuke once a day. But I really liked the idea that you were putting extra effects on enemies that your allies or you could take advantage of on subsequent turns in addition to building up your own momentum for a big kick to the face.

glacialavian.bsky.social•159 days ago

Yeah, my first thought reading this was FF14 WHM, which is a healer class. Most of the fight is Glare/Lily churn, but every so often you get to pop Afflatus Misery/LB4, and you feel /alive/.

jacd.bsky.social•159 days ago

It's a tough design call. "make anything you want" includes "make me very powerful" or "make me without drawbacks". I like the 5E design space which seems to have rejected class niches but 3.5E is tricky

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