Figuring Out Fighters     

Sometimes I feel like a kid in a candy store when it comes to D&D character classes: "That's my favorite, no wait, that's my favorite!  No, wait..."  But truly, I did not come to love fighters until the Second Edition kits came out, and even then they did not hold my interest long.  Fighters, well, fight.  They are fighting men (as the class was originally called), later expanded to fighting folk of all kinds.  They are as diverse as the weapons that they wield.  However, it is clear that, until Third Edition, a lot more effort went into designing the different weapons than did into designing the fighters themselves!

Third Edition fighters look a lot like the components that I have shown thus far.  They are endlessly customizable, with an extensive list of abilities (combat feats) to choose from.  Pathfinder increased the abilities of fighters even further, giving them even more bonuses to combat actions when using certain groups of weapons.  But really, the focus is still on: what sort of weapon do you use?  That's what distinguishes one fighter from the other.

The fighter is a class that I feel has so much potential, but designers seem to have never quite figured out how to express it.  Is the fighter designed to be specialized in one weapon or fighting style?  Or is it designed to be versatile and use many different weapons and fighting styles, switching between each depending on the situation?  The latter is much more appealing to me, but the rules simply do not support it.  Let's look at the different class abilities of the fighter with respect to which support specialization and which support versatility:

• Proficiency with all simple and martial weapons (supports versatility)
• Bonus feats (supports versatility in building the fighter, but not in play)
• Armor training (supports specialization in a fighting style, i.e., heavy armor)
• Weapon training (supports specialization in a fighting style)
• Armor mastery (fairly neutral)
• Weapon mastery (supports specialization)

And, of course, when it comes to feats, the big feat that only a fighter can take is Weapon Specialization.

This is not to say that Pathfinder did not add other options for fighting styles!  The use of the Combat Maneuver system to replace the incredibly archaic grappling chart of Second Edition, and the confusingly complex grapple algorithm of Third Edition, was very welcome.  But all characters have those options available to them.  Which leaves the fighter with the versatility of being able to pick from a long list of things, but still having to choose which individual thing they want to be good at.  Ultimately, the choice to create a fighter that splits their attention between two or three different fighting styles, is the choice to create a sub-par fighter.  And the system does not really reward such versatility.

Rewarding Versatility

Let's say that, as a design goal, I want fighters to be making more decisions during combat, instead of having one particular tactic that will almost always be the most effective for them.  Several things have to be considered to make this happen.

1.  More choices need to be made during combat, rather than during character creation.  As it stands, many of the various tactics (tripping, charging, grappling, tumbling) often require feats in order to be effective, and those feats are often part of a tree with several pre-requisites, not to mention the ability score pre-requisites for those feats!  Trip is a great example of this.  It is a maneuver that, without the feats, a character is unlikely to try.  Essentially, you are giving up your attack for an opportunity to knock your opponent prone.  Without feats, you will incur an attack of opportunity.  But in order to get the Improved Trip feat, you need to have Expertise, which also requires an Intelligence of 13.  Assuming that you take these things, you will also want to choose a weapon that can perform trip attacks (only some can) and you will probably want to focus in that weapon.  You will also probably want to take additional feats or abilities so that you can actually take advantage of an opponent who is prone.  Tripping opponents becomes the big tactic that your character can use, and unless you are planning to build your character this way, you are unlikely to ever try to trip someone.

2.  Weapons need to be more versatile tools.  Three of my favorite weapons are the dagger, the quarterstaff, and the halberd, because they are some of the most versatile.  A dagger can be used as a piercing melee weapon, a slashing melee weapon, or a piercing thrown weapon.  A quarterstaff can be used as a blunt melee weapon in two hands, a blunt double weapon, or it can be used as a monk weapon.  A halberd can be used as a piercing melee weapon, a slashing melee weapon, it can be used to brace for a charge, or it can be used to make a trip attack.  All weapons should follow the example of these three.  Instead of having a huge list of different weapons, we should have a smaller number of more versatile weapons.

3.  Combat maneuvers need to have a serious effect on combat.  As it stands, monsters who have weaknesses tend to be weak against a particular energy type.  This means that spellcasters have the best opportunity to plan their attacks to target a monster's weakness.  Only a few monsters are weak to particular non-magical weapon damage or combat maneuvers.  By changing who we think about when we build monsters (fighters, as well as spellcasters), fighters will get more of a chance to demonstrate tactics on the battlefield.  In addition, the battlefield itself is a great source of tactical advantage and disadvantage.  For example, a fire pit in the middle of the cave provides an opportunity to use bull rush.  Encounters that introduce battlefield features are going to often give fighters more to do.

Thus, changes to improve the fighter may depend on other system changes: to feats, to weapons, and to monsters.  But we should also consider, once these things are modified, how fighters will be able to take unique advantage of them in order to stand out as a character class.

Components of the Fighter

Fighters are fairly generic characters.  They are often multiclassed or given archetypes or unusual races in order to give them more flavor.  But looking at the fighter as it stands, here's how I believe the components should break down:

• Primary Versatile Fighter:  This ability will give the fighter the opportunity to use weapons in a wider variety of ways than other character classes.  It will also give them proficiency with all martial weapons, as well as increasing their base attack.
• Secondary Armored Fighter:  This ability will enable the fighter to wear heavy armor.  In addition, the Armor Training and Advanced Armor Training abilities will be a part of this component.
• Secondary Weapon Specialist:  Ideally, this will not be a component called "weapon specialist", but will rather be a choice of components, each for a different combat style.  So, for example, Archer would be a component that could be chosen here.  This will reflect some of the feats that fighters gain, as well as weapon training and advanced weapon training.
• Tertiary Soldier:  This will grant most of the fighter's skills, as well as their bonus to Fortitude.

Next post, I will look at some weapons and how the Versatile Fighter can get the most use out of them!

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Considering Clerics     

We are skipping over bards for the moment (we'll come back to them soon!) to talk about clerics, a truly unique character class.  Clerics are one of the "original four" standard classes, along with fighters, wizards (formerly magic users), and rogues (formerly thieves).  The cleric, sometimes known as a priest, was a little bit crusader, a little bit Friar Tuck, and a little bit Van Helsing.  Clerics could fight in melee combat, but with restrictions that made them subpar fighters.  They could cast spells, which were generally less powerful than wizards, and they were extremely effective at dealing with the undead.  They had two very important abilities that set them apart:  they could heal other characters and they could cast spells while wearing heavy armor.

Magical healing is an absolute necessity in most fantasy RPGs.  You can do without the fighter or the rogue, because there are lots of character classes that shares those skills.  You can even do without the wizard, although it will slow you down in higher level adventures.  But you need a healer, and this means someone has to play the cleric.  I'm not certain whether it is because the class is practically mandatory, or because of the religious background, but for whatever reason, I have found that many players hate playing clerics.  If you are lucky, there is that one person in your group who enjoys it (it's almost always a dwarven cleric for some reason), and they end up taking the role in every game.  More often, the cleric is the last character class chosen, by the person who doesn't really care what they play.  The game designers of D&D and Pathfinder, beginning with TSR, realized this.  There were three approaches that they could take to solve this problem:  make clerics more interesting, allow other character classes to heal, or change the way the hit point and damage rules work.  What we have ended up with is a bit of all three.

Second Edition D&D made clerics more powerful and flexible, dividing their spells into "spheres" of influence by their deity, and relaxing the weapon restrictions a bit.  This was greatly aided by one of the classic settings of Second Edition: the Forgotten Realms.  In this campaign world, created by Ed Greenwood, the gods and goddesses were major characters in the story.  Suddenly, playing a cleric or agent of one of these deities gave a character a whole lot of story potential.  Other settings also helped, such as Ravenloft.  The predominance of undead as an enemy meant that clerics would always have a lot to do.  So clerics were still mandatory, but they became more interesting to play.

Third Edition D&D made druids a more viable and interesting character class, and they had access to healing abilities, but druids never really caught on as healers.  Their other abilities, such as wild shape, were not well-suited to support roles.  Bards also gained healing spells, but they were so limited that they were rarely used as full-time healers.  Instead, the main solution of Third Edition and later Pathfinder, was to crank the cleric's healing power up to 11:  spontaneous casting of healing spells and channeling positive energy made healing incredibly easy, leaving the cleric to focus on other aspects of their character.  At the same time, hit points all got a significant boost, so that by Pathfinder, no one had d4 hit die any more.

In my house rules, I've also modified the hit point and damage system considerably, which helps make having a healer no longer a mandatory requirement.  Fourth and Fifth Edition D&D have taken similar approaches, although they use substantially different rules.

Clerics are now about as powerful as they can reasonably get (they are overpowered compared to other character classes), and they still get little respect.  But I suppose that means that folks who like playing clerics (I count myself among them) will always have the option and be welcomed at the table.

How Components Interact

My ulterior motive for skipping to cleric is to discuss how different components of a character's class can interact with each other.  Here's how one could break down the cleric into four components:

Primary Healer

• Heal skill
• spontaneous casting (cure spells)
• channel energy (positive)

Secondary Spellcaster

• fast Will save
• Knowledge (arcana), Knowledge (planes), Spellcraft skills
• divine spellcasting, beginning at first level

Secondary Armored Fighter

• 1d8 hit dice
• medium attack progression
• fast Fortitude save
• proficiency with medium armor and shields
• allows spell casting from Secondary Spellcaster with armor

Tertiary Community Leader

• Diplomacy, Knowledge (history), Knowledge (nobility), Knowledge (religion), Linguistics, Sense Motive skills

There are more things that are granted by these components in my house rules, but these are how the current Pathfinder cleric abilities break down.  Clerics also get a few things that don't fit within any of these four components, such as Appraise and Craft, and some things that are granted based on what deity they follow, such as Aura and Domains (more on that shortly).  Note that I've assumed that this cleric is channeling positive energy.  That is because healing through positive energy channel is such an essential part of the cleric, as it is played in the vast majority of games, as to make evil clerics into practically a different class entirely.  I'll talk about changes we can make to this "standard" cleric in the next post, but for now, assume that the cleric is good aligned and follows a deity of good, community, and/or healing.

There are two ways that these components interact, both with spell casting:  Healer grants the ability to spontaneously cast healing spells, which is useless without Spellcaster.  And Armored Fighter grants the ability to cast spells while wearing armor, which can only be used with Spellcaster.

Spellcasting While Wearing Armor

The Armored Fighter class component is designed to work together with Spellcaster in order to reproduce the effects of the wildly inconsistent and incomprehensible "spell casting while wearing armor" rules.  Currently, arcane spells cannot be cast while wearing armor without a) incurring a chance to fail in casting, b) taking a particular feat tree, c) having magical armor made specially for the purpose, d) having a particular racial bonus, or e) being a Magus.  And what qualifies as "arcane" spells is equally unpredictable (bard spells, including healing spells, are arcane, but ranger spells are divine).  Divine spells, on the other hand, are cast in the same way, often with the same somatic components, but can be cast while wearing any sort of armor.

The real reason for restricting wizards from wearing armor is story based.  Wizards wear robes in fantasy stories, and not armor.  That's it.  There is very little game balance justification.  Granted, if wizards could wear armor, they would be likely to wear as much of it as possible.  Wizards would become small tanks, like rooks on a chess board, hiding behind their metal walls and lobbing spells.  And this would be fine!  The system could totally support this sort of change.  Any resulting game imbalance could be easily fixed in other ways.  However, since very few fantasy stories have this sort of character in them, and the genre as a whole is moving away from heavily armored characters, toward more mobile characters, this is not done.

So, instead, here is an alternate solution that generally maintains the status quo, but does so in a more streamlined way:  Armored Fighter allows a character who also has Spellcaster to cast spells wearing armor, if and only if, the Spellcaster component is equal to or less than the Armored Fighter component.  Since a character can have only one primary component, Primary Spellcaster characters cannot cast while wearing armor.

The core classes break down about like this:

• Barbarian - not an Armored Fighter, not a Spellcaster, not applicable.
• Bard - not an Armored Fighter, Secondary Spellcaster, cannot cast spells while wearing armor.
• Cleric - Secondary Armored Fighter, Secondary Spellcaster, can cast spells while wearing armor.
• Druid - not an Armored Fighter, Primary Spellcaster, cannot cast spells while wearing armor.
• Fighter - Secondary Armored Fighter, not a Spellcaster, not applicable.
• Monk - not an Armored Fighter, not a Spellcaster, not applicable.
• Paladin - Secondary Armored Fighter, Tertiary Spellcaster, can cast spells while wearing armor.
• Ranger - not an Armored Fighter, Tertiary Spellcaster, cannot cast spells while wearing armor.
• Rogue - not an Armored Fighter, not a Spellcaster, not applicable.
• Sorcerer - not an Armored Fighter, Primary Spellcaster, cannot cast spells while wearing armor.
• Wizard - not an Armored Fighter, Primary Spellcaster, cannot cast spells while wearing armor.

If we added Magus to the list, they might have Secondary Armored Fighter, Secondary Spellcaster, and thus would be able to cast spells while wearing armor.  The only class that doesn't come out ahead in this equation is the ranger.  Sadly, the ranger loses the ability to cast spells while wearing armor.  However, as the spell casting ability of a ranger is of very low importance to the character class, that it isn't too great a sacrifice.  When I write about rangers, we can see whether we can make it up to them.  Druids also lose the ability to cast in armor, but other abilities and restrictions of druids highly mitigate against wearing much armor anyway.

If one of any of the above classes were to switch out Armored Fighter for a different component, they might lose their ability to cast spells while wearing armor.  And if a spellcasting class switched in the ability to wear armor, they might gain it!  More on switching out components, and how it is a highly useful way to make Domains more interesting, next post!

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