>guy who's athletic and tough and good with weapons
Literally just martial characters in general
>guy specializing in ranged combat
RANGEr duh
>guy who fights dirty
Rogue.
>Guy who's just that good at martial arts
Monk
>knights
Paladin
>guy whos really really strong
Barbarian
What does the fighter even do? The only character concept I can imagine that's best expressed by a Fighter's skill set is a peasant with a pitchfork, but if you want that why would you play a heroic fantasy game with mostly supermagic anime classes? Fighters are simple, but if you want simplicity then why play a game that has this much class bloat anyway? The only way you should have a class called Fighter is if you're like Original D&D and the only other choices are Wizard or Cleric. So why should Fighter even be a class in fantasy RPGs if you already have a long list of "martial" characters and even non-martial characters can Fight just as well? What character concept is even served by fighters that you can't serve with another stock class that appears in every heartbreaker already? D&D 3+, Pathfinder, etc. all do this stupid shit. This shouldn't be a character generation option.
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Knights aren’t Paladins. Maybe - subset of knights are Paladins but most are Fighters.
Paladins are pretty much just better knights though. If you want to play a knight without supernatural powers, you just play a Paladin and violate your Oath, at which point you just lose all the cool magical powers and are just a guy with armor and extra attack.
But you get worse attacks than the Fighter without your powers
Sounds like a good reason to not lose your powers, and a bad justification for a class
>oh it's like a Paladin but you get a +1 extra hit bonus
Like who gives a frick? Why should the game be trying to intentionally trick people into thinking the knight with supernatural powers and the knight without are on par. Let people play a powerless Paladin and be objectively worse if they want, but don't present it as an equal and default option.
Paladins are knight+cleric in my setting
But you can choose either. Why would you choose to be a non-paladin knight? Especially when there's oaths that are bound to fit your character concept in some splatbook out there. And even if you cant, you could be an Oathbreaker paladin which is still a cooler choice than a fighter. They added Paladins to OD&D as fighters but better, they were supposed to be a no-brainer choice if you were playing a Lawful and Good Human Fighter. Nuscool Paladins still are a no-brainer choice and they even took out most of the restrictions.
But the fighter gets worse DPT than a full caster anyway. Whatever you want to do, there's a better way to do it than being a fighter.
This is the first stage of your awakening. Now you'll gradually start to realize that classes as a whole are for the most part unneeded concept.
>Knights aren’t Paladins
they are
>they are
Really? I’ve never seen a knight use holy powers on someone.
Paladins are the Squares to Knight's Rectangles
*Knights quadrilaterals
A group of regular human male farmers fighting together against evil threatening their land and family is based. Brotherhood and duty are the core of all great adventures
OK but what if they were paladins? That would just make them more dutiful and more effective at fighting evil.
If anything peasants banding together is often better represented by Rogues, since they're more reliant on tricks and subterfuge to take out stronger opponents, and their talents mainly lie in areas that aren't fighting.
A Fighter conversely is somebody who took the time to learn how to use every type of weapon and armor that could be found in the region (including rare and expensive ones like plate armor and greatswords), but is so much of an autist that they didn't bother to actually learn anything outside of that.
Fighters are the guys who fight. It's not complicated because it doesn't need to be complicated.
>the guys who fight
As opposed to guys who don't fight? Because that's not how d20 style games use the term.
Fighters are defined by their specialty. There's no frills, no abilities, only sheer, straightforward fighting prowess that starts reliable and progresses to become the best of any class. Besides that, the lack of baggage with Fighters enables an immense degree of variety in character concepts and backgrounds. Almost anyone physically fit and willing to be belligerent could believably be a Fighter, in a way that can't be said for other classes.
Righter represents a master of arms, the guy who is not only good at using various weapons but exhibits a mastery of them.
The fighter is the guy who has trained to not only to master sheer martial combat but battle tactics and strategy.
The Fighter forgoes the Rangers Forestry skills to use a real style longbow.
The Fighter Does not sneak around like the Rouge but also doesn't need to hide and surprise others to disarm them or to use practical tickery to his advantage
The Fighter forgoes the tranquility and inner understanding of the monk to do the most efficient fight, akin to the difference between MMA and traditional Martial Arts
The fighter is not as much of a rage filled brick shithouse as the Barbarian but can think tactically and has a better mastery of weapon use vs the crude actions of a Barbarian
And in comparison to a Paladin a Fighter may or may not have a moral code they follow while still being able to fight just lacking divine blessing.
Basically the fighter removes all of the utility and flavor of the other classes to focus on being the best in a straight physical fight which also allows one to use it for a more varied group of backgrounds and character concepts.
But mostly people really just want to be the knight from this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mJj16dE07s
Good justification for battlemaster style guys actually. Terrible justification for champion style fighters. Support for being that kind of guy is pretty sketchy in D20 games, but maybe its just about execution.
Yeah in a better version of say 5e all Martial's would have access to some maneuvers but the fighter would be specialized in them and able to do the most with the system at the cost of not having the same utility or magic as others.
Champion basically just exists as a beginner subclass for people who don't know how to play.
Originally the Fighter was your knightly sort, and assumed to have a succesfull militairy campaign or two under his belt to count as 1st level (most npcs were level 0 Fighters with no features and incapable of gaining xp) while the Paladin was a specific sort of religiously motivated crusader. Interestingly this meant that while the paladin had stricter ability score requirements to enter the class, they could have a much simpler background and even be the "local boy done good" by just believing really hard in doing the right thing whereas Fighters had to have a decade or better of training and warfare.
Also, the solution for a villain with a paladin after them used to be "hire a Neutral mercenary" and sit back to watch the paladin get slapped around, but that's gone to the wayside a fair bit.
They're the class that gets an army for free.
They are the power class.
If you're going to keep the "Fighter" or generic "Warrior" as a class in a game, then they need something to compensate with what the other classes get. Personally, I think the Fighter should EXCELL in martial combat, not just be a little better than the other classes. The Ranger focuses on wilderness exploration bonuses, and gathering information about beasts in the wild. The Rogue focuses on stealth, guile, and ambushes. The Barbarian focuses on all or nothing charges, but quickly burnout if the combat goes on for too long. The Paladin focuses on divine spells to aid the party in and out of combat.
In exchange, the fighter can wear heavy armour unlike the ranger and rogue, can last for the long haul and focus on ranged weapons unlike the barbarian, and can use underhanded tactics and poison/oil unlike the paladin, and on top of that, they get much better to hits than the rest of the other martials. Of course there are problems, like oh why cant my rogue wear plate armour? That makes no sense! Personally I'm more inclined to classless systems where players are free to mold their character how they wish, but within the classed contraints of D&D, this is how I'd handle the Figher.
Basically, the Fighter is not bound by any of the restraints of the other classes which gives them more freedom in their tactics... but this means that the other classes need to have real, significant restraints, which people shit and piss about...
Technically DnD can be somewhat "classless" in a sense that a character may dip and be good to go.
Fighter is the typical example. You get heavy armour from the start and can use virtually anything and then can go anywhere.
Even Elminster has Fighter levels.
Fighter is a residue from the times when your choice were: Fighting Man, Magic Man, Cleric.
Welcome to the world of DnD, where "muh tradition" is the ever-growing, multi-organ tumor
>Fighter is a residue from the times when your choice were: Fighting Man, Magic Man, Cleric.
Yes.
>multi-organ tumor
Modern D&D is the cancer killing D&D. 5e doesn't even have the Platonic essence of D&D. It's another system draped in the copyrights of something long-dead.
There have always been things in D&D which have never been explained properly and so people think poorly of them. These come to mind:
>Alignment
>Vancian casting
>Paladins "falling"
And the elephant in the room which no one wants to address:
>Classes having requirements
To circle back into OP's complaints, of his classes provided, fighters needed a minimum of 9 STR and thieves(rogues before rogue was a class) needed a minimum of 9 DEX.
Rangers needed decent WIS and CON and had to be Good aligned. Paladins needed 17 CHA, decent WIS and STR AND be Lawful-Good. There are plenty of horror stories out there of DMs and paladin players misunderstanding how to be Lawful-Good and be bound by a moral code so strict that the powers granted by the class are taken away if it's broken. That was the whole challenge of playing a paladin in the first place!
High level fighters could become barons with a castle, lands, and a retinue of soldier NPCs until 3e decided to throw out that class feature basically rendering the fighter useless.
While I'm at it:
>Barbarian
Just a fighter from a society different from the other fighters. This does not need to be a distinct class
>Monk
There have been two times the monk class was not shit in the history of D&D. The first was the scarlet brotherhood monk from Greyhawk because they could summon skeletons by 5th level and the second was 4e. For how bad 4e was, the combat was very mechanically balanced and no class was left behind.
5e players point buy right? Not sure if you mentioned that your typically roll stats 3d6 and they were fixed, you’d roll in order so these requirements matter. A recent character of mine has 8 con, 8 int, and 6 dex so there were relatively limited options available
>point buy
This or the Standard Array (15 ,14 ,13, 12, 10, 8), even though everyone is told "4d6, drop the lowest, arrange to taste" during their first session.
AD&D 2e gave seven options to generate ability scores. The one closest to point buy was method VII:
>All abilities start at 8
>Roll 7d6
>Assign each die to an ability score
And the above 4d6 method was method IV.
3d6 in order was method I.
you would have a point if every setting didn't make 1 character who can fly, put up shields, teleport, shoot fireballs and scy events from far away with the wizard class instead of forcing specialization so evidently we actually don't care about having more generalist classes
You hit the nail on the head in the OP.
Fighters are badass, especially in LBB where they get an extra Melee attack for each fighter level.
Modern fighters and rangers are magician characters with spells disguised as powers.
Simply refuse to play any version after AD&D.
Why does/tg fall so much for such a low effort and shitty bait? I dont understand it
The post that killed fightergays 4ever