The Fighter Problem in Dungeons & Dragons is bit more subtle than “fighters are jocks and wizards are nerds and the game’s...
The Fighter Problem in Dungeons & Dragons is bit more subtle than “fighters are jocks and wizards are nerds and the game’s designers hate jocks and love nerds”, though that’s definitely been a part of on occasion.
Basically, it comes down to levels of mechanical engagement.
In a nutshell, some people like to have lots of complicated rules-based “toys” to play with, while others prefer few and simple ones. This operates independently of any other preference in terms of character building; for the former group, getting to engage more deeply with the rules is its own reward, even if the resulting character isn’t necessarily any more effective in play than its simpler counterparts.
In most tabletop RPGs, there’s a built-in expectation that all players will be given roughly the same number of rules toys, so you’re stuck trying to find a system that provides a big enough toybox to be interesting to the folks who prefer high mechanical engagement, while still being tolerable to the folks who prefer low mechanical engagement.
Tabletop RPGs with strongly templated character creation – like classes, in most iterations of D&D, though there are other kinds of templating – offer a means of getting around that by supporting multiple levels of mechanical engagement at the same table. That introduces a whole bunch of new game design challenges, though, one of the most critical of which is spotlight balance: characters who are built for higher mechanical engagement will naturally tend to spend more time in the narrative spotlight, simply because the procedures of playing them take longer to carry out.
One possible approach – and the one taken by D&D and most of its various imitators – is to give the low mechanical engagement character types big numbers. That way, they make a bigger impact each time they engage with the rules, even if those engagement points happen less frequently and take less time to play out.
That’s not a bad way to tackle the problem, but it comes with its own pitfall: counterintuitively, it’s difficult to avoid having the Big Numbers Guy completely dominate the table. From the standpoint of engaging with the rules, doing one thing extremely well is much better than doing a whole bunch of things only moderately well.
This can be moderated to an extent if the Big Numbers Guy’s specialty doesn’t come up very often, or if it needs a fair amount of prior setup to be made relevant – and you see this principle in action with, say, the D&D rogue, who also gets to throw big fuckoff numbers around, but only in relation to a narrow and specialised range of tasks. The fighter, though? The fighter’s thing is making the bad guys fall down, which comes up constantly.
Basically, trying to make a character type like the D&D fighter work has a very small sweet spot – there’s just not a lot of design space between “fighters are kind of mediocre” and “fighters render the whole rest of the party redundant”. It’s not an impossible problem by any means, but for better or for worse, most iterations of D&D have historically tended to err on the side of caution.
(Ironically, the only recent version of the game that’s gone the other way is the 4th Edition, where fighters are nightmares made of chainsaws, but it’s also the version that supports the narrowest range of levels of mechanical engagement, so that doesn’t terribly help you if you want to play an effective fighter, but also don’t want to make any rules-based decisions more complicated than which baddie to hit with your sword!)
@scattered-storyteller replied:
If you wanted to play a fighter type character with the same number of mechanical toys as a wizard, how could you do that? Is there a way in 5e as written, or would you need to look elsewhere or homebrew?
That’s where the jocks-versus-nerds thing rears its ugly head.
Historically, Dungeons & Dragons has tended to link specific levels of rules engagement to specific sets of character aesthetics. If you want to play a character whose thing is swinging swords, you must build a low-rules-engagement character; if you want to play a character whose thing is chucking fireballs, you must build a high-rules-engagement character. In many iterations of the game, this is carried to the extent that the most complicated sword-swinger you can build demands lesser rules engagement than the least complicated fireball-chucker you can build. If you’d prefer it the other way around, you’re generally out of luck.
Obviously there’s interest in having things the other way ‘round, and not just from people who want to play anime-style fighters. For example, have you ever had a player in your group who seemed to be really keen on playing a wizard, but who then proceeded to forget about 90% of their character sheet and just cast the same one or two spells over and over again? What that player really wants is to play a low-rules-engagement wizard, and they’re crashing headlong into D&D’s baked in assumptions about which sets of character aesthetics go with which levels of rules engagement.
Returning to the parenthetical aside from the previous post, supporting all levels of rules engagement for all character types was one of the 4th Edition’s explicit design goals. However, it did so, in part, by considerably narrowing the range of levels of rules engagement that are supported, chopping off both the very low-engagement options and the very high-engagement options and retaining only the middle part of the range supported by other editions.
This is where apparently nonsensical criticisms like “4E is just tabletop World of Warcraft because it has cooldowns” come from; what those criticisms are trying to articulate is that 4E takes certain types of rules engagement that had historically applied only to a specific subset of D&D character types, like managing cooldown cycles for spellcasters, and makes them apply to all character types – which is a pisser for folks who don’t care to engage with the rules in that way, and in prior editions didn’t have to, albeit at the cost of never getting to play certain types of characters.
Unfortunately, the 5th Edition’s designers looked at those criticisms and concluded that 4E’s problem is that it had attempted to tackle the problem of chaining character aesthetics to levels of rules engagement at all, not the way in which it had gone about it, and now we’re right back to the highest-engagement fighter you can build demanding less rules engagement than the lowest-engagement wizard. Well, except for the archetype that staples one-third of a wizard to the side of your fighter, but if anything that just highlights the problem: the only real way to get your high-rules-engagement fighter is by giving them wizard aesthetic.
So I guess the short answer is that if you want to play a high-rules-engagement D&D fighter, and if the level of rules engagement you’re looking for happens to fall within the narrowed range that 4E supports, you might consider giving 4th Edition a spin. Otherwise, you’re going to have to look further afield!
(This type of conflation can be difficult to avoid because it’s not always obvious that you’re doing it. If you look in the notes of this post, for example, you’ll see folks proposing that this is really an encounter design problem. That only works if you can safely assume that the things that characters built for high rules engagement are good at and the things that characters built for low rules engagement are good at won’t overlap; the moment it’s possible to have two characters who are good at exactly the same things, but who are built for completely different levels of rules engagement, approaching the issue via encounter design becomes untenable!)
And for everyone in the notes saying “Tome of Battle!” or “Path of War!”: Yeah, that was my first thought, and this approach does a lot for giving you high-rules-engagement fighters.
But it also throws the jock-vs-nerd dichotomy into very sharp relief, if you’ve ever tried to introduce it to an RL table.
These books are highly controversial, and a lot of tables will ban them outright without real consideration. There’s a widespread belief that they’re “unbalanced,” despite the fact that characters under their mechanics are still plainly overshadowed by corebook-only wizards.
They’re a great solution to the technical problem of “high rules engagement fighter,” but they feed into the nerd-vs-jock problem, so they aren’t actually the universal patch that folks who love them seem to think (and I say that as as one of those people!)
Unfortunately, there isn’t really a great fix here. My personal preference would be to look at Spheres of Might/Power, which give martials and casted alike a lot of rules engagement and variable levels of customization - but I recognize that it sets the engagement floor a lot higher (there’s really no “I hit it with my sword” class), and the learning curve is high because it has to change some core mechanics to dismantle the aesthetic assumptions mentioned above. And it still has issues with high end casters pulling ahead.
(Its approach does tend to dodge the jock/nerd thing by throwing a bunch of fun new toys at casters and martials alike but tossing out or rebalancing the worst-offending magic, but that doesn’t make it an ideal fix.)
4E was tabletop World of Warcraft because it was about aggro and range management, but otherwise fair.