Quote from: Christopher Brady;1034922I also think part of the problem is that everyone still thinks that the Fighter is the 'everyman' class, not the Rogue/Thief.  Most don't realize the amount of training needed to be good with a wide array of weapons and armour, whereas the thief type skills can be picked up as you go along.  If you're lucky to not get caught.  To be a thief/rogue no one needs to be really taught.  To use a sword properly while in armour?  Years.

I think the main thing keeping the rogue from getting that perception is their oh-so-specific backstab/sneak attack ability. If you swapped out that very specific trait for say "bonus feats" (or in 5e terms; gain Advantage on any check X times per long rest... or short rest depending on what you're shooting for) and say, better saves (since one of the hallmarks of the everyman seems to be their luck... which is why they're alive and generic bystander number 17 just got stabbed in the throat by the Orc raiders attacking the village) it might feel a bit more everyman-ish.

Quote from: Chris24601;1034931I think the main thing keeping the rogue from getting that perception is their oh-so-specific backstab/sneak attack ability. If you swapped out that very specific trait for say "bonus feats" (or in 5e terms; gain Advantage on any check X times per long rest... or short rest depending on what you're shooting for) and say, better saves (since one of the hallmarks of the everyman seems to be their luck... which is why they're alive and generic bystander number 17 just got stabbed in the throat by the Orc raiders attacking the village) it might feel a bit more everyman-ish.

'Sneak attack/Backstab' doesn't really need to be trained.  Here's the thing, the most common types of weapons that 'Rogues' use are knives and clubs, are rather easy to use for most humans, and stabbing someone in the back is more about surprise than it is about training.  Thrusting is easy.  Men do it all the time.

It's also misconception that every ravaging monster with a weapon is somehow a 'Fighter'.  Now, admittedly, Orcs are a warrior culture, meaning that everyone is trained to fight, everyone.  But that doesn't make them Fighters.

Fighters are special.  Why?  They're meant to be (originally) PC only classes.  Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, especially in AD&D (I'm planning a 5e game, using the old 2e FR-Waterdeep supplments, like Waterdeep and The North) they gave out the Fighter class like candy.  There's a petite club owner, who's an Adventurer/Bad Boy groupie with FIGHTER LEVELS in Volo's Guide to Waterdeep.  At best, she should have had a couple of Thief levels.  AT BEST.  But a lot of the misconceptions come from this belief that being a Fighting Man is naught more than brawling, sword swinging goon with no brain cell close enough to get to start the rubbing.  And that is just incorrect.

I'm not saying that fighters aren't special... I'm only saying that rogue doesn't really fit the everyman concept any better than fighter does because it does have specific types of training that is not common to all everymen types (not every everyman is good at stabbing people in the back... some would probably trip over themselves just trying, nor is every everyman good at sneaking around, climbing walls, opening locks or half a dozen other things depending on the edition).

I think Fighters, particularly in 3e, felt more like everyman because the sum total of their class features were "just what everyone else gets, only more of it."

I find it much more accurate to say that D&D doesn't really have an everymen class. Everyone is special in some way if they're a PC and so making an everyman character is more about how you present the character than which class they belong to.

The closest I've ever seen to a realized Everyman hero class in D&D was 3e's Factotum class. The real everyman class would probably be the 3e Expert (or the Unearthed Arcana expert from the Generic Classes option).

Quote from: Chris24601;1034954I'm not saying that fighters aren't special... I'm only saying that rogue doesn't really fit the everyman concept any better than fighter does because it does have specific types of training that is not common to all everymen types (not every everyman is good at stabbing people in the back... some would probably trip over themselves just trying, nor is every everyman good at sneaking around, climbing walls, opening locks or half a dozen other things depending on the edition).

I think Fighters, particularly in 3e, felt more like everyman because the sum total of their class features were "just what everyone else gets, only more of it."

I find it much more accurate to say that D&D doesn't really have an everymen class. Everyone is special in some way if they're a PC and so making an everyman character is more about how you present the character than which class they belong to.

The closest I've ever seen to a realized Everyman hero class in D&D was 3e's Factotum class. The real everyman class would probably be the 3e Expert (or the Unearthed Arcana expert from the Generic Classes option).

In MY experience, which is fully anecdotal, given media, novels, medieval 'thievery' (such as it was) says that the closest to an 'everyman' class is the Rogue type.  Simply because of how you acquire a lot of the skills.  But being a Rogue/Thief means you've decided to make that your 'adventuring career', so you picked up more skills to round it out.

What I mean is that from the Adventuring pool, there should be more Rogue/Thieves than any other class, simply because a lot (but not all of them) the skills can be picked up by just practicing what humans can do naturally.

Fighters, Wizards and Clerical abilities not so much.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1035012In MY experience, which is fully anecdotal, given media, novels, medieval 'thievery' (such as it was) says that the closest to an 'everyman' class is the Rogue type.  Simply because of how you acquire a lot of the skills.  But being a Rogue/Thief means you've decided to make that your 'adventuring career', so you picked up more skills to round it out.

What I mean is that from the Adventuring pool, there should be more Rogue/Thieves than any other class, simply because a lot (but not all of them) the skills can be picked up by just practicing what humans can do naturally.

Fighters, Wizards and Clerical abilities not so much.

Rogue and Fighter skills are both "what humans can do naturally". Rogue and Fighter classes both mean you're becoming very, very good at a subset of "things humans can do naturally". Because without training, humans tend to do rather poorly at it:).
And yes, thievery is very hard without hours of repetitive training. Pickpocketing requires hours of practice daily, same as top-level fighting skills.

About the only class which does "what humans can do naturally" is the cleric, the one who prays to a higher power to deliver him from undead, heal him and his companions, and so on;).

Quote from: Kiero;1034318I would have thought alchemists more likely to be hobbyist aristocrats, who make enough money from their estates not to have to worry about how to fund their researches, than some pauper with no other source of income. Or else someone with a wealthy patron who supports them, not dependent on shilling snake oil to wandering vagabonds.

Historically, it was more often the latter.

Quote from: Chris24601;1034405Not really. I just like logically coherent worlds.

If you want authentic medieval then magic needs to either be so rare (one-in-a-million) and/or subtle (akin to Coincidental Magic in Mage the Ascension... was it really magic or was it just fortuitous circumstance) as to not disrupt the non-magical social order.

Nonsense. In the medieval paradigm, magic was everywhere.
Yes, you can't have wizards throwing around magic-missiles and fireballs indiscriminately, but the supernatural (both divine and arcane) should be fairly ubiquitous.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1035590Nonsense. In the medieval paradigm, magic was everywhere.

But no one could say if the magic was being cast.  It looked like it did.  Magic has always been 'ritualistic'.  Hidden.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1035590Yes, you can't have wizards throwing around magic-missiles and fireballs indiscriminately, but the supernatural (both divine and arcane) should be fairly ubiquitous.

THINGS were magical, and IT LOOKED like spells were being cast, but nothing really overt.  Often, people made up stories about certain other people, just to get them in trouble or because they misunderstood situations.

You're not refuting Chris24601's point.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1035718You're not refuting Chris24601's point.

He never does. The only arguments he ever has are to berate anyone who disagrees with his "one true way."

The facts of the matter are that the people in the Medieval period were not at all the dung-covered superstitious illiterates that many moderns try to paint them as to pretend that mankind has made any progress at all beyond the technological. The primary differences were due to the need to overcome their lack of technology relative to modern day humans. For example, feudalism was almost entirely a result of lacking the rapid communication and transportation technology of later periods and the logistics of equipping a fighting man and making due with the best option available with the technology at hand; trains and the telegraph would (and did) render it utterly obsolete as a management system. Their magical equivalents; flight, teleportation, crystal balls, etc.; would have the exact same effect on a fantasy society.

The scientists of the day didn't believe the Earth was flat (they just rightly knew the circumference of the Globe was too big to reach Asia by sailing West without running out of supplies... and if there hadn't been the Americas there Columbus and his crew would have starved to death as they were past the point of no return by the time they spotted land and the expedition been nothing but a footnote). Galileo didn't get into trouble over his heliocentric theory; he got into trouble for refusing to let it peer reviewed before it was published (he was about a century behind Copernicus, an actual Catholic Priest, who published his heliocentric theories without any issue).

The medieval belief in magic wasn't anything more esoteric than that of any modern Christians believing that prayers asking for God's intercession can bring miracles. If you want to see what their magic looked like back then you can just go to any Catholic Mass where the Priest, acting in the person of Jesus, uses ritual to transform bread and wine into the true body and blood of Christ that the faithful then consume in order to have Communion with the divine. If you want to get more esoteric you can look at any of the other sacraments; invoked to grant protection from evil spirits, cleanse spiritual wounds or bestow authority over divine forces to those for who receive the sacrament; or to obscure rituals like exorcisms; rituals to cast out demons.

The notion that Medievals believed in witchcraft and burned people at the stake for it is nonsense... serious belief in the power of witchcraft as anything other than misguided, but powerless, pagan beliefs didn't crop up until the Protestant Reformation. There was the field of "natural magic" of course... but that was just early science; the study of natural forces we'd call astronomy, botany, chemistry and physics today. It was magic in the sense the the processes were not fully understood, but its effects could observed (unlike ceremonial magic) and duplicated and were not believed to involve spirits in any way.

Someone who could legitimately and reliably conjure up what we today think of as magic would completely transform the perception of society. A world where studying and committing to memory the right words, gestures and using a bit of bat guano could blow an entire infantry company off the map is not one that could ever be reliably medieval because it removes the primary basis for power in the medieval system (the dominance of heavily armored mounted warrior... and the wealth required to equip and train them) from the nobility and puts supreme power in a military sense into the hands of anyone capable of performing arcane magic to annihilate their enemies and against which armor is of virtually no help.

Only in a world where magic is little more than Catholic ritual and the study of early science could the armored and mounted warrior maintained their dominance of society. The mere existence of someone who could look like any other commoner, but who could armor themselves with magical force as strong as steel, pass by any guard invisibly and immolate a cavalry charge or the courtyard of a castle with a single spell is going to so radically tilt the balance of power in a civilization that it could not resemble anything like the medieval period... and that's before you throw in warriors riding griffins and wyverns into battle, hordes of goblins, orcs, ogres, giants, legions of the undead raised up by powerful necromancers and actual freaking dragons living out in the wilds.

I stand by my statement; any magic that isn't exceedingly rare (like one-in-millions rare; akin to the Saints who performed miracles during their lifetimes... who popped up at best once a generation or so and usually well away from civilizations) or incredibly subtle (either hidden by secret societies using MIB-style memory wipes or which operates more in line with coincidence or applied botany, chemistry or physics) is going to warp a civilization to the point it cannot be credibly called "authentically medieval."

Quote from: Chris24601;1035754I stand by my statement; any magic that isn't exceedingly rare (like one-in-millions rare; akin to the Saints who performed miracles during their lifetimes... who popped up at best once a generation or so and usually well away from civilizations) or incredibly subtle (either hidden by secret societies using MIB-style memory wipes or which operates more in line with coincidence or applied botany, chemistry or physics) is going to warp a civilization to the point it cannot be credibly called "authentically medieval."

Preaching to the converted, my friend.  But the Pundit has a game to shill.

More about those who run the D&D and less about the setting are those DMs who seem to think a level 15 player should simply walk into a dungeon. Then not look for traps, not look for secret doors, expect players to blunder into combat without expecting a attack from a npc or monster. While claiming that players no matter the level are "metagaming". As a character after a x number of ambushes, traps and finding secret doors/traps a character is going to know what too look for and expect. To some nope a level 15 character is supposed to be as wet behind the years level 1 character or players are cheating.

Quote from: Chris24601;1035754serious belief in the power of witchcraft as anything other than misguided, but powerless, pagan beliefs didn't crop up until the Protestant Reformation.

This is revisionist bullshit propagated by Newmanites who cherry-pick a few papal bulls and extrapolate that to all of Europe prior to 1519. Fact is, everything from burying an enchanted talisman in the garden to make your vegetables grow to feuding statues of the Virgin needing to be placated with regular offerings of garlands and vegetables, lest they cause miscarriages in the enemy town's women, was commonplace in Europe.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1035856This is revisionist bullshit propagated by Newmanites who cherry-pick a few papal bulls and extrapolate that to all of Europe prior to 1519. Fact is, everything from burying an enchanted talisman in the garden to make your vegetables grow to feuding statues of the Virgin needing to be placated with regular offerings of garlands and vegetables, lest they cause miscarriages in the enemy town's women, was commonplace in Europe.

Thing is, even that sort of 'magic' isn't all that impressive.  It's common and accepted, yes, but it's not world changing as real, D&D style magic is.  Imagine, able to know that God or Gods exist, that Demons are truly able to be summoned.  To be able to really spy on your neighbours.  And those aren't from the Evocation school blasty mcblasting.

And that's before getting into creatures that clearly fantastic and powerful.

Quote from: sureshot;1035807More about those who run the D&D and less about the setting are those DMs who seem to think a level 15 player should simply walk into a dungeon. Then not look for traps, not look for secret doors, expect players to blunder into combat without expecting a attack from a npc or monster. While claiming that players no matter the level are "metagaming". As a character after a x number of ambushes, traps and finding secret doors/traps a character is going to know what too look for and expect. To some nope a level 15 character is supposed to be as wet behind the years level 1 character or players are cheating.

It ties in with the belief that the Fighter is the everyman class (it's not, the Thief is.  You pick up how to climb and run and sneak around and hiding, while playing as a kid, for example.  There's a reason there were Knights and Squires attending them, as well as schools teaching weapon work after that, but none for being a thief or burglar after all), and to mention that the Fighter doesn't grow as much as most of the other classes in terms of power.  Yes, it often gets a good amount of hit points per level, but everyone does that, and if you're the old guys who absolutely love the randomness of rolling for HP, you can have sad cases where the Wizard is outstripping the Fighter in HP, because the poor sword-swinging bastard can't roll higher than 2 on his d10, and because he has a 14 Con, isn't getting a HP bonus in THAT version of D&D, or is only getting a +1.

And speaking of casters, they get access to higher level spells every two levels.  Level 2 spells at 3rd, 3rd at 5th so on and so forth.  Now that's not to say that the Fighter doesn't get stuff, like extra swings but by that time in the game, the Wizard can often STOP TIME.  And the ability to wipe out half a room of Kobolds is cute, but when a single Fireball can do that to Hobgoblins?  Kinda sucky comparatively.

So it often FEELS to some players that the game is always of being constant noobs, despite the fact that about 3rd level, the average adventurer is a veteran monster slayer, and often knows quite a few creature's weaknesses, even if they hadn't read it in a book somewhere before adventuring.

Quote from: Dr. Ink'n'stain;1031606Revolving Door Afterlife. I like the idea of bringing someone back, but it should be more than a resource drain.

In AD&D it was risky and could fail for various reasons. The person could fail their death save and just not be recoverable. gods could just say "No" and in some cases the dead could just say "No."

There was also the problem of actually finding someone high enough level, and willing, to cast it. Depending on the setting that could be a quest all by itself.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1031666Magic.

Village idiots.