Defenders suck. Well, maybe not ALL defenders. There are those rare exceptions where a player has come up with a particularly imaginative build like a Warden/Druid hybrid that turns into a swarm of bees and embraces the primal forces of nature. The defenders I’ve got a real beef with are Fighters, specifically any Fighter built like our good friend Conscore McSwordy.
Today we let Bauxtehude off the reigns. He’s got some very strong opinions about defenders. After listening to his ranting at the game table for the past year I buckled and let him have his say on Dungeon’s Master. I may not agree with everything he says in this article but I wanted to give him a chance to rant about it. I leave it to you, the readers, to put him in his place and let him know just how wrong he is about his stance on Fighters. – Ameron
I think we all have a Conscore McSwordy at our gaming table. You’ll recognize him by his heavy armor and shield (giving him an incredibly high AC), a starting Constitution score of 20 or higher and very little going on upstairs. Fighters built like Conscore McSwordy are simply annoying. I particularly hate that they can lock down combat with abilities like “if you attack anyone but me, I get to stop your attack, stop your movement and then pound you for 1W damage” and “I have the highest defenses and hit points, smash my skull all day, Int was my dump stat so I wont even notice.” Fighters are ruining D&D. I say we just get rid of them all together.
Too Sticky
If you’re looking for a way to make D&D combat intentionally boring just add a Fighter to the party. When hostile combatants move around the map the party has to cope with the new tactical positioning. Fighters prevent this kind of movement, keeping combat stationary and boring.
Why even have controllers at all if there are Fighters in the game. The Fighter wants all the monsters surrounding him and once he’s got them marked he doesn’t want them going anywhere. Defender who lock down opponents (again, the Fighter being the prime culprit) all but eliminate the controllers forced movement powers making these classes feel particularly useless.
Strikers built to jump from the shadows and hit unaware opponents moving past them must give up the advantages that come from stealth once the Fighter marks everyone and keeps them in place.
The leader’s role becomes trivialized as well. Not only is their expertise as a battlefield commander inconsequential, but any tactical choices about who to heal are completely removed. With Conscore McSwordy taking all the punishment it’s safe to say we know who’s getting all of the Inspiring Words.
As an RPG, D&D at its best is high flying and explosive. Characters can swing dramatically from the brink of death to making a heroic, tide-turning, daily-using, action-point-spending surge to victory unlike any other game. However, without major alterations it’s not the best game system for political intrigue (if you want that play Houses of the Blooded) nor is it ideal for cloak & dagger (if you want that play L5R). Where 4e D&D does excel is in its combat mechanics which rely heavily on the grid. Dynamic tactical movement is a huge part of what makes D&D combat great. The defenders (Fighters) are the antithesis of what D&D does well. Remove Fighters from the combat equation and things will get a lot more interesting and likely a lot more fun.
Hogging the Spotlight
The Fighter begins his turn by marking everyone, but then further hogs the spotlight as he continues to act and react on everyone else’s turn. Your gaming table becomes the Conscore McSwordy show. The Fighter keeps jumping in to remind you about the penalties affecting each opponent. This slows down combat and makes the monster’s turn very boring. DMs find that their best course of actions for the monsters is to just say “I use ‘nothing happens this round.’ Oh look, I got a 12 does that hit your insanely high AC?”
TPK? Not While I’m Here
With a Fighter in the party there is almost no chance of the PCs even facing a truly desperate situation. The Fighter easily soaks up damage that might otherwise decimate any other PC involved in the combat.
The only solution is to have every monster use blasts and close bursts that include the Fighter in the attack. But this gets boring and is overly punitive to everyone not playing a Fighter. It’s like using a shotgun to kill a fly. It may solve the problem but it’s not going to be pretty.
Strong Defense, Weak Offense
In order to try and maintain some kind of balance between classes and roles, defenders have really high defenses and comparatively low damage output. This combination makes standard combat encounter drag on forever.
Add to this that fact that monsters in general tend to lack danger and any sense of dramatic flare in 4e D&D. Fighting the biggest and baddest opponent becomes a long drawn out combat against a docile creature. I can’t tell you how often a one attack per round solo monster is stunned or dazed for the first half of the encounter and then fails to hit the defender for the second half.
Even the players find this kind of encounter boring. I sometimes wish that the rest of the party would just join forces with the solo monster and gang up on the Fighter. He’d be caught unaware and you may even pull off a coup de grace. Once he’s down the rest of the party can actually play D&D and have some fun.
What’s Role-Playing?
Have you ever seen a Fighter actually try role-playing his character? Defenders in general offer very limited range in role-playing possibility. The classes themselves encourage a min/max mentality when assigning ability scores. They practically demand competitive feat selection. Players running Fighters can always just say “To hell with what’s on paper, I’ll role-play the character I want to role play!” but that’s a very rare exception to what I’ve seen in practice.
If you build your Fighter competitively, min/maxing his defenses and ability scores, you don’t have the points to spare to round out his non-fighting abilities. He’ll lack the Charisma to form words, the Intelligence to actually have anything to say or the Wisdom to notice that anything is going on around him. From a mechanics perspective, most of his skills will be so awful he’ll hurt the party every time he’s forced to make a skill check.
Reality Check
People like playing Fighters. I don’t get it myself, but they are certainly popular. So even as I rant on about all of the reasons for removing Fighters from D&D I know that many people will ignore me and keep on playing their own Conscore McSwordy. That’s your call.
In these cases I hope that you’ve got a great DM who has found clever things for your character to do or you may have found an exciting way to redefine the role in combat that is a hip manifestation of your character concept. But I plead with all of the Fighter-lovers out there to try playing other classes and other roles. Stop slowing down the game and just build a striker already. Be the envy of the table and roll the big damage dice for once in your life.
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1 2 3 … 8 Next »love yalls blog but this is terrible. does the author know that fighters can only combat challenge once a round? hated this
This is one reason why I have players give me their character sheets. I find opponents that attack something other than their AC. AC 20, great. How's your reflex, 12? Looks like you're going to take a bad beating here!
It's funny to see how fast the players want a magic item or some way to boost their low defense!
arggh ill stop replying but the ac comments, paladins have better ac. the marking comments, fighters cant just 'mark' they have to hit or miss on an attack. it doesnt sound like the author knows how fighters play and that is probably the reason for their disdain
Err... what?
1. The only way for a Fighter to start with 20 CON is to also start with 14 or 16 STR, which means his accuracy will suck. Considering that all those punishments you're complaining about depend on him hitting, a 20CON Fighter is pretty awful.
2. "The Fighter begins his turn by marking everyone". Err.. what? Fighters mark one person, or two if they have one of two specific at-wills. Everyone else around the Fighter is unmarked and can Shift away whenever they like.
3. It's the DM's fault if he's sending the entire enemy roster into melee with the Fighter. If your DM isn't completely stupid, the bad guys should send one Brute or Soldier after the Fighter to keep him busy, and then have all the rest of the melee forces run around him to punch the soft back row.
4. Fighters aren't THAT hard to kill. Two rounds of focused fire should plant one into the dirt without any major issues. Three if they're completely defense-oriented (like the one I play).
5. "Fighters don't roleplay"..? WTF?! Tendency to roleplay has almost no connection at all to character class. I've played with Bards who never say a word, and Fighters who never break character. Roleplaying comes down to the player, not the character.
This is the stupidest and whiniest blog article I've read in a really long time. It has lowered my opinion of this normally-excellent blog-- why the hell was this allowed to see the green light? Don't you guys have some kind of editorial figurehead to keep garbage like this off the front page?
@Everyone
I've been playing D&D with Bauxtehude for over a year and since day one he's been complaining about defenders (Fighters specifically). Every couple of weeks he's brought up his dislike of the defender classes. Finally I said "If you feel that strongly about it, write a blog post and share your discontent." This was the end result.
I see this article as his way to rant and rave and be done with it once and for all. I also expected that a lot of people would come out and defend the merits of the defenders (which I see is already happening in the comments above).
I happen to be a big fan of the defenders, especially the Paladin class which I've played for over 10 levels. I agree that the sticky Fighters can be a real pain for the DM, but otherwise I think they do exactly what they're supposed to do – defend the other PCs. Sorry, Bauxtehude we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.
You might want to slap a "this post does not reflect the opinions of the blog as a whole" disclaimer at the top, because right now this is reflecting VERY poorly on you and your team.
Seriously? I'd rather run a game without a leader than without a defender. I feel way too cruel wailing on the softy strikers and running past them to smack down the ranged folks that want to be in the back if there isn't someone at least trying to stop me.
While the fighter is the best defender out there at his particular mode of defense (mark, punish and prevent), they're ultimately not the stickiest builds out there (they need to hit to get the "punishment" part). Way to alienate 20%+ of the players out there with something that's clearly rules-ignorant.
@ Captain Spud
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Also I dare the writer of this post to play a campaign through 5 - 10 levels, using the standard monsters compared to a game with a fighter and see how long the group lasts (Fighter is switched out with a striker.)
@Froth: it seems your not the only person who is in a froth over the position I take in this article. The fighter can use the combat challenge once a round but they can use combat superiority on every monster's turn that forces the table to wait for a resolution of an attack that will do minimal damage and stop the creature's movement.
There's lots of ways for a fighter to get more than one attack in per round so I wont list them, but there are tricks that span item selection all the way to race choice. Remember that the fighter only needs roll the attack die. There's lots of people I know who keep a bundle of javlins with them just to mark enemies they can't get in melee with knowing they they'll never hit them.
@Azanhour Axebearer: This is one of the easiest ways to force a character with a two dimensional to grow. As a DM you can target at character's strengths or weaknesses. If you target their strengths often times they just overcome and reassert their qualities, but if you target their weaknesses and beat them you force them to rethink their lot in life.
@Captian Spud: a fighter with a Con score of 20 actually fills the defender role quite well; the higher the con score the higher the hit points, surge value and number of surges. Sure this types of fighter has a bad attack score but if you wanted a good swing and damage dice there are a wide range of strikers out there to play.
There's lots of ways that fighters can get their hands on bursts, blasts and multiple attacks per round. Right now I am playing in a group that has a dragonborn that can use it's breath attack up to four times an encounter up to a blast 5 or in burst.
Where are you quoting "Fighters don't roleplay" from? That's not even in the article, nor is any such claim made. If someone where to make that claim I would be like: "No! You are wrong, stop that."
@Ronin Randy: Seriously? Nope. You got me. That being said, I'll agree with you that the fighter is not the stickiest defender out there, but it is the most accessable sticky fighter, it's iconic and a likley choice and it has been around the longest so you see it the most.
I'm interested to see where you get your figures from though, I am surpised to learn that 20%+ D&D players identify as fighters. Care to cite your source?
@All: Lets think about magnitude. I am more than content to have you rag on me all day, and I wrote the piece so I will defend it but I encourage a humorous or even satrical reading of this article. You might want to look over it a think "Is this really worth fighting about?".
Thank-you... finally someone had the courage to point out the elephant in the living room. I know this position might anger a certain percentage of people, but I believe there is a percentage who agree with the argument. However, they just may not be as vocal about it as this author.