Tuesday, March 11th

The Daily Report

So far this week's not going great. We had a really ill-timed power dip at the end of yesterday afternoon. I lost more momentum than progress, but momentum is important. After my episode lat week, I haven't had a really solid day at work since last Wednesday, and I already know today isn't likely to be the combo breaker: we're expecting a major furniture delivery any time during a four hour window in the afternoon. Don't know how long it will take, don't know how much interaction on my part it will require.

It's good news overall, because it's a major step forward in getting the house situated. It's Jack and Sarah's bed. Once their bed is in place, we can move their dressers into their room, which will free up the space that they're currently occupying and allow more clothing to be unpacked and put away.

This is a really timely improvement, because we're starting to get into the warmer weather. The house has been in a holding pattern through much of the winter as snow and cold complicated the logistics of getting stuff out of the house and rearranging the stuff that's here. When the weather's nice, we'll be able to do things like move stuff out on the porch just to get it out of the way while we move other stuff around.

But anyway, as nice as it will be to have this milestone accomplished--and as nice as it will be for Jack and Sarah to have a bed, since they apparently like that kind of thing--it does make it hard for me to plan my day.

The State of the Me

Doing okay. I slept normally last night. I still felt a little wobbly by the end of the day. I'm thinking that realistically it will probably take me about a week to bounce back fully, so I'm going to continue taking it easy-ish through the end of this week.

Plans For Today

Well, this is tricky, like I said. I'm going to focus on stuff that's interruptable.

Item number 1 is going to be some habitat improvement. My work space and living space could definitely use some picking up/decluttering.

Item number 2 is ebook compilation. The Tales of MU Omnibus project is still the single biggest driver of ebook profits I have, and new entries also generate the biggest spikes.

After the bed is here and set up, I'll revisit my plans. If they're here and done any time before the extreme end of the delivery window, I should have a good enough chunk of time for writing. If they're here and done at the earliest part of the window, I could have most of the afternoon. Until then, I'm just going to do what I can.

Adventure Song: Fight Good

While I was waiting for the furniture delivery today, I ended up turning my thoughts to the power progression for Fighters, and in the course of doing so, rethought the class a bit. The next draft is going to have their class features pared down a bit and one added.

My power progression differs from 4E in the following ways:

You never "level out" of a power. The same powers can have the equivalent of at-will, encounter, and daily uses. Powers are "used up" by spending general pools of tokens, not by expending the powers themselves.

For a Wizard casting spells, it's easier to understand why someone who is 30th level might cast a spell they learned at level 1. If you need to put someone to sleep, dropping a meteor on them isn't going to work. A Wizard with a "full hand" of 8 combat powers has 8 completely different things they can do.

For a Fighter—especially one played by a player who values simplicity—it gets a bit harder. If you're just picking out the shiniest new version of Hit Harder each time, why would you ever use Hit Hard I when you've got Hit Hard VI?

So I started to rethink things. I came up with a slightly different and slightly simpler progression and structure for powers that makes things like higher degrees of Hit Harder more complementary than redundant, although that's a different discussion.

I've said before that my concept for Fighter is that they should be the best fighters. Simple, obvious, hardly revolutionary... but something D&D has never really done before since the days when fighting was "I hit the orc and hope I don't die" every round until the Magic-User evolved into a plasma cannon and made fighting completely obsolete. 4E has the Fighter making attacks that dish out comparable damage to a Wizard's spells at higher levels, but the whole "good at fighting" thing has been mostly outsourced to a different role, striker, which is occupied by the Ranger and the Rogue. The Fighter's job is to run interference and tangle up enemies while the small-f fighters present the real threat.

Imagine the Fighter is just straightforward good at fighting, in a way that keeps them competitive with spellcasters. How do we do this?

Let's say a game uses a similar level progression and HP scale to 4E. Imagine a character class that has a +1 bonus to melee weapon damage at level 1 that scales up at +1 per level through level 10, then +2 per level until level 20 and +3 per level until level 30. This is a character who does 60 points of damage per hit at level 30, before you include anything else (like the actual weapon damage).

Is this ridiculous?

Well, let's think about what HP are: having any is an abstract representation of a character's ability to fight on. The exact number represents your ability to take a hit, to turn bad hits into light hits, roll with the damage, etc.

Shouldn't the best fighter on the field not only be good at doing this, but be good at countering other peoples' ability to do this?

If you think about it in terms of comparing it to dagger thrusts (about 24) or sword swings (about 12) or how many level 0 non-combatants it would be enough damage to kill, the idea that you could get +60 damage even without a weapon sounds ridiculous... but if we stipulate that damage in excess of HP is meaningless, all 60 damage means is "enough damage to drop anyone with 60 HP or less".

Basically, my vision for the Fighter isn't to come up with a full thirty levels of powers that let them keep up with Wizards. My vision is that the Wizard should need spells to keep up with the Fighter. The Wizard's virtue is flexibility and being able to do things a person with a sword can't (area attacks, teleporting, reshaping the battlefield, et cetera).

That's not to say the Fighter doesn't have powers. But the Fighter's core functionality comes in at the low levels and keeps growing. The powers Fighters get after level 5 tend to be increasingly purpose-specific... things like Giant-Felling Strike, Dragon-Slaying Strike... neither are *quite* as limited as the name suggests, as the first one gains benefits against any large opponent and particularly two-legged ones and the second one can impair the wings or breath weapon of any critter with either. Sword-Shattering Strike seems more general-purpose, but its useless against someone not using a weapon and its actual impact would vary heavily depending on how dependent the target is on the weapon.

The common thread of higher level Fighter strikes is they're things you won't find a use for in every fight, which is okay because a Fighter's power comes from their class features and low-level powers which scale with level in a way most don't. A Fighter could skip their own favored powers after level 5 and get a smattering of low-level powers favored by other classes and have them be gravy because the Fighter gets what they need early and grows into it.

(You might wonder what happens if someone from another class takes one of these scaling powers. They don't scale with character's overall level, but with their number of Warrior levels. Warrior is a metaclass that Fighters, Barbarians, Paladins, Rangers, and Warlords belong to. Levels in these classes count as Warrior levels.)

4E made the Fighter into an MMO style tank, enshrining the "meat shield" strategy in the mechanics. This isn't a bad thing. I'm including powers specifically for players who want to play things that way. But it's not a part of my core concept. The Fighter... fights good. The Fighter is the most dangerous person on the field to stand in reach of. Not the Rogue. The Rogue is dangerous because you can't see them coming. The Fighter stands out in the open, coming out swinging.

One of the better parts of this concept is that it pretty firmly cements the Fighter's newbie friendliness. You *can* take tactically-minded powers if you're a tactically-minded player, and you can add them later if you get comfortable with playing the game in that way. But none of the Fighter's innate features revolves around anything complicated. They have enough HP and deal enough damage to make for a gentle learning curve. All complexity is off-loaded into powers.