r/DnDcirclejerk

So this is what we do we give all martials Maneuvers. We dont just give them Maneuver dice but we also create multiple tiers of Maneuvers 1 to 9. You spend a tier 1 Maneuver dice to perform a tier 1 Maneuver and a tier 3 Maneuver dice to do a tier 3 Maneuver .

As you level up you gain higher and higher tiers of Maneuver dice but the cap is 4 per tier. How many Maneuvers and what tiers you have is indicated in the Maneuvers using... closet.

https://preview.redd.it/dexiwfix5w0h1.png?width=470&format=png&auto=webp&s=a2643c9ae0b6df651f3e6f554a8fcca8933b692d

Sauce is a guy I know who keeps reverse engineering spells while trying to fix martials.

It's UNDENIABLE that the martial caster divide exists. Casters are better, stronger, tankier, more CC, more utlity etc. But martials have the niche of better single target damage due to GWM and multiple attacks, as well as possibly better RESOURCELESS damage. In 2024 though, WoTC decided that this was UNACCEPTABLE, and started pushing certain motives, narratives and elements that resemble LITERAL CUCKOLDRY with the martials as the CUCKS, the casters as the BULL and the monsters as the HOTWIFE.

This can be easily seen through the addition of weapon masteries, most of which are meant to benefit casters, and the nerfing of GWM, PAM and Sentinel. Masteries like push have no purpose outside of buffing caster damage spells like spirit guardians. Let me repeat that. You, a martial, who is supposed to be the single target hero, is PUSHING your MONSTER into the range of the CASTERS spells so they can ENJOY it more and be the single target champ instead. The caster is taking YOUR throne and taking YOUR glory, showing themselves as a superior male/female and more adequate for the task at hand, while you sit in a chair 10 ft. away ENJOYING it and LETTING it happen, watching the monsters get drained by the casters in a scenario engineered by YOU. This is CUCKOLDRY. Plain and simple. The motives are obvious when you spot it. And this is everywhere. Stunning strike? You're setting the monsters into position for a caster to enjoy themselves by removing legendary resistances (Similar to removing clothing). Grappling? You're dragging the monster to the caster and enhancing THEIR spell, while you deal 0 DAMAGE.

And the magic stealer is the FINAL and ULTIMATE stage of this. Your ONLY purpose is to set up the casters. You prepare the stage for them. You give them slots which they expend (letting them last longer), you make THEIR saving throws better and you let THEM USE and ABUSE the monsters (who remember is the hotwife in the scenario WOTC have set up) in any disgraceful way they desire by removing resistances, while YOU watch and do nothing.

It's only a matter of time before they release a martial subclass where the optimal move is to sit outside the dungeon room and LISTEN to combat. I'm tired of the blatant cuckoldry and attempts at undermining, emasculating and humiliating martial characters. I can't be the only one whos seeing this and is tired of it.

Just finished a game night featuring a player who stirred up so much self-serving drama that the DM threw him out mid-session. Maybe when I calm down I'll re-evaluate and say it was probably too harsh, but right now I'm fully on the DM's side.

Everything was fine when we were just chatting before everyone arrived. It went off the rails immediately when he handed the DM his character sheet. DM's eyebrow shot up immediately, then furrowed their brow and tilted their head not even halfway down. They stared at it a bit longer, trying to make sense of it, and then challenged the new player: "What is this?"

New guy played dumb & innocent. "What do you mean?"

I was sitting next to DM, so I asked to see it. Buckle up for this one, folks.

"Gender: M" - Not terribly imaginative when this is the same as the player's, and unusually mundane for our group, but fine, whatever.

"Strength: 10" - Alright, I guess he won't be on the front lines.

"Dexterity: 11" - Wow, really going for a min-maxed build here I guess.

"Constitution: 10" - Okay, this is really getting suspicious...

"Intelligence: 18"

That's not a typo. That's a "1" and then some kind of sideways infinity symbol.

The rest of the sheet was littered with a combination of absurdly low values and more of these deranged runes. He had "S" torches, but like a weird blocky S. Number of waterskins was just a cursive Z.

DM: "What's your character's Int?"

New Guy: "Ate teen" (?? something like that)

DM: "Do you mean 10010?"

New guy acted like he was stunlocked.

New Guy: "Oh! You guys use base-two? Sorry, I was using base-10."

"NO," DM snarled, "WE use base-10. What the fuck is 'two'?"

Turns out this guy had his own special non-binary snowflake numbers system that he felt more "comfortable" using. But he at least seemed amenable to working with us as best he could, and he was cool otherwise, so we decided to play on. The only experience we had like this before was one who used base-1, but he never finished making his character.

Very first thing he does, right after we agree to work together, is take out his coinbag and dump out the wildest, wokest coins I've ever seen in my life. They were all kinds of lumpy rock shapes with his special squiggles all over them. None of them could lay flat. I swear, one of them had like 10000-10100 sides; it was practically a ball.

Apart from a few skill checks here and there, the game was sailing smoothly enough. But when we inevitably ventured out to do some adventuring, it was pure drudgery. Every single time his turn came up, every time he took damage, every time he had to roll a save, the flow of the game froze dead in its tracks as he and DM tried to translate to and from his non-binary gobbledygook.

The last straw came in the middle of what was supposed to be a cinematic fight. The big bad boss hit the new guy with a fireball, and the DM was trying to quickly convert 1111 damage: "flef... flefty...?" And new guy fucking had the audacity to GIGGLE.

DM stood up, slapped his palms on the table, and told him, "I'm done. I tried, but I'm done. Just get the fuck out."

New guy sheepishly gathered his things and all his stupid little rocks, and fumbled on his phone to call an Uber. But when he stepped out into the rain, he suddenly turned around. "Oh, can I actually wait inside for my ride? It says he's twenty min--" and the DM slammed the door in his face.

And, like... Look. I get that it takes all colors to make a rainbow, and diversity is our strength, and all that. But you've gotta draw the line somewhere. We live in a society, for Christ's sake. Do they actually understand how much additional, unwelcome cognitive load they're imposing on everyone around them? Or do they know perfectly well, and thrive on it? I'm genuinely torn between the ten.

See, I was spending my last 23th hour of the day (the day started at 3 PM yesterday for me), then I just stumbled upon this specific post.

There is so many insightful answers but I think someone should summarize them to explain why the OP is so, SO STUPID.

1. BAD DM: If you cannot do crazy things, it's all your DM fault. Yeah, DM, you suck, that's it, accept it, big loser. Yes casters can stop others to play, yes they can teleport, yes they can make clones and bring people back to life per the rules themselves, but there is NOTHING in the rules that stop a martial doing a 2 with his athletic check and jumping right to the moon. Because there is no rules for it doesn't mean you can't do it, it's tabletop games, roleplay, DUH.
2. Martials do high damages: I can hit with my paladin, which is totally a martial btw, on a critical, by spending my spell maneuver slots, 19238491839 damage. Can your fucking loser of a wizard do that? NO. So yes, fighter is perfectly balanced, dumbass.
3. My sister think her rogue is funny: And my sister opinion is very important, much more than maths and facts, so just shut up. BTW my sister is also my aunt and plays a tiefling horny character, so cool.
4. Asymmetry in design: It's DND, of course there is an asymmetry, which explain why martial can do only one thing (and it's pretty disgusting) meanwhile casters just get billions of options. Perfectly balanced as it should, totally intended, and clearly it doesn't do anything bad for the logic of the game.
5. More encounters: Accepting that SOMETIMES caster may be better, just run the 23th fight of the day. You'll see, when the fighter with 0 hp left will be able to strike those 235 goblins with his sword THREE times, not once, not twice, but THRICE, and your wizard will just cast his terrible 14 damage on its firebolt with half his hp remaining in range, like the loser he is, you can joke about how a disappointment he is to his mother.
6. Pathfinder 2e don't fix this: You have to wait high tier to be able to do large scale powerful stuff so it's no better than DND. In fact DND is better because it doesn't make you think you can do it. Stupid game. Pathfinder 2e I mean, DnD is my love. 5e only. 4th suck (I heard of).
7. I don't want to play caster: Dude, why would I want to play a caster with a sword? I mean, if I pick a fighter, it's for playing a fighter. I want realism when I fight this gigantic kaiju of 120ft that is eating me and dissolving me in acid and I came out and still can use action surge to attack SIX time (not once, not twice, not thrice, BUT SIXTH). You really think I want to do magical stuff, like a shield formation, or trampling a line of smaller enemies with a charge on my horse, or grappling a guy and throwing him on another, or breaking a brick wall with my 24 strength on my barbarian? You think I should be able to get more feats, more skills, when I am a veteran adventurer compared to a nerd wizard that spend 20 years leaning magic? It's clearly stuff not made for a martial to be able to strike to people side-to-side in one swing, sorry. I want to be martialing goblins, not fireballing them. Plus, it's not like a warlock with eldritch blast is a martial with spells, so as there is no equivalency on the other side, you can't do that at all.
8. Spells are unbalanced btw: Everyone play fireball and counterspell and everything else is bad so in truth caster have almost no options. You can push, grapple and attack, you have more stuff in martial. Really, just a big band of losers. Also sneak attack is like a free fireball for ROGUE! Do you realize HOW GOOD rogue is with his UNLIMITED FIREBALL?
9. There is other games so no issue: You can't criticize DnD own design if there is (bad) games that you can play for your stupid fantasy. Not my problem if DnD is the default choice for 98% of the tables and it's way harder to play TTRPG, or that you think just more stuff balanced could strengthen the whole design of 5e and make it a better game. WELL YOU CANT MORON, BECAUSE ITS ALREADY PERFECT!
10. Gear already carries you: Yes you can get a +3 sword that sometimes fire a level 3 spell, so martials are absolutely good in options. Because the wizard can absolutely not use this sword, they don't have items only useable by casters, and they need to spend the whole group economy on components, because all spells use very costly components, the party is poor, there is no way to ignore component cost for most spells requiring ones, and the DM cut the wizard tongue and hands anyway so he can't cast. I don't want to treat it of a loser for that, because it would be mean to disabled people, but... you understand what I think of this wizard.
11. You can homebrew: Really, why are you bothering me when you can just add the rules that, I don't know, your level 4th fighter can spit acid by his mouth which teleports him?
12. Wizards are for losers: Pretty self explanatory.
13. It's a lord of the rings inspired game: Yes. In LOTR it's well known that there is mages everywhere that can break reality on a regular basis granted they have little experience, and Aragorn can only attack four times an orc during his turn and has a +11 to two skills only. There is clearly no other inspiration anywhere to make stuff able to rival magic to some extent, in any country and culture.
14. Martial design is so tightly perfect: Like I can fall from orbit and survive with my 120hp but cannot lift a horse. It does absolutely makes perfect sense, I can do the exact same IRL.

And you know what? WOTC is SO good at game design that even then they found how to introduce ways to solve those "issues" (which they clearly aren't) with 5.5! You can get martials with more stuff, by making them magical on 99% of subclasses! You have a feat at the start of the game! You can now push enemies with hammers! ITS CRAZY!

Tl:dr, tired of seeing those arguments on how martials feel bad when clearly my sister/aunt's experience with her rogue proves how wrong you are and how with a friend when I was playing a fighter and him a paladin we killed this guy in one turn at the start of combat.

I want to nail a wizard with a throwing knife within line of sight. I want to be able to tumble for no damage from a 400 ft. fall. I want to be able to jump off an enemy's head for a 30 ft. vertical jump slow fall shooting arrows. Fuck this damage balancing and the numbers. I don't care that a maximized 3.5 fireball could outperform my damage 10x over to a field of enemies. I don't care that a 3.5 wizard could sneeze and take over the world. The question is, why can't I? Where's my nonsense? I'm playing a skill monkey rogue for god's sake, why am I not good at anything? I'm a level 14 fighter. A legendary warrior. Why do I never get to do anything actually cool? Why can't skill checks do anything? Why can't I do anything. Utter nonsense.

No, I'm not going to play a different system. I like D&D because it has good numbers except when it sucks because it doesn't. I don't want 4e except when I do. I don't want to DM because then I can't play. I don't want maneuvers because if I wanted to track spells I'd play a cleric or some shit. I don't care if I do damage or one shot things. I don't want to be part of a team.

I just want something I can fucking abuse. I want to break the game.