The Tactical Role of Martials. Pt 1.

If you follow a lot of optimization posts on the internet, do a lot of optimization yourself, or just happen to be fairly observant you may have noticed a trend.

Spellcasting is very very powerful.

Not in a small sense ether.  Spellcasting can solve a wide range of problems from “not enough damage” to “stomach ache”.

This leaves non-casting characters in the awkward position of being limited only to what they have without the potential to stop the day and within a few minutes of out of game time be prepared to face the days with a full set of answers to solve all of the current in-game questions.

Today we’re going to briefly explore this phenomenon and then take a look at the tactical role of martials and explain why every group typically has one despite the apparent superiority of spellcasting as a cure-all to every adventuring conundrum.

What Caster-Martial Disparity has Right

Let’s be honest here, magic is powerful.  The proof is in the observation.  Just as a brief example a wizard of 5th level can cast fly. A fighter of similar level will get the ability to attack a little easier and damage a little more.

Other martials like paladins, rangers, and the upcoming brawler, swashbuckler, bloodrager, and slayers get some interesting offensive abilities but that’s the extent of it.

So why is fly  such a big deal?

Remember positioning is the strongest factor in combat.  Fly provides an incredibly strong positioning option.  Now consider all the spells that wizards and other casters have that effect positioning and actions.  What good is a full attack when you’ve been hit with slow?  How useful is it to create a tower shield wielding paladin to act as a moving fortress when we can cast  wall of stone  to cover more area and be more expendable?

A lot of what a martial can do can be done better and more expedient by a small resource expenditure.

“But wait!” You say. “Wouldn’t the wizard be limited in the amount of times he can do that?”

Well, yes and no.  It really comes down to the game master, how many encounters they run, how hard, and how often they need to have such resources expended.  But, the player is a factor as well, even a bloody handed GM will be cancelled out by a clever player.   So, it’s not really worth bringing that into account since hard encounters often punish martials just as hard.

Ultimately, the best analogy for this disparity is the choice between taking a crossbow with plenty of bolts and taking a  full survival kit into the wilderness to live off of.  Sure, eventually the survival  kit will deplete but by the time that matters you will likely be quite well off if you’re savvy enough.  All the crossbow can do is kill things very well and do everything else rather poorly.  In an adventuring situation you want the bag of answers as opposed to the pointy object.

What Caster-Martial Disparity has Wrong

What a lot of caster-martial debates come down to is a character colloquially called “Schroedinger’s wizard”  a theoretical character who may or may not have access to all spells, may or may not have them memorized or accessible ona  scroll they scribed, and may or may not have performed any number of out of combat actions to make themselves immortal.

This wizard (or cleric, or druid, or witch) has never existed at a real gaming table.

Sure, there have been wizards who have overpowered a table.  But, I’ve been at tables where barbarians, rangers, and paladins have literally defined the combat strategy of the group.  Schroedinger’s wizard also assumes that the GM apparently allows the wizard to attain infinite wealth, build entire galaxies and devour the gods without so much as a simple “stop that”.  Just because it’s RAW does not mean the GM will make it REAL.

Plus, it never takes into account outside factors like basic player intelligence.  A wizard making up for his groups failing won’t be at their strongest purely because they’re covering holes.  On the flip side a group that plays well will hardly ever have need of the uber-wizard making the point about  their power moot.

Lastly, there are situations, environments and games where the “uber-wizard” just isn’t all that viable.  Dumb luck may keep you from getting the spells you need, a dead magic zone may kill a lot of your capability, even a rival caster who knows all about your repertoire can outgun you at an inopportune moment.

Ultimately, a caster’s biggest weakness is not having the answer on hand for the problem presented.  A lot of times the problem presented is a bad guy that needs to be dealt with swiftly unaccounted for in the cater’s arsenal.  That’s where martial’s matter.

The Martials Place

There are three areas that martials have over casters of all sorts.

Efficiency: Martials are exceedingly resource efficient.  A ranger will never suddenly run out of his favored enemy bonus, a barbarian takes a long time to run out of rage rounds (50+ rounds at level twenty is a long, long time), a paladin without his smite evil still has his divine weapon, auras, immunities and spells to call upon.  A fighter with an adamantine weapon can literally dig a hole from one side of the dungeon through to the other with surprising speed due purely to the fact that he never runs out of sword swings.  Fighting casters like magi, bards, druids, and what not require several buffs to match or exceed the damage and defensive potential of martials.  However the same martial can receive those buffs and exceed anything the encounter itself can accomplish with far fewer resources.

Immediacy: A martial character is prepped almost immediately from when initiative is rolled. Outside of just drawing a weapon ( a move action) or sometimes activating an ability (most often a swift action) the martial is ready to go from the start.  If you think about this from a tactical standpoint it means that the martial characters threatened area is an immediate danger zone able to control and defend the area around them long before, and often much better than, any of a caster’s control spells.  At level 1 a fighter with a long spear/cestus combo and combat reflexes with a decent dex can control an area much larger and more effectively than much of what a caster can use in a much faster amount of time.  This is the reason why many groups will often try to have at least one good melee combatant in them in order to provide a bulwark of defense and a hammer of offense to the group.

Multiplication: This ones a tough one to explain.  In essence what do you get when you buff a wizard with enlarge person? A bigger wizard no more or less threatening than a smaller wizard.  What do you get when you apply the same buff to a fighter? A terror.  Martial’s are very good at taking the action, and positioning manipulating powers of casters and turning them into truly terrible threats.  A blade barrier is merely a fancy wall until the barbarian hurls you into it.  Haste is merely a nifty speed enhancement until the group’s damage output nearly doubles because of it.  It’s easy to associate this ability purely for casters but without the martials to become the lightning rod for these sorts of spells to go around they are not nearly as effective.

Tactically speaking if you consider casters enablers by manipulating the field and numbers to their advantage than martial’s become the enabled.  They’re the ones that ultimately allow the job to get done and finish the job when the casting is all but finished.

So, instead of looking at the ways in which casters and martials differ we should focus instead on how they function as a cohesive whole.

The Caster-Martial Partnership

Martials do not so much protect and screen for their casters as simply exist as living battlefield control capable of finishing a fight.  These same martials make excellent targets for buffs that increase their capacity to control the field and destroy the opponent.

In essence the caster provides the numbers, actions, and opportunities for superior positioning while the martial provides a ready focal point to base those spells around as well as an efficient means to deliver those spells or make them more effective.

The martial makes battlefield control spells more effective by dint of being a real a present threat that requires good mobility to either avoid or deal with.  They also make action and number spells more effective by having a solid base by which to grow (good BAB, good damage, efficient action economy) and having more actions through which to deliver those boosted numbers (flurry of blows, rapid shot, two weapon fighting, etc.).

Next time we’ll talk about how this partnership forms the core of many group strategies and why every spell serves to make martials better and then discuss how this partnership influences builds themselves.