 Howdy how's it going, my name's Davy Chappy and sometimes when I'm bored I like to moonlight as a historian and uncover the secrets about why and how our lovely dice game was built to be the way it is, and no class better represents the core of D&D than the fighter. The fighter defines the design philosophy of D&D, without it a core aspect of the game would simply cease to be. You can have a game without a wizard or a rogue, but the fighter represents what a person is. Most of the mundane mechanics of the game are fed into the fighter's special abilities to make it the paragon of the Mucho Macho Man. So today I'm going to be traveling through time as I visit every version of the fighter, from its humble fighting man origins to the 5 star gymnast of 5e. And as always, keep in mind that the majority of this is just my opinion, so if you feel like I'm not very good at fighting, feel free to play your games however you want. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So the fighting man of the first edition is a weird thing to look at, mostly because OGD&D is a convoluted mess of two different games that are trying to play footsies with each other, and eventually an alternative combat system had to be made just so that the fighting man could, well, fight. In the beginning, fitness grams would act as a single normal dude, which is what every level 1 fighter should aspire to be, and the first couple of levels give minor bonuses to attacking so that they would now be a slightly better than average dude. Then after that the fighting man would gain all the powers of a second fighting man, and from then on it just became as physically strong as a linear number of men, until every fighting man had all the might of he-man. Conceptually, original D&D placed a lot more value on armor to prevent being hit than it did on health, which came in very short supply, so a finger mittens increase in strength benefited its ability to break through an enemy's AC, attacking multiple times kind of wasn't a thing back in those days, and a high-leveled F-men would bring a single strike down with the might of Atlas in order to slay one gobble, and then they'd wait a whole round to see if a lucky strike from a second gobble would immediately kill them. Speaking of armor, firemen could wear any kind that they wanted, making them the de facto tank of the group, since first edition was kinda centered around the idea that the game was just seeing how high your character could level before their inevitable demise, which is where that thought process of dying and then being sent back to level 1 comes from. The higher a strength score you had as a fightman, the faster you'd gain XP. Also, race didn't benefit from playing a particular class more so that they were held at gunpoint and told that they will play a certain class, and only to a certain level. It was not a safe time to be a fantasy creature in those days, but the fighting man stood out as the class that every race could pick, no matter the size, and for the dwarf in the Hobbit, it was their only option, presumably as a means of keeping humans the most popular race by comparison, and keeping guy-what-punch stuff as the most common type of hero. Also, weirdly enough, as a means of showing the fitman off to be the rising hero, by level 9, they could just get a building, from which random dudes would just walk in and swear fealty, thereby giving the pilgrim just the slightest reason to take charisma. Despite the name and the proclivity of 70s D&D to ignore the whamen in the room, the name Fighting Man wasn't invented as a means of gender locking, but more because it was coming off the heels of chainmail, which was an army sim with units like Footman, Spearman, Horseman, so Fighting Man was an earnest attempt at being inclusive towards all manner of murder. Still, it eventually got shortened to Fighter after the first few supplements, because honestly, Fighting Man is exhausting to say. And just as quickly, the first iteration of the Paladin came days vaulting over the window seal as a subclass for the fighter, attainable only if your charisma score is through the roof, and filled with all the abilities that you know and love, laying those hands, rebuking diseases, detecting thoughts, and being completely restricted in roleplay by the Alignment mandate. Although, it makes more sense in first edition because the Alignment system wasn't this bingo board yet, it was just a basic slider that went from law to chaos. Basically, Paladins just had to be the good guy. But this isn't a video about Paladins, and the first iteration of D&D didn't get fancy with its Fighting Men, so let's move on to the iteration that had a little more going on to it with the basic D&D set, which took all of the rules from the white box and melted them down into something resembling sense. In this Wild West of Rules, where elves and dwarves were classes instead of races, the fighter remained unchanged. High health pool, access to the whole armory, but nothing else save for huge biceps. The awkward thing about basic D&D was that it was created to get new players up to level three, which point you're supposed to make the switch to advanced D&D like a teenager getting kicked out of the house for being too old. And it was in this transitionary period where you were also supposed to get a job, with the fighter getting the options of Paladin, just like the original game, and a fancy new concept called the Ranger. This new kid on the fantasy grounds was exceptionally hard to get. In order to spec into it, the fighter had to have a strength and intelligence of 13 and a wisdom and con of 14, keeping in mind that in the olden days, you would roll 3D6 for all your stats, so it was less that you were trying to work toward being a Ranger, and more that you might pick up a fighter, roll those dice blocks, and notice, hey, I have the stats to spec into Ranger. That's D, and then you'd have access to all those weird Ranger features. To compensate for the ultimate survivalist prowess, Rangers had a bunch of weird restrictions, similar to the Paladin, in that they had to be good, they had to give away whatever treasure they couldn't carry, and they apparently had massive social anxiety because you couldn't have more than three of them in the same room at the same time. This kind of made them non-theologian Paladins, giving the fighter more options if they wanted less lordly might and more swordly fight. But as for the base fighter itself, it just did more of what the beta edition fighter did, fight stuff, get money, and build a house. For some reason, castle construction was a big factor in early edition fighter kits, since getting one would get you a netly income from taxing the poor, and a revolving door of gentlemen suitors that history will look back on and fondly say that you were very good roommates. Then after years of assaulting harmless monsters and playing feudal society simulator, AD&D was replaced with the hot new second edition D&D, which decided to shake things up by renaming the Fighting Man archetype to warrior, since that sounded more badass than guy what fight stuff good. This was only an occupational title though, as you could still pick the fighter, Paladin, or ranger classes from under the warrior umbrella. They were just separate classes now. As a warrior, the fighter gained access to all kinds of weapons and armor. They got the beefiest D10 hit die, and they even got more health from their constitution than any of the other groups got, making fighters, rangers, and paladins the de facto tanks of the game. This version of the fighter also continued the trend of home ownership that it had been tied to since the start, but finally gave something more to work with by making the fighter the only class that can specialize in their chosen weaponry. Because while you were out there saving dragons and slaying fair maidens, the fighter was studying the blade. Other than that, the only benefit to the fighter was the exponential amount of hands that it could pass out every turn, which has always been the fighter's strong suit, and it would continue to be all the way up until third edition, at which point all the normal fightery stuff was thrown to the wayside in place of the new leading mechanic, feats. Feats are a concept you may understand from 5e, but in third edition and 3.5, they were weaker, but you could collect them like trading cards. Each feat would have its own tiny bonus to add to your adventurer, and the fighter got dozens of them, meaning that you could mix and match to suit your playstyle and make an incredibly versatile character, sort of like how warlocks are in 5e. But by this point in the game, D&D had evolved to something that closer resembles what you would think of today. XP gain rates were standardized. The standard 11 classes are just one short of the exact same 12 classes that you're used to seeing, and there was lip service to the idea of all the classes being created equal. Unfortunately, both 3 and 3.5 were unmitigated buster clucks, and the fighter got clucked harder than most of them. Using the countless source books created in third edition's runtime, you could assemble the best feats to create a Frankenstein's monster of broken semantics-based munchkin power, but if you didn't, then you would spend mid to late game hitting enemy with stick, while the guy next to you summoned undead sharkin' bears that could each devour the sun. The major benefit of this era is that finally, after X years, the fighter broke free of its lease agreement, and no longer had to spend time tending to a vassal state. It could just go out and party with its friends like it always wanted. Then came 4e, which all but gave it a new job in the form of overwhelming character creation. It's strange to think about, but after going through half a dozen different editions of Fighter Lore, I can say that 4e technically has the most complicated fighter there is by merit of being the most in your face about actually assembling a character. Up until third edition, all the fighter had was extra attacks and a building that they couldn't even hit people with. Then third edition came along and overwhelmed the fighter with options, but those options were the most straightforward that you could get, so if you wanted simple, you would just pick simple. But 4e gives the fighter a bunch of attacks like normal, plus a bunch of other options to choose from every level, and it was the progenitor of the subclass system with paragon paths, which were kind of a middle ground between subclasses and prestige classes that made you compare one group of talents related to a theme to another big pool and its own talents. But I do think that it's really funny that this is the most complicated that the fighter has ever been, only because for half of its life it was just sit on throne and hit things. 4e also leaned in hard on turning the fighter into a tank, putting it into the defender section of classes and prioritizing abilities that pull enemies towards you so that you could use your other abilities to block all that new popularity. 4e is probably the most balanced that the game has ever been since fighters were given huge leeway with how ridiculous or fantastical their powers could be. And that set the groundwork for fighters being less like Captain America the first adventure and more like Captain America Civil War, which brings us to the present day where the design philosophy evolved from spamming books with new crazy classes and instead hyper-fixated on the 12 basic ones that it started out with, thereby turning the fighter into not only a staple of the game from being grandfathered in, but also by having 10 secret identities that all fell into the same banner of fighter, kind of like how the fighter used to be under the banner of warrior back in the AD&D days. This 5e version brought the fighter back to basics. It hit stuff and it got a special ability that let it hit more stuff every once in a while. It also kept the tank-esque feeling of 4e by getting a skill that lets it heal, and the philosophy of spamming the ever-loving crap out of feats was reintroduced from third edition by giving the fighter two more feats than all the other classes, which might not sound like much, but 5e feats were massively overpowered compared to third edition feats. For instance, if you wanted to understand the very complicated process of holding a one-handed weapon in two different hands, the olden days would have you take one feat to do it at a massive disadvantage, then another feat to do it at a slight disadvantage, then a third feat to finally master it, whereas 5e was the cool uncle that decided that you didn't need to work to get rewarded, so you got just that one feat and you were good to go. The hope with 5e was for the fighter to rely on an endless waterfall of dice rolls to get through encounters, and all of the abilities relied on the new short rest long rest system, where a short rest would give the fighter back most of its abilities. In this way, it would balance out with most of the magic casters as their wiggly fingers would get tired out really quickly and they'd have to take a full long rest, forcing them to hold onto their power until absolutely necessary. However, the designers didn't recognize that making short rest take a full hour wasn't completely conductive with prowling around in a dungeon, since they apparently expected parties to stop mid crawl and camp out for that whole duration, during which time the monsters of the dungeon were supposed to just wait patiently, I guess. Regardless, the fighter of 5e is the result of cherry picking the best design choices from over 40 years of D&D, and the only thing that we have left to ask for is a subclass that will give back its landowning privileges. But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, check out all my social media in the description below, and maybe support me on Patreon if you wanna see more of these history of classes videos. But yeah, Davi out.