Top 10: Fighter Subclasses 2020 – DnDBeyond

One thought on “Top 10: Fighter Subclasses 2020 – DnDBeyond

  1. D. Walker says:

    I love how Gunslinger is the fourth most popular choice.

    This despite it both being campaign-specific in 5E, AND having all the oldschool grognards yelling “No guns in D&D! They have no place in Fantasy!” (despite the fact that guns have literlaly been a part of every single edition on D&D).

    ~~~

    The reflexive opposition to firearms has always baffled me. People want a fantasy world where knights ride around in full plate armor (peaked late 15th century and early 16th century), but not one where there are early reliable firearms like cannons and arquebuses (widespread by the start of the 15th century)?

    Our collective pop culture imagining of the late medieval period is full of holes and misconceptions. Guns were a massive part of warfare all throughout Eurasia, and yet we ignore or downplay their presence, or pretend they didn’t even exist!

    We imagine everyone fought with swords, when in reality the king of the battlefield was the spear, and swords were uncommon and used primarily as backup weapons for the elites. We think of knights in shining armor, when in reality they were only a tiny fraction of soldiers on the field, and much more important were common spearmen, archers, crossbowmen, et cetera.

    We think of the Mongols thundering out of the steppes and armed with composite bows, but they didn’t conquer half the known world using arrows – they adopted cannons from the Chinese, and put them to use sieging fortified cities.

    We think of the Japanese samurai viewing firearms as dishonorable and insisting on fighting with katanas, but that’s completely wrong – the Japanese were so enthusiastically in love with firearms that there are periods where they were producing more guns annually than all of Europe combined!

    Guns were everywhere, and people didn’t hesitate to adopt them, because they were just another tool of warfare! If you’re okay with shooting someone with a powerful crossbow, why are you against shooting them with a powerful gun? The only difference is that one stores muscle energy in the limbs of a bow, and the other stores chemical energy in a charge of gunpowder.

    Fantasy isn’t ruined by gunpowder anymore than it’s ruined by crossbows, or by steel metallurgy good enough to make plate armor. A wizard casting fireball can still obliterate a platoon of arquebusiers. Magic doesn’t lose to guns.

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