Originally Posted by SaurianDruid
Originally Posted by Etruscan
And just to nitpick, I'm guessing a level 1 fighter hasn't mastered every type of weapon as I assume that is why we choose our specialisations as we level up?

Fighters have proficiency in all martial weapons, which means they're trained in their use and can fight with them as well as any trained soldier. They further specialize in specific fighting styles in the form of Fighting Style choices, but even if you specialized in Great Weapon Fighting you're still as trained (proficiency bonus) in the use of a longbow as your resident rogue sniper is.

Fighters are masters of war who can pick up any weapon and fight effectively with it, but reach a new height of deadliness in a specialized style of combat. Even a 1st level fighter is meant to be a hardened combat veteran, a trained bodyguard, or a royal knight in the court of a king.

As contrast an actual nobody with a sword would be similar to a bandit, which has a CR of 1/8th. Which means it takes eight bandits to be a moderate challenge for four 1st level adventurers.

As for if the game wants us to see ourselves as nobodies or somebodies, I think the intro resolves that pretty easily. We see all around us dozens of bodies of normal folks who've been mind controlled by the Mindflayers and torn a part by imps. They're laying on the ground bleeding out as we march through the ship, weapon in hand, cutting through the imps and fighting our way to the controls.

We're clearly supposed to be someone exceptional. Someone that can earn the respect of a Githyanki pirate or a 200 year old vampire spawn. We go on to lock blades with ogres and come to blows with evil hags and flesh eating gnolls.

I dunno how much more clear the game can be that we're not average folk. We have a set of skills and abilities that make us exceptional, and that is why we're able to escape the Nautiloid ship in the first place.

My issue here is that we don't get context for any of that systemic stuff. WE don't know what our character has done, we don't know that they've had that training, etc. We have no context for our history to say why we're exceptional. Loads of video games in the past have gone the route where the player character is exceptional because they're the player character. Those other 'normal' people are mindcontroled and I don't think they make a good comparison for that reason. I also think that the nautiloid is meant to be a confusing, disorienting experience where we're not meant to fully understand what's happening around us. Maybe in retrospect what you're talking about is a good indicator of our exceptionalism, but on a first playthrough, I don't think most people are going to absorb that detail among all the other stuff going on.

Again, I'm someone who has played D&D and has read through the character creation rules before and still never really absorbed the idea that we're exceptional at level 1. All the stuff you're talking about as to what a level 1 fighter can do is great...but the game should tell us that if it wants us to understand and internalize what kind of story it's telling. We as the player characters also don't really get to be larger than life outside of combat. We don't get to talk about the things we've already achieved, etc. Like Wyll, he's already a known hero, he ACTS like a larger than life hero with experience enough to justify it.

And finally, I don't think we learn enough about the setting itself to know what such larger than life heroes would look like. Think about the first act and what we learn about the wider world only from that, no outside media. A city got dragged into Hell, how normal is that? Do adventurers deal with that stuff often? I've long had an issue with the game overall not being interested in really giving us a baseline for the setting that we can build off of. I played the original a little while ago and that was not a problem I had with it at all.