One of the moderaters accused me of trolling (yeah I'm still butthurt)Well this is it. LM's big summation of balance, fighters, wizards, 24 ton rock monsters, magic items, and everything since if we go further with the Pit Fiend OHT is going to lock the thread.
D&D is a game of fantasy, however some classes are by their nature supposed mundane. It's clear that the sorts of things people will accept the Fighter or Rogue doing are sharply limited. If the fighters and rogue really break out of human limitations especially if they're blatant about it then a section of the playerbase is going to riot and whine about weeaboo fightan' magic. The means the fighter class operates on hard limits, ones that other class do not.
The Monk has always been implemented badly but it's still totally possible to write a balanced Monk class that people can accept because the already practice quasi-supernatural martial arts. If the monk can jump 100ft in the air and punch a dragon in the face that still fits his conceptual space. If a fighter does that people will rage unless he's wearing boots of jumping 100ft and carrying a +2 sword of dragon stabbing.
The fighter especially at high levels was never really meant to be a completely mundane human. High level fighters where supposed to be mythic heroes. Hercules is after all one of the inspirations for the fighter class. That's very clear from the sort of monsters you're supposed to sword to death. It's had to see Spartacus hacking apart the 32ft tall 48'000 lb. Huge Earth Elemental, but it's easy to see Hercules doing it though. Hercules is not a mundane fighter of course he's half-god and his Strength is (Su). The thing is that in D&D the fighter has to start as Spartacus and eventually become Hercules.
When I posted my example of the fighter hacking the Iron Golem to death there was resistance to that even though hacking Golems to death is one of the first examples people tend to bring up re:usefulness of the fighter at high levels. Someone was so uncomfortable with that example that they claimed the fighter wasn't really hacking up 5'000 lbs. of iron instead the magic in his sword was just disrupting the Golems animating force.
Which is a great time to segway into my next point, magic items. The idea of mythic heroes getting a lot of their powers from their equipment has a lot of traction. The problem is that it's really hard to implement in D&D. For one thing it requires a lot of cognitive dissonance to keep things balance if the Fighter need's his items he need's to be entitled to them and that makes a lot of people unhappy. It also clashes with the level based system, you have to wonder why the fighter is even tracking xp if the items he has matter so much more than his level. It also makes it really hard to have fighters as opponents. If once you have Excalibur you can also track down Cu Cuchulain and stab him to death and now also have his Gáe Bulg that could easily get out of hand. You also need a way for the fighter to not still fall behind the other martial classes with real superpowers like the Paladin and Ranger who presumably can also use those items.
What worries me the most is if future editions don't wise up. If they take what's in my view the worst possible route. If the fighter is just a normal guy and noone can be strictly better than him it puts the game in a vice and then starts to squeeze. You see alot of this in 4e where huge aspects of the game were removed in the name of keeping the fighter relevent. Leaving the fantasy in our fantasy game of choice feeling increadably unfantastic.
I've hinted a lot that I have my own fantasy heartbreaker in the works, based heavly on 3.5. In the end even with more blatently superhuman martial classes I had to cap characters at 13th level and revise spell lists a lot to get the game at a place where I could like the fluff and still have a balanced game.
So It's really hard In a game that scales like D&D to have "mundane" classes that poeple are satrsfied with. However people still want fighters in their 20 level game. People want to sword to death 24 ton rock monsters but get offended if the fighter is superhuman/unrealistic/weeaboo. Is there a solution to this problem or is this just going to be a milstone around D&D's neck forever.
