Zaranthan wrote:
I recall a line in the Tomes where they mentioned that clerics, thieves, and magic-users were all real heroes while Fighting Men were meant to be a fair match for them in groups of three.
Honestly, that's just genre convention and resource management and math.
If we're going back to the JRPG, pure fighters generally have better sustained DPS than other classes, but mages can nova, and clerics buff and heal, and thieves steal the good equipment, which you then give to your fighter.
Take, for example, Final Fantasy X. In the end, magic doesn't matter and everyone just uses overdrives for massive damage, and the fighters have the most damaging overdrives.
Or Chrono Trigger. By the end, Ayla's normal attack is the most powerful attack in the game, and the mages need to nova their most powerful spells to keep up with normal attacks from melee fighters.
But in a JRPG, it's all combat. Combat is the easiest part of the game to design.
The problem with the fighter in D&D and its derivatives is lack of support.
The cleric and the mage each have giant lists of things that they're explicitly allowed to do, called spells. The Thief has a smaller list of things that he's explicitly allowed to do called skills. The fighter has a giant blank space. What he can do is determined by DM fiat.
Can the fighter climb a rope? Logically, he should be able to. But the Thief has a percentage chance to climb, and the mage has Spider Climb, and the explicit existence of these two things implies exclusivity, so many DMs would rule that no, the fighter can't climb a rope. This problem was partially solved with the use rope and climb skills, but that just created more problems.
4e attempted to solve this problem by giving everyone narrowly assigned rules and reducing the game to grid combat, but this failed at being what anyone wanted.
Fighters were better in early D&D. They have the best saves, the best attacks, and most importantly, the rules for the other classes were finicky and incomplete. Spell lists were tiny and many rules were extremely vague, with instructions for the DM to just make shit up.
The fighter became less and less powerful as the rules were fleshed out and became more complete. Spell lists became huge and bloated and fighters got nothing but variant classes that were strictly better than fighter, and which eventually became core classes of their own.
That's really what made fighters weak.
Every other class got useful stuff, and they didn't. The more the rules for other classes were fleshed out, the more fighters sucked, because fighters had less to do. The more the rules were fleshed out and expanded, the more fighters sucked, because they had fewer rules. But when everything was either roll under stat or magical tea party, they were pretty good.
And this leads us to the obvious conclusion, that the more material published for an option, relative to other options, the more powerful that option will be, relative to other options.
I'm going to go against the grain of the den and say that math doesn't matter that much. There's a lot of games with terrible math that sell extremely well. What really matters if flavor, taste. It has to be something that people want to play. And people will play games with shitty math if the flavor is right.
The key, then, is creating an interesting setting in which to play, and to give the players the ability to play in that setting. Which is why licensed games like Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings do poorly. Because those settings have fixed plots and you're not going to play Tywin Lannister or Fordo Baggins, you're going to play Ser Bumfuck Sheepfucker at best, in both cases. And outside of Call of Cthlhu, no one wants to play "random knight who gets eaten by a dragon so that the real heroes know how serious things are." That's just not a fun character role (outside of Call of Cthulhu).
Like, I could make an complete RPG called Dragonshit, which takes place entirely in the digestive tract of a dragon, and it would be more interesting than a Game of Thrones RPG, even though both of those games end up in the exact same place, for the simple reason that Dragonshit wouldn't come with the baggage of a pre-written narrative in which your characters do not matter.
Which is ultimately why Star Wars works, I think. The Star Wars universe is big enough that characters who aren't named Luke, Han, or Leia can have fun adventures without detracting from the plot of the movies.