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A proper 'fighting style' gives you a pile of options for defence, offence, and "special tricks". Picking a fighting style that gives you one of those things makes me think I'm not picking a style at all, just something paying lip service to the concept in a rather patronising way. "See, we gave...

Games where martial characters are as useful as mages (assuming they're close in experience - you are only the second person I've ever seen argue that level doesn't matter, magic is inherently better): Runequest, World of Darkness, Exalted, Heroquest, Savage Worlds, Gurps, Fate, The Dark Eye...

Now, give credit where it's due. Celtavian recognises the differences between the Superhero nature of 3e high-level play and the more mundane nature of high level cahracters in 4e.

Well, the D&D version is remove as many hit points as possible. How this relates to reality is hard to determine. But, if you aren't going to explain how then I imagine that should mean a penalty needs to be applied to your attempt; or we can assume that the character, a Fighter perhaps, knows...

What do you consider a "normal attack" to be? If you want people to explain how their manoeuvre differs from what's normal, you should have a good grasp of what normal is.

As @Abdul pointed out, Robilar was probably the most successful in actualy play of the early characters. Shame he doesn't fit your theory. Also, congratulations on advocating for a purely gamist approach to game design. A bunch of wargamers playing to win thought they recognised balance flaws in...

That people believed it when Forgotten Realms and 2nd edition and 3rd edition told them casters were supposed to be at the top of the pile didn't like it when 4e came along and flattened the pile out so everyone was more equal is perfectly plausible. Still, what were people complaining about...

Not having any combat abilities but ones which you can use all the time also makes no sense. At both ends, because repeating "At Will" attacks time after time is a cheap way to be predictable and have your opponent adapt to that, and that's an easy way to fail. At the other end, because...

It was either Villains and Vigilantes (1979 1st edition) or Champions! (same period) where I first remember seeing "minions", enemies that you'd always put out of the fight with one successful attack. James Bond might have had them a little later, and one of the editions of Chivalry and Sorcery...

Why not? Just because it's not an entirely original description doesn't have to make it dull. And as for spells, if you find it hard coming up with descriptions for things that happen in 4e combat, well spells also happen in 4e combat, so I assume they're part of the problem. And there's a lot...

And how often is that important enough that you find the other "killing things" classes inadequate? How often is it that you need that much combat ability, as opposed to having some other class that most of the time kills things at a perfectly adequate rate? Being superb at killing things isn't...

There are literally thousands of pre-existing descriptions for different things people try and do to each other in combat situations. Why don't you crib from those? It's surely easier than finding yet another original way to describe an entirely fictional spell.

They are very very good at killing things, though there are other classes as good or better than them in surviving while they do so. That's part of the problem; there are several other classes perfectly good at killing things, that bring a considerable amount of other things to the table. The...

That makes very little sense to me. You can't write interesting fiction because the events it's talking about take a long time to happen? People write fictional accounts of much longer periods than that all the time. Besides, at this point you're arguing that mechanics don't affect the ability...

I'm with Gaius Julius Caesar, "Let the dice fly". If that creates stories - fiction - that I want to tell afterwards then I'll do that, but it will be based on what happened in the game. As such, what the game does or doesn't do largely determines the sort of fiction that I could make of it...

That's true of any single roll. Very few adventures depend on a single roll. If you can keep re-trying, success is eventually certain in the DC is within range. If failing any one of several rolls means you can't finish, failure becomes the expected state far sooner than people realise...

Given that there's certainly far more people playing homebrew settings than play any published one, making a set of rules setting-specific doesn't seem all that sensible - unless the goal is to force people to buy something they otherwise wouldn't be interested in. Who knows how many people's...

Be fair. The Fighter should have to roll unusually high to do those things. Not that there's any skill involved in casting spells, but the poor casters will no doubt feel very hard done by if their strengths can be easily duplicated by someone who doesn't even have to roll a high score. I want...

WarHammer 40K is the SF game that is the equivalent to D&D in being a hotch-potch of influences from all over the place without any really coherent plan to their inclusion; and in later developing into a genre of it's own, which really isn't imitated outside itself or imitating anything outside...

You might be able to mix Conan, Elric and Lankhmar, but they're all in the "Sword and Sorcery" sub-genre of fantasy. Mixing in Tolkein's high fantasy, Vance's Dying Earth science fantasy, Arthurian romance and 19th century Horror gives you something that isn't part of any particular genre and...