No. My problem is that "magic" comes with HUGE baggage like:
"Oh so Fighters shoot lightning bolts out of their hindquarters now?"
"Ah, good to hear that my Fighter will be shut down by a counterspell when doing her stuff. Just wonderful."
"But Fighters can't be magic, then there are no nonmagic classes left!"
"I wonder what hand-jive and weird Dog Latin phrases Fighters learned in order to jump really far, so strange that that is required..."
Etc., etc., etc.
It isn't that I don't think magic contains a lot. It does! Of course, D&D 5e is kinda at fault here for continuously shifting more of the game's contents...even things that aren't supernatural at all like "shoot multiple targets"...into being specifically spells, which is just once branch of magic, but that's a digression for another topic.
It's that magic excludes many of the amazing, heroic, astounding things martials should be able to do, if our inspirations are European myth, literature, and folklore. There is no place in "magic" for "he's just such a good blacksmith, the swords he creates have souls of their own." Nor for "she can just hold her breath for three hours, no big deal." These things are impossible in real life. We are not talking about real life. This is a world where species are created by gods directly, where interbreeding between many many many different species is fully possible without any complications. Where bus-sized lizards can fly on wings that couldn't keep a hangglider aloft. Where women and men can be roasted by a fire that would instantly incinerate a warhorse, but which these heroic individuals shrug off as a Tuesday afternoon.
That is why "magic", as broad as it may be, is still too narrow.
I believe I understand where you are coming from here, and I have made my point. So no need to beat a dead horse.
I mean... it's literally a demonstrable thing WotC actually did, repeatedly pretending that 4e never existed and then "inventing" 4e's way of doing it ("What about what I like to call 'passive perception?" asked Monte Cook, literally just regurgitating 4e, even in its actual terminology, but pretending it was brand-new). And then the several more things where they took only the most trivially superficial impression of 4e mechanics, and then actively worked against anything even remotely like what the 4e mechanic was for (Hit Dice, cantrips, subclasses, "monster builder" stuff, etc.)
We might be on the same page here, but coming from different sides. I can see the influence that 4e had on the things you list (Hit Dice, cantrips, subclasses, "monster builder" stuff, etc.) but, for me, they are different enough to make them palatable, whereas I think you feel they didn't go far enough.
Why does "partial success damage" (if that is your preferred term for the exact same mechanics...) mean "you literally never fail ever no matter what"?
Because there is no "no success, no damage" option. You either "hit" and do full damage, or "miss" and do half damage. There is no "Miss entirely" and do no damage. So you literally cannot fail no matter what. You always at least partially succeed. You could say that you also partially fail, but that is not what I want. And I realize that it is purely subjective, and other people might want something else.
What this oh-so-offensively-named mechanic does IS NOT "you just cannot fail." Instead, it pushes a tension situation (like combat) toward resolution, one way or another. I have no problem with either PCs or NPCs having such mechanics. I think it is extremely good and healthy for a game's design to avoid encouraging "and nothing happens" results. Those bleed tension dry and turn what should be exciting and memorable moments into drudgery and bookkeeping.
I disagree. It certainly doesn't add any bookkeeping, if you miss and do no damage you literally don't need to write anything down. It is the opposite of bookkeeping. As for drudgery, I think it is the exact opposite. A miss heightens the tension because instead of killing the wounded and near death foe, he (possibly) lives to take another turn. Maybe he will get a lucky hit and take out a character, maybe he will manage an escape. But if you can't fail to take him out, hit or miss, all of that tension is gone.
A similar design concept that I think D&D needs to pick up, sooner rather than later, is "fail forward." Note that, just as the above, failure is still bad. It's still not what you want to have happen. (Edit
"Fail Forward" simply means that
failure does not grind the game to a halt. E.g. if the party just flat-out must get through a particular locked gate...they will! But whether they do so fast enough to achieve their ends, or without sacrificing something important, or without suffering a terrible setback? That's where the failure comes in for fail forward. Sure, you pick the lock--but you get through after being positively identified by
numerous bystanders, meaning your cover is blown and you'll have to lay low or skip town. Sure, you find the secret entrance--after
hours of trial-and-error frustration, at which point the cult has already killed their sacrificial captive and left the scene, so now you must figure out where they'll go next. Sure, you rescue the hostage who is the only person who knows the secret you need to learn--but they're comatose from the poison, so you still don't know what you need to know and have to solve this
new problem. Etc.
I like the idea of "fail forward." Maybe there is a very close battle and your one remaining character misses his attack and the bad guy is still standing. No damage on a miss, so he gets a turn and drops you. Now the DM can end it there and say, "Well, you are all dead" or he can have them "fail forward" by saying, "You all wake up naked in a cell. What do you do?"
Fail forward doesn't mean they have to be able to succeed in combat despite failing to hit anything and just took more damage. It can be what I described. The adventurers actually failed and now they need to escape captivity. The good new is that now they don't need to figure out how to get inside the BBEG's stronghold. They are already inside! The bad news is they have to escape and find their stuff. Sounds like fun to me!
And, unrelated to the above: Does this mean you have ruled at your table that every spell which says it has reduced effects for a successful save actually has no effects at all? Because otherwise you are again saying magic is just better, magic can be an auto-win button and that's totally cool but martial things can't do that because...reasons? Assuming you did fairly take away this thing from magic that you're so vehemently opposed to, have you thus compensated Rogues and Monks for making what was a special class feature for them a generic thing?
I said this in another post, but Magic is frequently a very limited resource. If the Fighter, Rogue or Monk has a very cool thing they can do, but only a very limited number of times, then I am okay with a "partial success." Like the Warrior of the Elements Monk spending Focus on an Elemental Blast and it does half damage if the target makes it save. Or there is the rule where the resource isn't spent if it doesn't succeed. That also works.
But yeah, magic is better. A magic sword is better than a non-magical sword. Monks can hit harder because of magic (Focus). So yeah.
