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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5909421" data-attributes="member: 996">Really, in the early days of the game, it seemed like the eventual dominance of casters was not only obvious, expected and inevitable, but was actually a design feature.  'Balance,' was considered across a character's adventuring career.  If you were comically weak at 1st level, that balanced you being wildly powerful at 18th.  The same with races:  non/demi-human races had many advantages and could multi-class, but had severe level limits - they had great advantages at low level but were constrained at higher levels.  Similarly, classes and other options seemed to be balanced across all character-creation experiences.  That is, if a class was hard to get stats to qualify for, that was deemed to 'balance' it, by making it 'rare.'   No, really.Those old balancing mechanisms only worked as intended (leaving aside whether working as intended was really balanced or not), if you played long campaigns which featured random character generation and disallowed changing characters, starting at 1st level and progressing well into higher levels.Obviously, a lot of campaigns were short or used generous character generation variants or started above 1st level, or allowed characters to be swapped out at a given level.  There are any number of reasons you might not see caster dominance at higher levels. Campaigns not progressing to higher levels was a big one.  Players changing characters, so at low level, casters are unusual and probably multi-classes, while at high level, everyone is a human caster of one sort or another.  Variants to beef up non-casters at high level and casters at low levels.  Wildly powerful magic items given to non-casters at higher levels.    Player restraint and/or arbitrary DM 'swatting' of casters (whether subtle through time pressure and the like, or overt, like ubiquitous anti-magic fields).</blockquote>

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