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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6596892" data-attributes="member: 996">The 5e Eldritch Knight, and 3.x supernatural-ability Stunning Fist as a 'fighter bonus feat,' aside, single-class fighters have never been 'mystic warriors,' let alone 'all' mystic warriors.  There might have been kits, Themes, Backgrounds, or feat options for such concepts, but 'all' is just absurd - never been the case, no reason to think it ever will be.  I suppose this was some sort of hypothetical tangent I missed. I can see how that might be a drawback in some game that eschewed having any sort of non-magical class options.  Even 5e (with 33 of 38 PC sub-class options using some sort of magic to some degree) doesn't go that far - while every class in 5e /can/ use magic, not every character of every class is forced to.In the context of 4e (which, originally, this thread was about), BTW, there were 4 classes that didn't use magic, with 24 builds among them plus 3 non-magical Essentials sub-classes, and one potentially non-magical sub-class of the barbarian, by the time D&D went on hiatus.  To make an apples:apples comparison, the 4e PH1 had 4 of 8 classes and 8 of 18 builds entirely non-magical; 5e has 0 of 12 classes and 5 of 38 sub-classes entirely non-magical.  For historical perspective, the PH1 in 2e had 4 class groups, none of which were exclusively non-magical, and 9 sub-classes (if you count the specialist wizard as one sub-class rather than 8), 2 of which were entirely non-magical.  In the 3e PH1, 3 of 11 classes had no spellcasting or other supernatural abilities.4e had more non-magical options at launch than any other edition - and they were all reasonably viable choices at any level, also a first.  While those facts are nearly the exact opposite of your hypothetical all-mystic game, it may well be that, while not the polar extreme (only non-magical classes) of that, it could still elicit a similar, shocked, 'not really D&D' reaction, since D&D has, for so long, leaned towards a larger majority of magic-using PC options, and the trend seems to have been for the proportion of those options to increase.  4e bucking that trend so dramatically could well have been an issue.  Doing so meant leaving supernatural classes like the Druid and Bard out of the PH1 for the first time, 'demoting' the ranger to a non-caster, and introducing an entirely new non-casting class, the Warlord - along with significantly boosting the choice, relative power, and resources of all 4 then-martial classes, and correspondingly decreasing the vast number and power of spells available to casters, to achieve a semblance balance through rough parity.  To get all the way back to the original topic, I think, ultimately, those factors were problems only because of the D&D imprint.  Were it not for that, 4e would have received no appreciable criticism, things like Dissociative Mechanics would never have been invented to facilitate such criticism, and the game -whatever it was titled instead of D&D 4e - would have slipped by relatively unnoticed, just another 'fantasy heartbreaker' with strictly better mechanics than D&D, but nothing to make it stand out.  Of course, 4e probably couldn't have been produced by some 3pp on a shoestring or via crowdfunding the way 13A or the many other retro-clones and heartbreakers and imitators of D&D were.</blockquote>

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