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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnSnow" data-source="post: 5828582" data-attributes="member: 32164">Sure. That's a high-level fighter - by the standards of a mostly 0-1st level world. In D&D terms, that character is probably 6th-level or so. If you stretch the game out, you can maybe justify him being as high as 10th-level.While he's certainly impressive by the standards of our world, that character simply doesn't possess world-changing power. He's a capable personal combatant, but that's ALL.Okay, now, we're talking the equivalent of Legolas. Or Beowulf.And again, we're talking about a fighter that should realistically, in D&D terms, have a level somewhere in the low to mid-teens. In comic book terms, this is about where Captain America and Batman sit. They are as capable as you can really imagine a mortal human to be. In historical/legendary terms, this is also where you place characters like King Arthur, Richard the Lion-Hearted, and Alexander the Great.But the wizards these characters deal with still shouldn't be able to level armies with a single spell. Just like the fighter, their magic should at best let them decimate a small horde. They shouldn't (probably) be able to cross vast distances in the blink of an eye, and while they can create a horde of low-level undead minions, they aren't going to be turning into a dragon.In other words, 5th-level spells are probably what you want in terms of the high-end of magical power at this level.Fighters simply lack comparable abilities in most of the forms of fiction where D&D's highest level spells are used. Advancing past what 4e would call the mid-Paragon tier takes decades and fighters simply don't live long enough to gain that kind of power (or it simply can't be done). What that means, if you're realistic about it, is not that a high-level mage is simply "more powerful" than a high-level fighter, but that the phenomenally powerful wizards in fiction are simply much higher level than the fighters.Yeah, by the standards of most fiction, that high-level fighter looks ridiculous. FINE. Who cares? Just because the fictional archetypes say that it's okay to have 25th-level wizards hanging around with 10th level fighters doesn't mean we have to write the rules of D&D so that we claim that fighter is 20th level.At least if we're realistic, the level dichotomy would properly represent what 20th-level play comes down to in most editions of D&D - a couple spellcaster heroes and their lower-level henchmen.</blockquote>

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