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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WarlockLord" data-source="post: 6068431" data-attributes="member: 40098">Here's the problem as I see it.  Feel free to send all kinds of nasty and threatening emails/PMs.The fighter is mundane.  The wizard is magic.  Magic > mundane.  Is this the way it should be?  No, but it's the way it is commonly perceived.  And the fighter needs to stop being a mundane.Over in the 14th level rogue vs dragon thread, a few posters are screaming to high heaven that the dragon shouldn't be hurt by mundane means because the rogue should be held to the same standard as a mundane human being.  And you know what?  That doesn't work.  Let's take some mundane human beings, such as Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, or any other Olympic athlete.  Now what the hell are they going to do against a dragon, or a demon lord, or even a CR 3 shadow?The answer is nothing.  Because when you get out of the realms of something mundane humans can hurt, no amount of human potential is going to save you.  You need something special of your own.  And the D&D fighter, who's sole claim to relevance is "hits things harder", does not have that.  You cannot have magical entities with abilities designed to screw over mundane humans such as incorporeality AND give mundane humans the ability to fight them.  You can have mundane human level shenanigans, you can have crazy-high superheroic screw you monsters that are immune to weapons Gygax-style, you cannot have both!.Many people will claim that this problem is solved by giving the warriors magic items.  Most of these are inferior to wizard spells.  It's a callback to the old Conan stories where Conan was going up against horrible thing of the week #57 which was immune to swords or whatever, and he mysteriously found the plot blade/had a wizard help him/had a dream from a deity/whatever.  And this just doesn't work.  You either have the question of "why not give it to the people with actual powers who can use it better," or the question of "why are these people crafting things which they can't use and can be turned against them?"  And of course trying to disguise the fact your character is a commoner with bigger numbers who owns a hat of disintegration.Now, if you want to have both magic crazytown with incorporeal ghosts, adamantine-skinned dragons, teleporting flying demon wizards, and the rest of that stuff while still having a totally mundane fighter class....well, you can't have it both ways.  You can give the fighter powers like Beowulf, Archbishop Turpin, and other mythological heroes the fighter is supposedly based on yet doesn't represent very well.  You can not have magic crazytown or phase out the mundanes after a certain point, but you simply can't have Michael Phelps fight Zeus and win.  It just wouldn't happen.  You can have Sir Bob the fighter awaken his demigod blood, pull mythic superhuman feats out of his ass Beowulf or Pecos Bill style, or have him pick up magic at some point and become a death knight, hell knight, or whatever, but he has to exceed the capabilities of a mundane human being at some point in his life or he'll just be stuck as the dead guy in magical crazytown.Lastly, I'm going to address a counterargument I've seen before."The fighter is part of a team!  He's useful and valuable!  He protects his allies and the party from bad guys and they buff him!"No.  No he's not.  The fighter, as conceived, can't actually "defend" the party from high level opponents.  He can't tank an AoE regardless of edition - the wizard's still getting hit.  In non-4e editions (mainly familiar with 3e, but I own 2e books) the wizard has as good or better defenses, such as the ability to fly out of melee range, the brokenness of 2e stoneskin, the 3e stupid buff stacking, retarded splatbook spells, contingencies, yadda yadda yadda.  He can sort of tank at low levels, but everyone's squishy and dies.  Clerics have heavy armor, actual defensive spells, and can heal themselves.  At high levels, the melee fighter's contribution is to make the cleric waste spell slots on healing him.  And he does less damage than the wizard.The worst part is that he can be easily replaced by charmed, dominated, animated, or summoned minions who go in front to take melee hits.  And you don't need to waste spell slots healing those.  At high levels, you could make the argument that there's no IC reason to bring a fighter - he's endangering himself and causing the group to waste resources, and the only reason you brought him along is because Steve the player is a good guy and you still owe him five bucks for pizza.So there you have it.  Pick one, completely mundane fighter OR magical crazytown.</blockquote>

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