Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Truth be told, in general I've found the basic fighters in our 1e-like games to be more than capable of holding their own and that they don't really need any further design-level help. I've got far bigger fish to fry in any case: thieves and assassins still need lots of help, bards still don't work right after a fifth complete redesign but I just can't bring myself to scrap them entirely (which would otherwise be the logical thing to do), and so on.Oh I admit it wasn't the best implemented ability being so disruptable by having that tougher enemy the character had to focus on and part of the reason actually is because its overly limited and should be relative level.... ie faced by opponents N levels lower you can use an extra attack vs. that singular opponent. (perhaps its a move that takes one of his normal 2 attacks to be aware of the openings of the schmucks insert better name for this exploiting weakness ability)
So the level 5 hero gets 2 normal attacks but if a bunch of schmucks 4HD lower and 1 challenging enemy attacks he gets an extra one upto 5 against any that are in reach. Or instead of rolling all that just let him do a form of splash damage if he is successful against one enemy (perhaps even that foe that used to disrupt it ... then he deals x damage to adjacent weaker enemies).And yes there was issues with honestly rolling a ton of attacks.
Point was that it felt like the hero adjusting his fighting style and using what might be a different fighting style or a maneuver that wouldn't work against enemies that were not up to snuff.
While it could make the fighter feel awesome more often than not just didnt get used because of implementation issues.
That, and if anything I'd rather flatten the power curve between low and high levels than increase it. I like it when both low-level characters and low-grade monsters have an outside chance of pulling off a major upset at any time against much higher-powered foes. Both 3e and 4e go the other way, as they both have rather steep power curves that reduce the chance of an upset to basically zero outside of a quite narrow window; while 5e to its credit has flattened it out again somewhat.
Examples from my current game: in their first adventure a raw 1st-level party somehow took down a full hill giant that by rights should have squashed them all flat (and I wasn't pulling punches!). Much later a party of about eight 5th-ish level PCs met some more giants - the big ones didn't last long but one of the giants' children (statted as a basic ogre) singlehandedly put up a heroic last stand that delayed the party for about six rounds - they just couldn't hit it (poor rolling) and, as it had just watched the PCs kill its parents, it rage-blindly refused to yield. It also managed to give out a decent amount of damage in return. So impressed were the PCs with this guy that when it finally did die they actually gave him a decent burial...