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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7703304" data-attributes="member: 996">Every 5e class has magical abilities.  The Berserker already doesn't.(I suppose a 'Thaneborn' type could be non-magical, but it could also, oh, call on ancestral spirits or something....)When some classes were so called 'Martial,' the Barbarian was so called 'Primal' and had magical abilities.But, yes, it would be nice to see some more non-supernatural options, both where existing classes need more, and where they're needed to fill missing archetypes &c...As compared to forcing all classes to be magical? I'm thinking characters may be more relevant that classes.  A player wanting a raging barbarian PC needn't play a magical character, he has to play a magical class, but he has one (OK, & 1 in SCAG) sub-class he can use.  A player, more simply, wanting to play a hard-hitting melee type needn't play a magical character (though he could, a smite-happy Paladin for instance), he can already choose a Berserker, Champion or even Battlemaster.  Likewise, he wants Ranged DPR, or general sneakiness & sneak-attacking, there are both magical and non-magical options. Of course the non-magical options could be greatly expanded, there's a lot of design space there.  It could probably include a completely non-supernatural class or two, though, as the magical basses are pretty well covered (excepting some 3e Sorcerer builds, though I probably shouldn't mention that). That is a bad thing, I agree, though not as bad a bad thing when mechanical balance isn't riding on it.  However, while it's happened very consistently in the past that such a 'threshold' has been used to justify radical class imbalance in favor of casters, it's not actually /necessary/.  The broader genre/myth/legend that inspire D&D's fantasy includes both magical or otherwise supernatural displays of power and superhuman but otherwise natural displays of prowess.  The latter do not have to cross into the former at some threshold of effectiveness, so martial & supernatural could be balanced, and, indeed, have been so in the past, even (however briefly) in D&D.</blockquote>

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