I DO NOT believe they have always ruled.
(Obviously, aside from, 4e, for two years of not-really-D&D.)
But you do believe they always should 'rule' in that niche-transcending sense, going forward? That they can't be restricted to a niche like Fighters are to best* at fighting:
[URL='https://www.enworld.org/goto/post?id=9161415']jgsugden said:[/URL] said:
Restricting it this way is anathema to the concept of magic. It doesn't serve the iconic image of a wizard we've developed over the past decades. As such, my answer would be that we should not assign a niche to something that is intended to be field.
They were very strong in early editions under the RAW, but I played in dozens of games and few used the RAW. Every game had a bible of house rules in the AD&D era. The rules were too convoluted to learn and if you did you saw gaps pretty quickly. And I'll tell you that a lot of those house rules -
The one common experience we all had back in the day, was that every DM ran their 'by the book, no variants' campaign with very different rules.
For instance, "mana" (spell point) systems, which made casters far more versatile & powerful were quite common.
especially things like segmented combat that resulted in ighters ttacksing far more often than the wizard cast spells (making them more like modern fighters) changed the dynamic between the classes.
I didn't think anyone else did segmented combat for anything other than psionics. I don't even bother mentioning it when I talk about my old AD&D campaign, I figure it'd be too outre to waste time explaining.
Tho, I wouln't call "modern" fighters getting iterative attacks or Extra Attack at 5th & 11th
far more often relative to attacking 10, 15, 20, 30+ times/round, in combats that rarely went a second round... nor, really, attacking far more often than what a wizard can do with an AE or a 3.5 fighter could with reach & WWA...
Yes, the wizard gets a little credit for casting spells on the fighter - just as the fighter deserves a little credit for every spell the wizard gets to make because the fighter is tying up the monsters and keeping the wizard upright.
Not s'much, really. Old-school, there was kinda an unwritten rule that, even if you weren't, as you often were, in a corridor or doorway where fighters formed a 'wall' of hp between the monsters and the rest of the party, melee monsters would generally engage the big tough fighter, anyway. In 3e discussion it became evident that nothing in the game actually made that happen, that the "fighter needed aggro!"
The 5e fighter is in much the same boat. Outside of convenient choke points it's not in any position(npi) to protect anyone. 5e, in general, gives very little mechanical support to such a tank/defender function, with a few non-PH builds, maybe one ea of Pally, Barb, & Fighter, having some mechanics that tend that way.
We often talk about D&D both as it was and as it is, as well as both how we've played it and how it's written, as if there aren't really any distinctions among those experiences, like it's just one thing. "Fighters must protect the squishy casters" is an age-old D&Dism, but they were never given mechanical support for it in the TSR era, and, there's really not much call for it in 5e, where casters aren't even that squishy anymore, even if you were to carefully build to be OK at it. So you hear that, you seem memes about it, you
believe it, you make it happen as a DM - but it was only ever backed up by the mechanics for a couple of the last 50 years.
Have you seriously not played in any 5E campaigs where a melee character played a major role in the campaign? If so, your experience is far different than mine.
I have always run D&D much more than played it. AD&D and 4e I ran long campaigns that went to high levels. 3e not so much, only to mid levels, and I got to play in
two longish campaigns. 5e I stuck to running AL, especially introductory one-shots, at the FLGS and local conventions. Running or playing, it's always been quite evident how badly D&D's core assumptions, like class, Vancian casting, and time-pressure balance work in practice, and how much the DM needs to do to compensate for that, both consciously/overtly and as a matter of skill & experience that becomes second nature.
But, personal experience of D&D says a lot more about the DM than the game. They're great DMs and terrible DMs and a whole spectrum between. At the extremes, it doesn't matter how bad or good the specific edition or variants are.
* in the advertising claim sense of best that they're just as good as anyone else.