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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6552297" data-attributes="member: 996">Mixing martial and caster classes doesn't give you a martial character that isn't a beatstick, it just gives you a caster who's not as much of a caster. So it's questionable whether he's 'martial?'  But, he was a non-caster, and he did lack profoundly in versatility.  Where a caster could sneak about invisibly, use conjured creatures or TK or even knock to open doors and trigger traps - and also bust out combat spells, the rogue could sneak around (by succeeding at /both/ a hide in shadows /and/ a move silently check, both of which were pretty low) and make really pretty tough percentile checks to open locks or find & remove traps (separately), and suck in combat.  Same lack of versatility as the unambiguously 'martial' fighter.And, of course, the Ranger & Paladin, who could be regarded as martial, were also casters. How 'bout the fact that the game completely fails to capture said tropes?  D&D casters, for instance, are wildly over-versatile and over-powered and have more consistent abilities than any of their sources of inspiration.  In myth and legend, for instance, a magic-user - typically a villain - will be able to do one or a few supernatural things.  Circe, for instance could change men into animals, and not really anything else.  Merlin, Gandalf and the like didn't exactly run around throwing fireballs like a D&D mage, either.  For that matter, if you go to the nearest source of inspiration, Vance's Dying Earth, the magicians he imagined could cast only a handful of spells a day - even the greatest Vancian magicians ever alluded to in his works could manage to memorize at most 10 spells - something D&D wizards exceed while still in single-digit levels.No, the only tradition that says casters must be wildly versatile and powerful while martial characters are choiceless beatsticks and inflexible specialists is the tradition of D&D, itself.  A  tradition that modern editions have tried to overcome with varying degrees of success. There has been, and is.  The hew and cry over martial characters in 4e finally getting close to rough parity - the edition war, itself - is clear evidence of it.   You're a little off - veering into straw man territory as you must to try to make the idea of balanced classes sound unreasonable or 'samey.'  No, the idea is that any given class should have the same amount of agency, a similar array of choices, not the exact same choices.  An old-school fighter had little more choice defined in the rules than attack or not.  A caster of moderate level had a lot of spell choices.  A more reasonable system would split the difference, given the caster only a handfull of spell choices, and the martial character a handful of maneuvers or tactical choices - similar in number, impact, and thus agency, but entirely different in kind.   I guess this is worth repeating:  the do-anything, dozen-slots-a-day, fire-and-forget-wizard does not exist in /any/ of the source material.  Not even Vance.  It's an artifact of D&D's failure to get the genre remotely right.    You insist on wandering off into strawman territory again, and pretending I want a superhero game, when, in fact, I'd just like a balanced game that is /closer/ to the sources of inspiration by having martial characters that actually matterThere have been rays of light here and there in D&D's history.  For a few years, the game even presented reasonably balanced classes and brought martial characters closer to parity.  During the playtest, there were a few packets that were going in promising directions.  The game's philosophy has become more open to homebrewing and DM-empowerment, so a good DM can mod it to be less at odds with the genre it purports to emulate, and to give players afflicted with a preference for martial archetypes more & better choices both at chargen and in play.   It's more evocative of the kind of non-spell-casting heroes that populate the fantasy genre than 'mundane' and not as clumsy as saying non-spell-casting-hero-typical-of-fantasy-genres.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> And 4e handled it extremely well with martial exploits that matched other classes' spells in power, effectiveness, and availability - if not quite in versatility - while being entirely distinct and still clearly non-magical.   It certainly could.  It might be better based on background than class. Class could handle the combat/adventuring aspects of a character, with manuevers, special abilities, and spells of classes focused on those things, exclusively.   Backgrounds could determine the social aspects - and you could have caster backgrounds that bring in the spells that affect that pillar, as well.  A third choice could deal with the exploration pillar, perhaps?</blockquote>

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