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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5978227" data-attributes="member: 82106">I don't know. I think the whole debate has kind of (in general, not here) been pretty well poisoned by people taking extreme positions. Certainly in AD&D no wizard can even hope to come close to replacing a fighter. Clerics can do the job well enough that you won't MISS the fighter, but at least if you were a fighter (or ranger/barbarian) you could hit things harder. I saw two problems as an AD&D player. The first was just plot relevance. I played a ranger in one long campaign. At least nominally this character's conflict was a driving force in the story. The problem was most of the actual problem solving was out of his hands. Once we hit maybe 9th level he simply wasn't relevant to accomplishing the overall goals of the party. The character was perfectly effective at hacking things to death, but there was no conceivable way any enemy you could face at that point who wasn't utterly incompetent or inconsequential was going to be stupid enough to let a non-caster within 100 miles of him. It was downright odd to be a major protagonist and just sort of be carried along. As a DM it always seemed to me that providing plot relevance to non-casters got more and more strained past low levels, but there was also eventually a sense that if you were playing a high level non-caster you were kind of gimping the rest of the party. Certainly it was a given in our group that the PARTY would be more effective at mid to higher levels with another at least MC caster than with a straight melee type. If you liked playing a fighter it was sort of a bit of a bummer. At LEAST in my 4e experience you could play the fighter and not be second-string when it came to a fight or at least SOME other types of problems. Wizards are still beating the pants off you in overall utility in terms of 'whatever might come up', but you have a spot on the front line nobody else can fill as well. You can also definitely come up with a couple other niches where you're going to be in very good shape (which ones they are depend on how you build the character, but that is another nice thing about 4e I find, you could be a sneaky DEX fighter, a super Athletic STR/CON fighter, or you could even pull off talky fighter or smart fighter with a bit of tinkering). I thought it was also nice that there were a bunch of classes that blended and emphasized slightly different aspects. You could play a warlord and be a real smart combat tactician, or you could just be a fairly smart fighter, maybe with just a little side helping of the warlord stuff if it suited you, etc. I LIKE the way there's less of a huge gulf in mechanics between all the classes. Playing MC in AD&D always felt like trying to play a half duck, half bear. Duckbear can cast spells, but oh wait he has to not wear armor to do that and casting is useless as soon as you get close to the enemy... Sorta just didn't really work that well. Honestly I think all the hew and cry about "every class needs different mechanics" is just going to make all these problems worse again.</blockquote>

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