Yes, please. Let's have some honesty and look at how games are actually played. The 6-8 meaningful encounter day is a myth outside of a very specific type of dungeon crawl hack and slash fest that allows for 1 hour naps several times a day. So is the idea that most games spend much time post level 14 where the second feat/ASI kicks in.
Sure, the latter seems to be broadly true (or at least, to have been so in the past when WotC did some research on it), and it can just be hard, between system and RL factors, to keep a group together into high level play. But, to the former, it's up to the DM how he structures his adventures. 5e does need that 6-8 encounter day (with 2 or 3 short rests), or, at least, the credible threat of it, to create some semblance of class & encounter balance, because it does lean very heavily on the attrition model to challenge players. The DM, though, can work with that rather than against it. For instance, you can declare the /benefits/ of an extended rest to accrue less often on a slower-placed adventure, only when resting days in a peaceful/civilized area during a long trek, for instance, with sleeping out in the wilderness giving you only short-rest benefits. You can thus draw out a 6-8 encounter 'day' as long as you need to. You could even tie the short rest to a plot milestone, or, as 13A does, just a set (or unkown to the players) number of encounters.
5e gives you a lot of freedom, as the DM, to
make it work.
Why is that bad? Isn't there room in the game for a couple of classes that do single target damage and combat better than everyone else?
Maybe there is, at least for the former. Are there such classes though? As [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] has pointed out, it's easy to build a stilted analysis that demonstrates the class of your choice does the mostest damage. Someone even tried it for Bard recently. It's the easiest thing to analyze, but even the better analyses don't show a clear winner - or show a feat or very specific build, rather than a class as the clear winner. So while there may be room for an overwhelming DPR king, and while the fighter is a class designed explicitly, and almost exclusively, for high DPR, I'm not at all convinced the fighter is that meaningfully-better-than-everyone-else-at-DPR class.
And 'combat' is a pretty general thing to 'do better.' You can't begin to tease out all the variables and all the ways to do combat well, let alone compare them meaningfully. The fighter, though, doesn't do as many things in combat as other classes, let alone do many of them particularly 'better.'
Does everyone need to be active in other pillars?
That'd be ideal. You don't want netrunner syndrome where a certain task comes up, and only one player participates for an extended period. It may seem like just a particularly harsh example of spotlight-style balance (which 5e legitimately makes great use of), but it's not. One character shining in one situation is not the same as no other players getting to participate. Interaction and Exploration can both easily go that way. The need to avoid it means keeping everyone engaged, somehow. That means either keeping all the characters participating relevantly, or the players interested and engaged in spite of their characters doing little or nothing.
I've found that too many characters participating in every pillar slows the game down.
It does. Everyone's getting to play the game, and that does take longer to resolve. Games with fewer players go faster, because there's just less going on, add players, and the game slows, sometimes to a crawl.
Whether you shrink your group by expelling players outright, or by marginalizing them so they don't get to participate for significant portions of the session, your game will go faster.
reasons why you can't multiclass to create the archetype? Why does it need to be something you should be able to do playing a single class fighter?
Multi-classing is an optional rule, so there's one reason not to MC, right there, and by the same token, it's a delayed-maturity build, so you may have some levels before the basic idea is realized, it's not like AD&D, where you could start as a 1/1/1 character. Another could be concept. There's only a handful of builds that don't use supernatural powers of some sort - the fighter represents two of them. If you concept doesn't call for supernatural hijinks, fighter might be part of it, or even all of it. If you are allowed to MC, and MC to Rogue for Expertise, for instance, you've just upped your non-combat relevance a bit, though you've also accepted some smaller HD.
The problem I see here is that people are too focused on single target DPR and short adventuring days.
The fighter's thing was NEVER that.
Single-target DPR was certainly the fighter's thing in post-UA 1e and 2e AD&D, specialization and broken TWFing rules saw to that. Short adventuring days - the infamous 5MWD - have been a problem for D&D, in general, throughout it's run.
The fighter's thing and its legacy in every edition except 4th was combat generalist who could take a specialty.
Weapon Specialization was added half way through 1e, 0D&D didn't have it, so not /every/ edition. ;P
The fighter has a better combined score in combat of all categories, period.
Are we still talking across editions, here? Or are we talking the DPR-specialized 5e fighter? Because that might, very hypothetically, be true, of the former.
Fighter is the Batman Wizard of weapons combat.
You mean a combat generalist? Not in 5e, and, frankly, not in any edition. There was an obscure 4e build that tried, and you could go crazy trying to create a generalist build in 3.x (and get tantalizingly close, with some MCing, around level 14 or so), but it was never practical. Specialization of one sort or another was just too over-rewarded.
It's up to the DM to follow the guidelines and either make combat generalism favorable or to adjust the class accordingly.
I'd like to hear what you think makes any given 5e fighter a viable 'combat generalist.' It seems that combat style, feats (if available) and archetype choices are all going to drive specialization of one sort or another, just as has been the case in every edition.
Yep. There are no examples of mythological or legendary mundane heroes.
Cuchulain
Alaric the Visigoth
Count Roland
Horatius Cocles
Attila the Hun
Yue Fei
Spartacus
Hannibal Barca
Miyamoto Musashi
Yennenga
Karna
Jason
Hector
Arthur and his knights
Ragnar Lodbrok
etc
etc
And for the record, I don't count any mythological hero descended from gods to count, because PCs aren't typically descended from gods. So wanting the fighter to emulate Hercules or Perseus is flawed from the get go.
Cuchulain was supposedly descended from Lugh, so I guess you need to strike him from your list. Though you could sub in Furgus mac Roth or any of a number of not-divine-descended Celtic heroes who displayed similarly super-human feats rivaling Cuchulain's. (Also, you can strike Merlin, Gandalf, Circe, & Medea from your list of caster archetypes.) Heck, historical figures, not mythical ones, have claimed descent from divine ancestors.
Basically, I can want the fighter to emulate heroes from myth and legend and at the same time not want them to emulate heroes that had divine backing behind them and/or had superpowers.
I think at least some superhuman feats are attributed to most of the characters in your list that I recognize, possibly even some of the less mythical, more historical ones. You can't really spit 4 Saracens on a lance, or slice through a foe's helmet, bisect his armored torso lengthwise, and split the spine of the horse he was riding in one blow with an arming sword, for instance.
Maybe you're just using 'mundane' differently. In the context of this discussion, it could be taken to just mean 'not explicitly magical' (which'd include psionics, at the moment) or 'not explicitly supernatural.' A 'mundane' Celtic hero might still perform the 9-at-a-Blow feat, or the Three-Spears feat, or even emulate Cuchulain's Salmons' Leap, without actually needing divine ancestry or supernatural power, though some of those are at least superhuman, if not obviously impossible under modern understanding of physics.
Every time I read conversations like this ("The Paladin does just as good...."), I can't help but shake my head. D&D has never only ever been about DPR.
The more D&D is about more than DPR, the worse it looks for the DPR-focused 'mundane' sub-classes.
I have not once ever played D&D where there was no role-playing involved. So even if the paladin did do the same amount of average damage as a fighter, you have to play him or her like a paladin. That's not insignificant.
Well, no, it's not insignificant, it's the RP part of RPG. Presumably, you picked Paladin so you could play one: so you could have fun RPing your godly Paladin. If you wanted to play a cunning, vicious killer, you might have played an Assassin, instead. If you wanted to RP a Conan-type, Barbarian... etc, etc...
...if you want to RP a generic beatstick, who consistently can't contribute much out of combat, and unleashes a brutal barrage of weapon attacks in combat, well, then, you might play a fighter. Because you'll be getting exactly what you want.
