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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6017120" data-attributes="member: 4937">In my game I have something called 'destiny points', which are essentially 'rerolls' but can also be used to add bonuses to a die throw or to buy temporary feats or negate critical hits and a variaty of other purposes.  The purpose is to mitigate bad luck so that a player who is careful not to get themselves in bad situations to often should not ever die to a single bad roll.  I've been toying with the idea of having a class ('Paragon') that has as their main feature a pool of regenerating destiny points to spend.  I haven't yet gotten the class worked out enough to put it into the house rules, but one possibility for dealing with the situation is to give mundanes at high levels a pool of 'narrative points' of some fashion that represents the favor that they have with powers in high places or some innate force of their being.  In addition to the sort of stuff above, you could create a stunting system around them that allowed mundanes to pull off a certain number of incredible feats per day.  You'd have to be careful to define how it worked and the options available, but that would be one possibility that would grant great power but which wouldn't feel like turning the mundane into a spellcaster.I agree that is one of the biggest problems.  The most notable examples of pre-D&D mundane heroes tend in fact to be 6th-10th level based on their deeds in the narrative.  But because they are so noted and well known, they are typically assumed to be examples of epic fighters - which is just not true.  Another problem is the existance of the Monk class, which has tended to suggest that if you can do epic feats of skill, that you must be a monk or perhaps some oriental class.  Personally, I hate the notion of a cultural split between classes.  Well designed classes ought to be able to cover the fighters and spellcasters of every culture, or else they aren't in my opinion broad enough to be core archeatypal classes.  If you want to play a samurrii or a monk, it ought to be obvious how you take a fighter in that direction.  It should not be assumed that you need a special class to do it.  One obvious reason why this has to be true is that you are really only slicing what the mundane classes can do that narrowly and siloing away mundane abilities so that your other mundane classes can't access them.  When you create a variant spellcasting class with variant spells, you are really never siloing off that ability - just some slight mechanical variation.  I hate mechanical variation for its own sake, but I hate even more creating highly narrow silos of abilities that end up saying, "You can't get anything good because someone else already has it."The exact nature of what you do as an epic fighter ought to be configurable.Personally, again I think that the designers of the feat/skill systems in 3e were overly conservative in their approach especially when you compare what a feat taken at a certain level or what a certain amount of skill ranks in a given skill can do relative to what a spell obtained at that same level can do.  Granted, since the feat or skill are 'at will abilities' (or IMO should be, otherwise, just give the fighters spells and be done with it), they probably shouldn't be quite as powerful as an equivalent level spell but in terms of what they allow the player to accomplish over the course of a session then they should.I don't think that full balance can be achieved without some selective roll backs of 3e caster power (shapechanging, save or suck, absolute immunities, spells that automaticly work and replace a skill use), since abusive 3e casters are absurdly powerful, but I think much more balance can be achieved without totally nerfing casters and losing that awesome aspect of D&D where your wizard really does start to feel like a wielder of incredible power.My starting point in trying to achieve balance is to start balancing feat progression and feat power, and skill progression and skill utility, with the exponentially increasing power of spells.   For example, my high level fighters actually reach a point were they are gaining more than one feat per level, and the feats that they do gain access to at that point are granting either phenomenal power (you become a magic weapon, and grant that enhancement to every weapon you touch), or else multiple useful abilities.  Additionally, my fighters gain 4 skill point per level and have good access to skills, including skills like Tactics and Leadership that give them the ability to buff allies as a free action.  The idea here is to avoid creating monks, marshals, knights, samurrii, warblades, etc. and instead dump that all into one bucket and say, "Fighters - you get all this good stuff.  You can hit the target with a flurry of blows, buff your allies, taunt foes into attacking you, leap over small buildings, run faster than a race horse, carry a wagon on your back, and tear off the limbs of a gargoyle with your bare hands.  Mix and match to taste."</blockquote>

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