EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
I feel that. Half the time it seems like a thread will go sedately for a day or two and then suddenly sprout 10 pages in fewer hours.
Ah, I see all "homebrew" as mechanical, and "reskinning" as flavor. Though personally I can't stand most "just pretend spells are not magic" approaches. It can work okay for a handful of things (as demonstrated by the reverse of this--Rangers having several class features hidden as allegedly opt-in spell choices), but plenty of spells are really hard to justify and having to do so with every new spell makes things really awkward over time. Plus, at least for me, there's always this overhanging "this is ACTUALLY a spell, you're just pretending it's not" aspect that poisons the whole experience; I know that won't apply to everyone, but it does apply to a lot of people. (Like how the Pathfinder developers recommended playing, of all things, an Oracle to represent Hercules...)
Part of the problem, which gets brought up by both pro-martial-buff and anti-martial-buff sides, is that this raises the specter of "how does this interact with counterspell or antimagic fields/dead magic zones/etc.?" If it works even when magic shouldn't, then you've just given a pretty powerful buff. If it doesn't, you're pretty much openly admitting that it's still magic, and the thin veneer of "flavor homebrew" in your terms starts peeling pretty badly.
I don't consider jump distance a meaningful contribution--it's extremely niche. I'm not even going to invoke spells here. Remarkable Athlete is, to me, the emblematic crappy pseudo-feature that shows how shortchanged Fighters are in this department. Its strongest benefit is to combat (Initiative), the jump benefit is near useless (20 feet to 25 feet, such wow, very impress), and since it doesn't stack with existing proficiency, it's wasted on most things you'd already be good at. The one and only non-combat benefit is that it applies to things that wouldn't normally be skills but are still ability checks, and my experience has shown such things are extremely rare. Even if they were merely uncommon rather than "I don't think I've ever had to roll one, ever," I just don't really think a maximum +3 bonus (only acquired at level 13) to a handful of checks is meaningful contribution. Again, it is not the fact that it is a passive benefit, since I think Reliable Talent is a decent non-combat utility benefit. It's that it's pretty small and extremely niche.
Know Your Enemy is exclusively useful for combat-related things, or bare ability checks, which again I have found to be essentially nonexistent. The only things it can tell you (and you can only pick two from the list!) are: Str score, Dex score, Con score, AC, current HP, "total class levels (if any)" (read: useless if it's a monster with no class levels), "Fighter class levels (if any" (ditto). By the rules, Know Your Enemy tells you diddly-squat about the target except ability scores, combat statistics, and class levels. Now, you could certainly house-rule that there are other things Know Your Enemy could be used to learn, but (a) that's not the rules actually provided, that's altering them to be more favorable to the Fighter which is exactly what I'm asking WotC to do, and (b) that's not what we had been discussing, which is the things the class itself (or its subclasses, which I allowed for, so long as all of them do something of loosely comparable impact) actually provides, not what DMs can finagle it to provide.
I'm not saying convenience is bad. I'm saying that designing the game such that convenience denies others options is bad. It would be like forcing everyone who uses desktop computers for accessing the internet to ONLY use the mobile phone interface, because it would be inconvenient for mobile users to potentially get sent to the desktop interface by mistake.
And I'm saying you're holding things to a much, much too high a standard on that front. You can still have "you only need a little time to learn it" while offering reasonable, meaningful options to players. I wouldn't want Fighters to have pages and pages of options. I would very much rather they get something straightforward but flexible. For example, have you played Dungeon World? Its Fighter isn't perfect, but it very much IS good at kicking butt (possibly the best, Barbarian may edge it out), and it includes a really quite cool and useful move that only Fighters get for non-combat utility. It is called Bend Bars, Lift Gates (emphasis in original; "Str" means modifier): "When you use pure strength to destroy an inanimate obstacle, roll+Str. On a 10+, choose three; on a 7-9, choose two. (1) It doesn't take a very long time; (2) Nothing of value is damaged; (3) It doesn't make an inordinate amount of noise; (4) You can fix the thing again without a lot of effort."
Now, I don't think we could just copy this over to 5e directly with zero changes and call it a day. That kind of facile design is usually asking for big trouble. But I very much do think D&D's designers could learn a thing or two about adding cool, flexible, useful utility features to martial characters from examples like the above. Let Fighters be capable of feats of derring-do, of Herculean Efforts or Mighty Deeds--don't bog it down with tons of rules minutiae, but rather have it support a conversation between player and DM about what the character can accomplish through prodigious (and eventually legend-worthy) effort and/or ability.
