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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6668877" data-attributes="member: 996">You're missing "... in the fantasy genre, or the literature/myth/legend that inspired it," when talking about what a character without supernatural powers "could do."   What Captain America (bad example, not genre) or Conan (or Heracles or Roland or Beowulf etc etc) could do certainly goes far beyond what an 'ordinary person' can do IRL, or even realistic 'peak human' ability.  No magic or mysticism or supernatural anything required.  What characters like that do in genre is also not merely superhuman, but extremely improbable.  They do things that may not be strictly speaking impossible, but which would require the wildest luck or most preternatural skill (or most likely both in large measure), and yet do them very consistently.  There's Author force going on there, a sort of 'protagonist syndrome,' where events around the character, by the authors design, warp in his favor to allow him to always catch that branch when he falls, or have the horde of enemies attack him more-or-less one at a time, or always avoid every poisoned arrow in the barrage, or outrun the avalanche, or split the arrow or whatever.  Crazy, impossible, super-human, but not quite supernatural thing after crazy impossible superhuman thing.Once you take that fully into account (and D&D /does/ get most of the 'plot armor' side of that protagonist effect under hps, if you don't interpret them too narrowly), you have an idea of what the fighter 'should' be (but sadly, isn't). That's prettymuch a straw man.  If you're OK was grafting supernatural powers onto a character, you'll just MC or play an exotic race or some other class or whatever to get what you want.  It has nothing much to do with the fighter class at that point. And in combat, for that matter.  At some points in the game's history, the fighter has had a lot more in-combat options than others.  Providing more in-combat options means more detailed, slower-to-resolve combat, whether those details are maneuvers for the fighters, generally-available maneuvers, or complex combat-useful spells for casters. That's an odd accident of tradition.  When the game first got rolling, much of the rules were focused on combat, including the few spells, and everything else but a few checks, like listening at doors or checking for surprise, was mostly just a matter of the players describing actions and the DM making judgments.  Then the Thief was introduced to the game with a bunch of special-abilities (actually just skills), and those became off-limits for everyone else.  Since the magic-user and cleric kept getting more spells, the class that fell through the cracks non-combat-ability-wise, was the fighter. There's a third idea, that non-class choices, like Backgrounds and feats can adequately cover non-combat ability, for everyone. The class players go to for the most familiar and accessible of heroic fantasy archetypes.  So the Knight in Shinning armor, the Robin Hood, the King Arthur, the Mighty Warrior, the lethal duelist, or the consummate martial artist.  It should eschew supernatural powers like spellcasting.  That doesn't preclude supernatural powers from other sources - a half-celestial or half-dragon could still be a fighter, for instance, or a fighter could use a magic item.  The fighter class just needn't provide anything supernatural.  Superhuman or preternaturally skillful or just supremely brave/lucky/etc, sure.The fighter should certainly be able to eventually do any of the things that martial heroes from genre/myth/legend do, with magic coming into it only in the sense of aid from outside, like magic items.  That means both superhuman abilities appropriate to those archetypes and routinely doing the profoundly improbable, pushing /beyond/ ordinary human limits (which are never absolute for the hero), or benefiting from 'luck,' narrative force, 'plot armor' or whatever you want to call it, via whatever mechanics can be devised to model such things. From a gameplay perspective, it's probably best to have all classes fully participating in all three 'Pillars.'  Either that or have classes just handle combat abilities (which'd mean trimming a lot from most classes, 'utility spells' or rituals, in particular), and have other options, like Backgrounds handle the other two (which'd mean 'Ritual Caster' might be a whole background, and Rogue might become one instead of a class).  Then you might have a Fighter w/Thief Background PC that essentially combined the combat ability of the fighter and the non-combat utility of the Rogue (and, I doubt such a character would be 'broken.') Not exactly true now (The Campion is the simplest sub-class, but the Battlemaster and EK beat out the Berskerker, at the very least, for complexity), and certainly not true in recent editions.  The 3.x fighter required a lot of system mastery to build effectively, and, depending on that build, could be quite challenging and interesting to play, as well - in that edition, the Barbarian made a much better 'training wheels' class.  In 4e, the classes weren't that far apart in complexity, and you could build a character and learn the game fairly easily playing whatever archetype you were interested in - but the Stiriker Role was arguably the simplest to use in play, and the fighter was a Defender.  In that edition, the archer-ranger was often regarded as the simplest character.Prior to 3.0, sure the fighter was pretty darn simple.  Not that new players always got to start with one.  Often when you were new to a group, you'd find yourself playing a cleric the first time out, instead. ;P</blockquote>

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