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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4913294" data-attributes="member: 4937">I felt Iron Heroes introduced a very elegant (at least at low levels) and interesting spell casting system, but that ultimately it decided to solve the problem by making everyone (well, almost everyone) spell casters.   In that,  along with Bo9S, it was very much to me a preview of 4e, although really, I think that the 'everyone is a spell caster' system was pioneered by Diablo (Diablo II in particular) and now has become pretty much the default way cRPG's work.I personally feel that if you go that way, you got to go that way 100%.  You get rid of the 'fighter' class (or make it an NPC class) and you have sword mages and a drenched in the arcane setting that supports the idea of 'everyone a talent/magic-user'.  The way Iron Heroes did it, which was billed as supposed to support something like Conan for example, it felt really silly to me.In 1st edition, my experience with fighters is that at high levels they were just as useful as high level mages because mages were so fragile.   High level fighters had better saves and more than twice as many hit points.  A M-U was extremely powerful above level 13, but still could go down hard in a single round if taken by surprise - which pretty much never happened to high level fighters.  I really don't think the problem is overall with the fighter design as a whole.  I love the fighter design.  It's so elegant.  I wish every class was as elegantly designed.  I think the problem is the sea that the fighter finds himself swimming in at high levels.Just as a suggestion, if you want to fix the fighter, start with the following:1) Don't add the level of the spell to its DC to save.  A 9th level spell is just as hard and no harder to save (assuming the same caster) as a 0th level spell.  That does quite abit to improve the durability of a fighter right there.  (Heightened Spell, under this model, increases the DC of a spell directly and becomes rather more useful than it would be otherwise.)2) Change the fighter's bonus feat progression to the following: 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th (x2), 17th (x2), 18th, 19th (x2), 20th (x2).  That's 22 feats plus their general feats, more than enough to take a speciality, improve some other aspect of their fighting and free up their general feats for useful things like Iron Will.  It also give Fighters something to stack up to high level Barbarians big late game upgrades.3) Give a fighter access to alot of high level end of feat chain feats or feats which require BAB +15 that do something other than add straight up damage.  Of particular importance are abilities which thwart things which would otherwise be the ban of fighters: low will saves, walls of force, high DR, loss of a favored weapon, etc.   I'm thinking things like giving a fighter armed with a iron/steel weapon SR, giving a fighter the ability to retry failed will saves if a battle is going on around him, the ability to break walls of force by shear damage, the ability to turn any weapon he holds into an enhanced weapon, the ability to ignore DR, etc.  I've got a few feats like this at home, if you are interested.  Some cool manuevers don't hurt, but try to make sure they are doing something other than just adding extra weapon attacks or flat bonuses to hit and damage.4) Give the fighter two exclusive class skills - tactics and leadership (leadership can be shared with paladins) - which let them do small but useful tricks.  I've got a thread around here somewhere if someone can dig it up.3) Avoid setting up encounters/adventures which feature one big battle per day.  This greatly favors spellcasters, who can then go nova without worrying about leaving spells in reserve.</blockquote>

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