Wealth, Feats, Fighters: Three Birds with One Stone?

[canamrock]

For a while, I've thought about how to make a Fighter not suck. Basically, I'd come up with two general solutions that deal with the major issues with the class on the whole:

1) Staying in the class for too long suxxorz.

2) Other warrior types can get a lot out of a level or two, perhaps moreso than a straight Fighter.

3) Fighters become utterly reliant on equipment to deal with threats.

4) Fighters just plain suck.

The ideas were basically to either make feats have a special 'feat cost' for Fighters, so that a single level in Fighter at a later level could get the Fighter a dozen cheaper feats, or to make a series of fighter-specific powers that make the odd levels more desirable and keep it from being as powerful a 'dip' class.

Why do fighters rely so heavily on magic items, though? For some reason, feats just don't cover those areas, even though they really ought to, if these abilities are so important for balance. If you let fighters be able to have a 'ki' power that gives them natural enhancements to whatever weapons or equipment they use, whether it represents supernatural capability, or just extreme skill, it's a great way to keep fighters going without reliance on specific stuff. Using named bonuses, this can even prevent abuse in regard to stacking up class powers with the magic items those powers are meant to replace.

Problem here is that it doesn't solve it for everyone else. There, we might consider regular feats which do similar things, that the Fighter abilities can enhance further. Then they might even be masterful fighters.

[RandomCasualty]

You could definitely make feats or even class abilities that emulated magic item bonuses. There'd be no game problem from having a feat that granted a deflection bonus or a feat that granted natural armor enhancement.

This would actually be pretty beneficial because it would help make NPC fighters a lot more of a threat without handing the party huge amounts of loot.

I think it'd be a pretty good idea, after all if you're letting clerics get a free ring of protection with a 1st level spell, then giving fighters the same as a feat or class ability can't be unbalanced.

[Absentminded_Wizard]

I want to see how this project works out. I'm still ticked that they didn't use feats to alleviate or eliminate magic item dependency for 3e fighters.