The reason why fighters will never have nice things.

[Kaelik]

That's some great dodging and insulting, Kaelik, but I'm addressing your own fucking words, right here:

You might be confused because I didn't address any of your post, but that's not because I'm dodging it. It's because your post has no substance. It can be entirely boiled down to a single sentence: "All the different D&D games are the same game." And since this statement is tautologically false, I don't need to address it.

And I pointed out that you can play D&D without simulacrum, and not play a different game. In fact, play something with "D&D" on it in big letters. So...that's a false statement. Completely.

I also pointed out you can play D&D without Simulacrum. I even pointed out that you can do that in games that have Simulacrum by just playing at lower levels. I also pointed out you could play a different game that doesn't have Simulacrum for completion.

The bigger point is, you can totally take spells like Magic Jar or Simulacrum or Planar Binding or Gate out of the game without ruining it or making it "Not D&D".

Did I ever say that a game becomes not D&D by the removal of some spells? No. I pointed out that there is a D&D cannon, and that Cannon exists because of several D&D games.

I would go further and point out that 4e D&D has a different Cannon than 2e and 3e (I can't speak on behalf of 1e and AD&D, having not played them much). I have not claimed this makes it not D&D. I do claim this means it does not match the D&D cannon that existed prior to it's creation.

The particularities of whether a Balor is a type of Demon, or a single Demon's name, or whether Magic Jar exists are not terribly important to the fact of those statements.

Considering the number of sacred cows people here are happy to slaughter, I don't see why certain problematic high-level options should suddenly be verboten because they are part of your "D&D canon", which you can't even define to the point where it encompasses all of published D&D.

So? Did I say that certain problematic high level options can't be touched? No, I even explicitly said that Gate should be redesigned. When you want to start talking about what I'm talking about, you can come back inside.

I can totally live with that definition of wizards. Of course, it's somewhat less than useful because the words "a number of spells", "potent", and "all encompassingly awesome" are extremely vague, and so STILL mean very different things to many different people. But hey, it's a start.

Wow, it's almost like those words were written to cover a wide variety of levels between say one, and some higher number, and so I can't say "6 spells that do X." because it might be seven that do Y and Z at another level.

So...because I point out how much you seem to hate all other editions of D&D besides 3.5, you accuse me of hating 3.5? Leave me out of your projection issues.

Once again, I think you have projection confused. I don't hate all other additions. I have never claimed that I did. I'm drawing on 2e for a large amount of D&D cannon, since that's a large part of the D&D I have played, and the people I normally game with have played.

The D&D cannon is remarkably consistent between editions 2 & 3: No Gandalfs, lots of Bigbys.

I don't hate 3.5. Only one of the two of us is telling other people they're "doing D&D wrong", and it ain't me.

See, when you have hallucinations in your head that say things, and then you argue against the hallucinations... That still counts as you being the one who said it. It doesn't matter if your hallucination answers to the name Kaelik in your head, since I didn't say that in the real world, it doesn't count as me having said it.

[Neurosis]

GENERAL STATEMENT, REPEATED SPECIFICALLY BELOW SEVERAL TIMES:

In the above posts I am talking about how things SHOULD be, not how they are.

I think we should back that up a bit. Killing wizard monsters should be improbable but not impossible, and Conan types should be all about doing the improbable.

Killing basically every monster with two-digit CR is flat-out impossible for a Conan-type, that has just usual weaksauce action hero powers, like limited luck, mostly ignoring bludgeoning damage and partially ignoring the probability of bleeding/shock. You can't allow Conan-types to remain relevant withour redefining the entire game, like 4E.

You are talking about how things are, and presumably how things are in an outdated edition (3.x). I am talking about how things SHOULD BE, in general or perhaps in a hypothetical 5E, because that's what I thought this topic was about....redefining the game.

Anyway, even within action movies there are tiers. John McClane James Bond could beat a wizard. It doesn't matter what the wizard does or what fucking retarded "game-breaking" powers he has. James Bond is a badass normal to the nth degree. James Bond always wins. I know that makes James Bond a pretty nonviable PC/Character Class. But in any case, I don't at all agree that the badass normal has a shelf-life of Level 5.

(In the above paragraph, replace James Bond with Batman if you prefer, unless it will lead to 'Batman is a gadgeteer' argument.)

Oh and this argument is really bad. "Being popular, therefore getting plot bent in your favor" and "Being main character whose death will end the series" are not viable shticks for an RPG character. So is "Being a comic books character, whose power level is horribly inconsistent".

The second after I mentioned James Bond I said 'but he's not a viable character class' for this very reason. Scroll up. It's there. And it predates you saying this. By a lot.

but James Bond wins every time. That is his super power. But this is tangenital to the topic, so let's drop it.

No, it's actually very integral (... you know, this is the first time I noticed that math pun. ) to the conversation. Because even if you accept that as a 'power' (which I don't, it's just metafiction) the fact of the matter is that most of the other protagonists have that power, too.

James Bond is already competing for attention with other 'I always win' guys like Superman and Dr. Strange. So when they go 'we can do that already', what is James Bond supposed to do?

See above.

* The fighter cuts down the tree of might with an axe.

They're fucking Trees of Might, there's no way an action hero could cut those things down fast enough to make a difference. Seriously, have you seen lumberjacking done without power tools? It's an all-day affair and those are just regular trees. I mean, sure, Paul Bunyan could rise to the challenge. Sora could. But not Conan.

Of course Conan could. And the fighter SHOULD be able to. The fighter should be able to JACK LUMBER that hard. That is all I'm saying.

The fighter tunnels under the Wall of Force.

... only to find out that the walls of force extend underneath the ground, so no.

Why would the GM/mechanics specifically shit in the fighter's cheerios like that? Who is the one saying that fighters can't have nice things now? Because it seems to be you. (The first thing I said was that I was not an expert on D&D mechanics, so if going underground really is specifically a feature of Walls of Force then maybe that should change.)

Your last example is (no offense) pretty laughable. Considering this is an argument about flavor and not power level, and I agree that Fighters and Wizards should be equal in power, why would you mention a zombie invasion as something that the Fighter could not Fight?

Because only a goddamn moron attempts to fight a zombie invasion. Yes, the action hero could chew through tens of thousands of them and win. BIG FUCKING DEAL! You still lose the motherfucking adventure which was 'save the city against a zombie apocalypse' not 'kill every zombie'. I mean if you were going to kill the zombie hordes on hand you may as well not have even bothered.

Traditional zombies spread the infection through killing. The fighter protects the people of the city by killing zombies. What's the problem?

The artificer could come up with a magical zombie cure/antibiotic. The paladin could force positive energy back into their bodies to cancel out the negative energy. The necromancer could soul-bind the original spirits back into their bodies, restoring their humanity. The wizard could just mass-transmorgify them back into humans and tell the cure to go fuck itself. That is how you beat a zombie apocalypse without having the keys to the plot handed to you and the fighter is sadly coming up short

Maybe these guys should need the fighter to cover their asses while they are doing all that nifty shit. Maybe the game should be designed that way.

That's all I'm saying.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Of course Conan could. And the fighter SHOULD be able to. The fighter should be able to JACK LUMBER that hard. That is all I'm saying.

O... kay. Then this hypothetical Conan would move out of the realm of Vanilla Action Hero and start getting into the realm of Gilgamesh/Paul Bunyan/Pecos Bill. If you want to do that then fine. In fact I think that most fighters should be able to, since the latter kinds of characters are more interesting and useful.

Why would the GM/mechanics specifically shit in the fighter's cheerios like that? Who is the one saying that fighters can't have nice things now?

First of all, it's a fucking data point. If I go 'here's an example of some of many high level obstacles that fighters cannot get past' and you're able to think your way past one, it doesn't suddenly defeat my case.

Moreover, 'fixing' spells that have unintentional conceptual loopholes like this is not shitting in the fighter's mechanics. It's just an extension of changing a spell so that it makes internal sense; D&D's Wall of Forces and Adamantine Doors on a Stone Wall only make sense if you're playing a video game or a narrow dungeon crawler. It's lame and insulting if you're able to get into the Castle of Impenetrable, Unteleportingable Doom by climbing in a window and it's lame and insulting to get past the Wall of Force by taking advantage of the fact that Gary Gygax only thinks in two dimensions.

Seriously, this complaint is like saying that you should be able to thwart stoneskin by throwing a handful of pebbles at the recipient and then crying 'fighter nerf!' when it gets fixed.

The fighter protects the people of the city by killing zombies. What's the problem?

Have you ever actually seen a zombie movie before? No one ever concludes it by 'and then we shot the six original infectees before they spread the disease', because that's anticlimatic. Zombie apocalypse stories invariably start at LEAST at the 'oh shit, a lot of people are infected and it's spreading!' point. The idea that you could stop a zombie apocalypse at this point by running around and killing infectees is laughable.

Maybe these guys should need the fighter to cover their asses while they are doing all that nifty shit.

Then the paladin and the gish point out that they can cover peoples' asses AND advance the plot at the same time. Then the wizards and druids and clerics are like 'oh yeah, we can cover our own asses, too'.

Why is the fighter needed again?

[Neurosis]

For the last time, I'm talking about how things ought to be, not how they currently are in x edition.

The fighter should be needed. The wizards/druids/clerics should not be able to cover their asses so well that the fighter is obsolete.

[Kaelik]

For the last time, I'm talking about how things ought to be, not how they currently are in x edition.

The fighter should be needed. The wizards/druids/clerics should not be able to cover their asses so well that the fighter is obsolete.

No one should be needed.

If you need a Fighter, then you can't have a party without a Fighter without sucking. Then if no one wants to play a Fighter, either someone takes one for the team, or you have a shitty game. Fail.

No one should ever be needed.

[RobbyPants]

Exactly. Otherwise you get that same crap where a new guy joins a game and is told to play a cleric because the group "needs" a cleric.

[Lokathor]

Wall of Force doesn't go into the ground or into solid objects. That seems like a reasonable limitation. Why are you taking out the limitations from an already very powerful spell?

[violence in the media]

Wall of Force doesn't go into the ground or into solid objects. That seems like a reasonable limitation. Why are you taking out the limitations from an already very powerful spell?

I think it's more a case that, if you're going to take the time to Wall of Force your castle, you're going to make sure some asshole can't simply tunnel underneath it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The fighter should be needed.

You keep asserting this point but you don't know why a fighter should be needed or how a fighter should be needed.

What is one thing that a fighter can do that a paladin or gish can't? The paladin can summon the spirits of dead dwarf champions to aid them and the gish can summon up gigantic walls of living acid. Their 'swing a sword real well' ability (the premiere ability of the fighter) is honestly a fucking afterthought--and if it becomes necessary the paladin channels holy every through their sword or the gish mentally channels lightning through it and they STILL outpace the fighter.

[mean_liar]

I cannot fully understand why Schwarzkopf still fails to get his point across.

Kaelik's insight is correct: no one should be absolutely necessary. The collary is that there necessarily should not be any one class that, alone, obviates another.

If the paladin or gish is outperforming the fighter in the "mowing down the horde" schtick, then your concept of the fighter sucks and you need to get on board with the idea that he is a one-man army. Or get bigger hordes and amp the fighter up accordingly. Or tune the other concepts down if that's your thing. A party with detectives gets to go head-to-head with investigations, a party with a fighter gets to face hordes. Writing off the fighter because you're assuming he doesn't do anything that another class can do is a tautalogy; if you don't WANT a fighter then you can make every class equally capable in combat and call it a day, but if you DO, then you come up with some kind of asskickery that he does better than anyone else.

If you can't come up with something but you claim to be trying, don't think that your failure of imagination is proof that the fighter has no role. Again, if you don't think the game needs a "mundane" warrior type, then that's fine, but that's not proof that the fighter has no role.

So, give him a schtick that doesn't involve warping spacetime. He gets friends, or followers, or inspired mundane folks eager to hear his every word, or something. He's approachable instead of intimidating, earthly instead of supernatural. Or something.

There should be nothing special about the fighter, and there should be nothing special about any of the other classes insofar as there necessarily should not be any one class that, alone, obviates another. If one can say, "the cleric and gish and paladin kill everything", then you should be able to say, "the fighter also kills everything". The real crux is what ELSE he does, since being dominating in combat is something most every character wants.

[FatR]

It is possible to compete at high power level by just being superhumanly good at punching or cutting things, and maybe having some ranged attack thrown in the mix, as about half of shonen main characters can attest.

They also can attest that this tends to make their fights relatively boring (compared to secondary characters, who tend to have more conceptually wide powersets) soon enough. And RPGs cannot discract their audience by the pretty to compensate for this.

[Kaelik]

It is possible to compete at high power level by just being superhumanly good at punching or cutting things, and maybe having some ranged attack thrown in the mix, as about half of shonen main characters can attest.

Aizen casts Silent Image. You lose.

[Jilocasin]

They also can attest that this tends to make their fights relatively boring (compared to secondary characters, who tend to have more conceptually wide powersets) soon enough. And RPGs cannot discract their audience by the pretty to compensate for this.

This seemed to be the more relevant part. Emphasis added.

[mean_liar]

...and the Fighter is completely unable to hear that the image is silent. And his neck hairs never raise up to indicate that vile magic is near. And he's a naive cripple armed with a spoon... who's asleep.

If you're going to continually define the fighter as, "worthless in all possible ways," all you're doing is telling us why 3eDnD fighters aren't as awesomely powerful as a well-played 3eDnD spellcaster, which is old and not worth rehashing. You're not adding to any solutions because you're refusing to attempt any. You're not even coming up with a reasonable explanation why fighters necessarily suck, only that your conceptualization of them is shit.

[Red_Rob]

Trading effectiveness in the combat minigame for effectiveness in the social or investigation minigames is not good as it means someone is failing to contribute all the time. Characters should be able to contribute in different minigames in different ways. Characters might be more or less effective in each minigame, but they must be able to at least contribute in some way that doesn't make you wish they had just stayed at home.

The Fighter must do more than just fight.

Haven't we agreed yet that in a game with D&D's power level the "action hero" schtick doesn't cut it? We should move on. How about a list of the various minigames / out of combat challenges that RPG's in general and Fantasy RPG's in particular tend to throw up, and we could look at some example abilities for Warriors for these minigames at various levels? A short list of challenges might be:

Social interaction
Heroic - Negotiate peace between the warring kingdoms
Legendary - Enter the Halls of the Dead and leave with your life - and an army
Mythic - Trick Orcus into handing you his wand

Investigation
Heroic - Track the cultists to their lair by following the clues on their victims
Legendary - Find the Sorceror who is killing nobles in their sleep
Mythic - Follow the Demons teleporting from Baator to abduct local clerics

Travel
Heroic - Navigate Mirkwood to get to the Goblin lair
Legendary - Travel to the top of mount Olympus before the spell is finished
Mythic - Get to the City of Brass to trade the Hand of Vecna for the Vorpal Blade you need

Survival
Heroic - Cross the desert to reach the Spirit Library
Legendary - Reach the Ocean floor to speak to the Triton King
Mythic - Survive the Negative Energy Plane whilst you hunt for Moil

Stealth
Heroic - Sneak into the castle at night
Legendary - Get onto the stage and kill the executioner without the crowd seeing who did it
Mythic - Get into the prisons of Acheron and rescue your lover without the Devils spotting you

Logistics
Heroic - Find a way to get the gold statue out of the dungeon
Legendary - Enter the wish economy / have unlimited wealth
Mythic - Create/Obtain Major magic items

So, for example, a Wizard can beat the Travel challenges by using Locate Object to find the goblin lair, Teleporting to the top of mount Olympus and Plane Shifting to the plane of fire. An action hero gets stuck at Heroic on nearly every challenge.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If the paladin or gish is outperforming the fighter in the "mowing down the horde" schtick, then your concept of the fighter sucks and you need to get on board with the idea that he is a one-man army.

The fighter is trapped in a double sandwich of shit here.

A) First problem, the fighter is supposed to be bound to the limits of 'Badass Normal'. The paladin and gish aren't so their special effects are better. This is why the paladin can do things like summon a celestial gold dragon to fly on and the gish can stab his sword into the ground and create a localized 10.0 earthquake. How is swinging a sword with no special effects attached supposed to keep up with that?

You have two 'solutions' to this. The first one is to nerf the gish and paladin's schticks so that they're on par with a regular person swinging their sword around. Unfortunately when you do that you get the 4E effect of having shit like Meteor Swarm or Prismatic Wall killing people slower than a regular sword swing. Which is insulting. The other solution is to 'stealth buff' the fighter by giving him a +50 bonus to melee damage and shit like that. Total metagaming and it breaks willing suspension of disbelief just as badly as the previous two do. I mean is swinging a sword like a dumbass was so effective, why didn't the paladin and the gish just stick to doing that rather than spamming ineffective dragon summons and earthquakes?

B) The second problem is that the Fighter specifically (other classes like the barbarian have this problem, but the fighter has the worst of it) is defined by being good in combat. Which is a really narrow schtick. If he was the only one that could be really good at combat that would be one thing, but this is fucking D&D. Everyone is good at combat. So the only way to keep him from still being inferior is to make him better at combat than everyone else--but that's fucking unbalanced and reinforces the age-old D&D problem of trading non-combat effective for combat-effective.



The thing is, as long as the fighter is a DMF he can't develop impressive schticks that would help party members because then he'd stop being a mundane character. He'd be a Transcendental Fighter like Rob Lucci or Kenshiro once he breaks the bonds of realism. Which is awesome, because everyone loves those characters except for grognards who want to the idea of their college academy-educated wizards being able to do all of these impossibly cool things that the jocks fighters could never do and FUCK THEM I'll show them and finally have sex with Card Captor Sakura one day.

mean_liar, if you WANT the fighter to be a Transcendental Fighter then these problems go away instantly. We can start giving the TF abilities that the paladin and gish (or anyone) can't intrude on, like being able to survive having his brain and soul pulled out or tunneling a hole straight to hell by pounding his hammer into the ground.

But there is an incredible amount of resistance from non-Lago posters over this issues. And while this isn't the only solution, I do resent the implication that I can't imagine a game in which a fighter can be good at high levels. The thing is, I can't imagine a game in which a fighter is good at high levels and is tethered to the surly bonds of 'realism'.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You're not even coming up with a reasonable explanation why fighters necessarily suck, only that your conceptualization of them is shit.

People have come up with solutions how to make the fighter awesome.

1) Gilgamesh Solution: Give fighters access to powers while not explicitly defined as magic still do impossible things. They live off of the transcendental or 'just because' power source. In other words they get magic but the setting goes out of their way to avoid calling it that, simply taking real-world feats to impossible extremes (like infinite double jumps or holding your breath underwater for several days).

2) Parn Solution: Ban fighters and other mundane characters after a certain point and force them to take levels in Angel Knight or Lord of the Flies or whatever. In other words at low levels when doing mundane things is enough to advance the plot they can be a Fighter or whatever, but at higher levels they're forced to pick up supernatural powers.

3) Gadgeteer Solution: Give fighters a bunch of geegaw that have the superpowers they need to compete with the big boys. Fighter McSwordington gets Demon Armor, Interdimensional Cut Sword, Ring of Flight, Boots of Ultra-Stealth. Or he gets one magical item that lets him have all of these things at once like a Green Lantern Ring. In other words when the class in of itself stops being viable you staple other peoples' superpowers to them and make them a launching pad for it.

4) 4E Solution: Ban all of the high-level shit from the game and pretend like it never happened. The power level of the plot tops out somewhere around level 6 or 7. That doesn't mean that the game has to end; you can make it go to level 50 if you feel like, but people have to stop escalating plot affecting abilities before mundane abilities become worthless.

5) Gygax Solution: Pretend that the fighter is still a functioning and important member to the plot at high levels and go out of your way to lie about them still being a viable archetype that doesn't need to be hand-held by the other PCs.

How do you get away with such obvious deceit? Simple. Just do what every LotR clone has done. You keep the numbers up in the combat minigame but hide the fact that the fighter--who used to be able to assist plots with his mundane sneaking and athletic abilities--can no longer advance the plot under his own power and his non-combat usefulness has fallen off of the face of the earth. Like when the classes that have superpowers put their heads together and wonder 'how are we going to storm the interdimensional fortress of acid' or 'how are we going to solve the curse of the shire AND reverse the zombie apocalypse' the fighter is in the other room playing with his micropenis and waiting for the combat music to start again. The fighter is not allowed to wonder: 'gosh, back when we had to do things like find a hidden temple in the jungle, my tracking and survival abilities were really helpful' because it would cause your scheme to fall apart.


I'm personally in favor of number 1, but people have had their brains turned to jelly by Conan so number 2 is an acceptable compromise. I've written quite a few posts why 3 is a bad idea, but it's only a bad idea conceptually. It's not inherently unbalanced or anything. Number 4 is also a balanced option, but that's outside the scope of this thread.

Number 5 seems to be really popular for some retarded reason. Sure, people say that it's not popular and they really want something like 1 or 4, but for some reason they can't man up and say that they want an inferior class that has to resort to having the plot force-fed to them.

[mean_liar]

I think it's still possible to create a badass normal that doesn't trample the tropes that people expecting badass normals to have.

So, he doesn't have his brain or soul sucked out, he... well... it depends on what the method of the attack is, but he should be able to pull out some kind of counter other than, "he grits his teeth and takes it like a BADASS".

To me, this discussion is basically saying, "there is no possible way to put 'badass normal' dressing on what we want the fighter to do". Mowing down hordes of shit should be well within that, as well as ripping trees up and smacking people with them.

It's easier to justify as Pecos Bill, but even tunneling to hell with a smack of a hammer doesn't really fit what I *THINK* you're conceptualizing as "badass normal". However, a DMF can conceivably know someone who can do that for him because the DMF is universally loved. Hell, he can just arbitrarily have allies sufficient to let him do ANYTHING at (level - 3) or whatever, giving him "everyone else's schtick but worse" as a schtick.

We can do better because we're more clever than that, but even that is a possible solution that doesn't overturn the DMF trope too much.

I still like Transcendental Fighter. I just think that a failure to find a place and thing for a DMF to do is a failure of imagination instead of a necessary conclusion.

[Red_Rob]

The DMF is just a low level Transcendental Fighter. At lower levels action movie shit is fine. There is no failure of anything.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Mowing down hordes of shit should be well within that

Psst. Mean_liar, this is D&D. Everyone can do that. They don't even have to be particularly high level to do that. Think of a better fighter-only schtick, otherwise the precious DMF is still a pile of derivative fail.

I still like Transcendental Fighter. I just think that a failure to find a place and thing for a DMF to do is a failure of imagination instead of a necessary conclusion.

Well, then you really need to try harder yourself, because shit like ripping up trees out of ground big enough to make anyone care is well outside the bounds of 'mundane' action heroes like Bourne and Conan anyway.

No one is going to really say anything to James Bond picking up a fireaxe and chopping off someone's head (except for the censors) once or twice, but if James Bond or other such characters ripped a tree out of the ground and did that--the whining would be immeasurable. I can see it right now: 'blah blah blah THE WEEABOOS HAVE TAKEN OVER blah blah blah I paid to see James Bond not Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon blah blah blah the director needs to stop playing video games and GET BACK TO THE ROOTS!

I'm assuming you mean a good-sized tree, because ripping out something like The Tree That Grows In Brooklyn is laughable, not cool.

I think it's still possible to create a badass normal that doesn't trample the tropes that people expecting badass normals to have.

Then fucking put one together. I really doubt that you or anyone can do that without the game getting stupid like 'tunneling under a Wall of Force with a shovel'. Even K has pretty much given up on the idea, opting for Option 3.

[Neurosis]

Lago, if you think the badass normal has to be less good than the magical guys, then you don't understand the badass normal trope. In the end, against all possible odds, time and time again Kaneda beats Tetsuo. Not the other way around.

1) Gilgamesh Solution: Give fighters access to powers while not explicitly defined as magic still do impossible things. They live off of the transcendental or 'just because' power source. In other words they get magic but the setting goes out of their way to avoid calling it that, simply taking real-world feats to impossible extremes (like infinite double jumps or holding your breath underwater for several days).

This is literally and exactly what I am suggesting and what I have been suggesting all long. And I think you can come up with this kind of non-magic flavor for everything but interdimensional travel, which I think is something that either everyone or no one should be able to do.

My favorite ACTUAL solution to this problem by the way is Earthdawn, where EVERYONE is magic. Of course, I have never actually played Earthdawn and can't say anything about its systems.

B) The second problem is that the Fighter specifically (other classes like the barbarian have this problem, but the fighter has the worst of it) is defined by being good in combat. Which is a really narrow schtick. If he was the only one that could be really good at combat that would be one thing, but this is fucking D&D. Everyone is good at combat. So the only way to keep him from still being inferior is to make him better at combat than everyone else--but that's fucking unbalanced and reinforces the age-old D&D problem of trading non-combat effective for combat-effective.

To me this is a viable solution. The Fighter should be better at fighting than everyone else. That is why he is the Fighter.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Lago, if you think the badass normal has to be less good than the magical guys, then you don't understand the badass normal trope.

The badass normal trope works just fine at low levels. Bourne is not only on the level of Static and Harry Potter and Episode 5 Luke Skywalker, he's probably better than them. The problem comes at higher levels, when Static evolves into Magneto, Harry Potter evolves into Raistlin, and Luke Skywalker evolves into Martian Manhunter. Who is Bourne supposed to evolve into to keep up?

Quick, Schwarzkopf, come up with three high-level Badass Normals and one of them can't be Batman.

This is literally and exactly what I am suggesting and what I have been suggesting all long.

Really? I honestly doubt that.

To go along with that Badass Normal list, I want you to come up with four things a high-level Badass Normal should do that's on the level of what a Wizard, a Druid, and a Paladin can do. If they're stunts equally as impressive and useful then I'll apologize. But so far you've suggested stupid low-grade shit like 'chop through a zombie apocalypse' or 'tunnel under a Wall of Force', so you'll forgive me for being skeptical.

[Lago PARANOIA]

To me this is a viable solution. The Fighter should be better at fighting than everyone else. That is why he is the Fighter.

First of all, how the hell can you make this happen? The paladin can summon a celestial gold dragon as a mount and the gish can cause a localized earthquake. The only way you can have the DMF do this is by employing a WSoD-breaking amount of metagaming, like giving them the 'secret' ability of having +20 to damage.

Secondly, are you seriously suggesting that fighters should trade combat effectiveness for non-combat effectiveness? My friend, this is D&D. While I do admit that there are a lot of players who aren't really going to care whether their character can't do anything out of combat but choke their chicken, I can tell you that everybody is going to complain about the guy whose class is 'better at the combat minigame than everyone'.

[Jilocasin]

I have always been completely in favor of option 2. Seriously, anything that calls itself a "Fighter" is going to be good at fighting. Except that every class in D&D should be good at fighting and there's this stupid idea that a fighter should only be good at fighting. Fighter, as the name of a class, should be removed wholesale from the game.

So forget about the Dumbass Melee Fighter already and move on to just focusing on the Transcendent Warrior. One can play in the conceptual sandbox and the other can't, some people may not like it but that's what tiers are for. They are more or less the same character, just one is low level. Everyone seems to agree that "being good at killing things" is not a specialty in D&D and that when you start hitting things with your sword so hard you warp reality (or even just make giants explode in one hit) you are no longer a DMF.

Also, ripping up trees and tunneling through rocks are Charles Atlas Superpowers. The most palatable option for the majority is probably option 1, just give them extensive social abilities and magic but actually not magic *wink wink* superpowers. You can give them interesting stuff that isn't calling lightning from a cloudless sky. They could rally the city to march behind your banner, and once you get to a high enough level the city could just as easily be the city of brass.

Lago, if you think the badass normal has to be less good than the magical guys, then you don't understand the badass normal trope. In the end, against all possible odds, time and time again Kaneda beats Tetsuo. Not the other way around.

No, the badass normal has to be less good than the superheroes, which is what high level wizards, clerics, and druids are. Unless they actually have charles atlas superpowers.

[Judging__Eagle]

FAR is going to be using the #1 solution. Creatures pick "all the time" things called continual powers; but abilities that actually mean anything tactically, strategically, or logistically (non-combat, Resources) are things that a players chooses to buy, or not buy, for their creature.