why do people dislike tiers in dnd?

[AMFV]

I disagree that anything I want for fighters is in any way supernatural. I do not want fighters to dress in robes, wiggle their fingers and say silly words. They do not entreat spirits or study occult knowledge or anything activity of the sort. They fight. The method of achieving an action is more important for determining whether its supernatural or not than how powerful the action is. for a game where everyone is participating in the same party, it is the ideal mindset to take, not being anal about whether or not things should be magical. because really there is no point in whether something is magical in a fantasy. Its fantasy, its a different world by definition where things just work differently and I could justify it working differently without needing magic at all, magic is not included in its definition. its an often used cliche, but one could have a fantasy without anyone having magic.

Certainly! You can have a fantasy without magic, there are games that really do that well! There are variants of D&D that do that well even, like E6 does that much better, d20 Past is really good at that.

But you're missing it, it is an important mindset to take, because anime settings where people can do magic with their swords and fly and what-not, are different in tone and reception than western settings where people who are not explicitly wizards have less magical power. It's a different tone, in D&D the tone is keyed for that western setting and that balance point reflects that. That's why 3.5 is good at the kind of games it's good at. So if you're a DM or a system designer you have to be anal about what kind of tone you're making and what kind of story you're telling.

There's a big difference between what you're discussing "Killing 30 guys in one stroke" and what is typically of a fighter in most games. There are games that are really well suited to that, but 3.5 D&D unedited is not one of them.

Yes, they are less effective than a caster, who can do comparable damage and also cast spells. Can they contribute to some problems? Sure, but it's damn difficult to produce a character who brings nothing to the table. The fact that they have a niche isn't important. What's important is that they have a unique niche. Otherwise, you're relying on people having sufficiently different tastes for the game to remain balanced.

Actually damaging casters are way outclassed by damaging martial, like it's not even close. Casters cannot do more die of damage than there are particles in the universe, they're also generally significantly reduced below uberchargers. And if you're contributing 1/5th of the time in a party of 5, then you're equally effective, even if you could theoretically contribute 4/5ths of the time.

If your definition of "mundane" includes "has supernatural abilities" it is not a useful definition.

Hardly, there is a distinction between things that are overtly magical and things are sort-of magical, and things that are not magical at all. THERE ARE NO MUNDANE CHARACTERS in 3.5 D&D, not after like 2nd level. Fighters are using magical swords, magical items, and kinds of stuff, they would not be mundane by a consideration that eliminates all supernatural abilities.

The line is more along the lines of "sort-of magical" and "explicitly super-magical"

That's not a good test of balance, because you're testing where success is expected. You also need tests where you expect some number of failures.

Right, and the game is imbalanced, when have I argued that it was balanced? I've only said that you could make the imbalances not significantly affect table-play relatively easily.

If one party encounters more problems than another with the same encounters, the game is not balanced.

Yes, and it's not supposed to be, that's not a design goal for them, or at least not a high priority design goal. The balance point is "Are they able to handle appropriate CR encounters" everything after that isn't at all important, because that's something that can be fixed by DMing.

That doesn't mean there's no possible improvement. You can make the game more balanced, even if it will never be perfectly balanced. Also, you're still missing the fact that some people might want to play characters that are martial but are comparably effective -- before the DM puts his finger on the scale -- with casters.

You're misunderstanding how I'm saying that DMs and players should deal with things, and you're conflating versatility and variety with raw power. THEY ARE NOT THE SAME. Just aren't. Until you can understand that difference you're not going to be able to contribute to this. The DM isn't making encounters more powerful so they challenge the wizard, the DM is altering encounters based on what the Wizard does so that some encounters will avoid his abilities, and the DM is making encounters where the Wizard is the only solver for the situation. That's what you have to do. It's not raising the power level, it's providing a variety of encounters so everybody can shine.

And if you want balance look at 4E, the things they did to make the game balanced, are the things that people objected to with the edition change. Like literally almost all of the complaints were about things that were balance fixes. That's why they brought back imbalances for 5E.