Changing the "Caster beats Mundane" paradigm

[GreatWyrmGold]

Spoiler: Cosi

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Chronicles of Amber[/I] if you do not mandate that all the PCs have plane shift. All characters are defined by their power level. Lord of the Rings happens the way it does because Gandalf can't cast teleport. The Second Apocalypse happens the way it does because Khellus can.

You're not completely wrong, but you're not remotely right.
First off, under no circumstances should a character be entirely defined by power, whether it's the power to defeat kingdoms single-handedly or the power to cut through wolverine claws and stuff. Your claimed character concept is all about the power fantasy. There's nothing wrong with wanting a power fantasy, but don't claim that it's a character and expect me to believe you.
Second, power level influences plot, but it doesn't create plot, and it sure as HFIL doesn't create character. Speaking of HFIL, let's look at the original power levels. Dragon Ball started with Goku at a superhuman level of strength, able to lift cars and boulders but not to destroy mountains or anything like that. By the time of DBZ, planets were fair game for blowing up, Broly destroyed a galaxy, and as of Dragon Ball Super, universes are on the line. It's hard to argue that there aren't meaningful power level differences across the series, even if scouters have been long forgotten. Yet you still have much the same characters going through much the same plots.
Or let's look at DC and Marvel. For a while, DC heroes were ridiculously powerful (aside from Batman, but his levels of preparation should probably count as a superpower) while Marvel heroes were relatively grounded. I mean, yeah, the Hulk was holding up mountains, but the top-tier DC heroes could casually move planets around. I could talk about the similarities between the two companies' stories and characters, but while that's a valid point, I'd instead like to bring up how Marvel has been subtly increasing the power levels of their heroes to "catch up" in the Who Would Win battles that people seem so weirdly passionate about. But does this matter? No. The Hulk is moving continental plates instead of mountains, but he's still the same Hulk doing the same smashing. For that matter, compare the Silver Age's madness (e.g, Superman sneezing planets around) to more modern comics. Sure, the stories told have changed, but not because of power levels so much as comics taking themselves seriously; the more serious Silver Age stories have modern parallels, and their characters are still essentially the same.
But let's keep superheroes in mind for a second, because you're conflating two different ideas of power. You say that LotR happens the way it does because Gandalf can't teleport. Neither can Superman. That's part of his power set, but not his power level. Understand the difference? Your description of how all your specific abilities tied together was:

So in summary, you have someone who can plausibly destroy an entire kingdom on a whim, demolish any army that stands against him, has swarms of animal minions, and can beat down the most powerful servants of gods.

That's power level, not power set. You could easily have the same power set at a different power level by tweaking how things work (say, by adding prep time or reducing numbers), but then you wouldn't be able to easily destroy kingdoms and armies, you wouldn't have a swarm of minions, and godly servants wouldn't be your bitches.

No one ever asks people to justify why not having polymorph is important to their character concept. Why should I have to justify why having polymorph is important to mine?

First off, see "power set vs. power level". Second, if your character is an actual character, it doesn't matter if you character has polymorph or not. They don't have to justify it because it doesn't matter.

Spoiler: Max Killjoy

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You can have those "not magical" characters, and spellcasters who are balanced to be viable in the same game, and a setting that is not incoherent and not dissonant.
You can have spellcasters on par with 3.5e casters, and fighters and rogues that aren't spellcasters but are still magic for that setting and can keep up with those spellcasters, and a setting that is not incoherent and not dissonant.
You can have spellcasters on par with 3.5e casters, and "not magical" fighters and rogues that aren't spellcasters but can still keep up with those spellcasters without any magic at all, and a setting that has people being able to do those things baked into its "physics", and is not incoherent and not dissonant.
You can have spellcasters on par with 3.5e casters, and "not magical" fighters and rogues that aren't spellcasters but can still keep up with those spellcasters without any magic at all, and a setting that doesn't reflect that and IS incoherent and IS dissonant... that is, objectively bad worldbuilding.
You can have spellcasters on par with 3.5e casters, and "not magical" fighters and rogues that aren't spellcasters and cannot keep up with those spellcasters, and accept the imbalance between character types, and a setting that is not incoherent and not dissonant.
What you CANNOT have is spellcasters on par with 3.5e casters, "not magical" fighters and rogues that aren't spellcasters but can still keep up with those spellcasters without any magic at all, no reflection of that in the worldbuilding, AND a setting that makes any damn sense at all.
Something has to be sacrificed.

The first thing to sacrifice is your verbosity. The second...well, D&D's vanilla worldbuilding is already threadbare at best and definitely not what people are playing the game for, so it's another good sacrifice. Skim the Monster Manual, full of ideas from a dozen mythologies and a hundred nightmares, each of which went through several permutations (sometimes just from edition to edition, sometimes taking ideas from works earlier editions inspired), and tell me it isn't an enormous kitchen sink before a single PC steps into the world.

The "You just want an unbeatable power fantasy!" caricature rears its ugly head yet again. Maybe it's time to let the poor thing rest for a few decades...

One of the people in this thread described their character concept as "I can raze kingdoms and crush armies and slay the greatest servants of the gods". What do you call that?

Cool.
How many demons have you killed, exactly?
Legendary demon slaying heroes shouldn't trip and sprain their ankle. And it definitely shouldn't be more likely the more legendary they are (4 attacks per round vs 1).

I get where you're coming from, but I have to disagree on principle. Even the greatest experts can screw up. Look up the cosmological constant sometime.
"Legendary heroes don't just screw up" is a perfectly valid genre element that you can incorporate into your game, and saying "We're not doing fumbles because it goes against what I want our game to feel like" is valid. Saying "We're not doing fumbles because heroes can't screw up" is another thing entirely.

P.S. Max Killjoy, what would you call wanting to be a legendary demon-slaying hero who is immune to making mistakes?
P.P.S. No, the cosmological constant isn't dark energy. The two concepts have only a surface-level resemblance, and Einstein didn't throw in the constant because the universe's expansion was accelerating--he did it for close to the opposite reason.