Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
Sorry you've missed the posters who are adamant that their Fighter be utterly devoid of fantastic abilities, but they've repeatedly posted to threads on this topic before. If you really want to take that last half-step and just openly call me a liar about that, I guess I can waste the time to go back and find those posts this weekend or whenever I can fit it in. I wonder if the max post size here can handle all the links I'll come up with... (And at this point, yeah, I do feel like I'm being called a liar, because I've said "no, really, it's there, I've seen it repeatedly", and just getting "no you haven't" in response.)
It's not even that fighters, or even any PCs at all, should be devoid of fantastic abilities, it's that, if you want to have 'the masses' be devoid of fantastic abilities then you need to acknowledge that in your design.

For example, in Vampire: the Masquerade it is a critical point of the game that the masses both have no fantastical abilities whatsoever and yet were still powerful enough to overwhelm all vampires through sheer weight of numbers as far back at the 15th century or so which is why the Masquerade came into being and the game is able to exist at all. Once you establish this point you can't have all-powerful elder vampires who are completely untouchable to the masses even in millions vs. one scenarios or the setting breaks down (of course, because it was a White-wolf game they did exactly that).

In a setting with spellcasters as powerful as those present in D&D the masses are quickly rendered utterly irrelevant and the result is that if the world manages to avoid one of several potential mystical apocalypses it eventually stabilizes around competing polities ruled by immortal god-king spellcasters - that is, it becomes Dark Sun (though it need not be that dark, there's not reason why you shouldn't have good and neutral mystic overlords in addition to evil ones).

Now you can certainly build such a world, it's just that the stories you tell in it have two tiers. You have the god-king tier where the sorcerers and their chosen servants engage in various machinations in which the fate of the world (or at least sizeable regions) is at stake, and you have the masses tier where various creative people creep around and have adventures in the shadow of much more powerful beings who either actively control the state of the world or just can't be bothered and sit back and mess with everyone according to their whims (Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser, after all, spend a very large percentage of their respective stories as the b****** of Sheelba and Ningauble). And this is the same sort of power dynamic that happens in a modern superhero world if you remove the guardrails of comic book logic that prevents the heroes and villains from chopping the world up into little fiefdoms (minus a few exceptions like Dr. Doom).

But a lot of people don't want to game in those worlds. They don't want a mid-level party to be able to march into a mid-sized two-thousand person town and effortlessly slaughter everyone, because it breaks the setting and, frankly, is really kind of stupid (just like those Civil war battles in Skyrim where you relentlessly murder dozens of guards in endless waves without the slightest trouble). And i think what happens is that many people - guided by the literature - hit on the idea that one point of balance here is that the warrior types don't have any supernatural abilities, and so even peak conditioning, expert training, and some magical gear have their limits and yield characters who can beat ten men but not one hundred. Unfortunately there are no such obvious limits for magical powers, so that part gets neglected, often with a 'well wizards are super-rare' dodge.