Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
Personally I'm fine giving more interesting and powerful abilities to non-spellcasters, so long as it starts as the fiction level and isn't simply a contrivance of gameplay/fiction segregation.
I wanted to address this in a bit more detail. Mostly that when designing an RPG you control the setting as well. I would say design the setting but sometimes you just choose it which is enough control for this point. Which is that I assume that most people are working on an system for a setting they want to mimic. Or even more extremely, are developing the setting with the system.

In these cases it shouldn't be a problem. Or not inherently, good design and good world-building can be hard and so one may make mistakes. But the real problem is where the setting isn't quite known. To pick on D&D a bit more (its a big system, it can take it) there are multiple settings it covers an they have different ideas that one rule set can't always represent very well. If you made a new system for Eberon, Ravenloft and Dark Sun I don't think they would be so compatible with each other.

Quote Originally Posted by Psyren View Post
I haven't gone through all 30 pages to see if this point has been made, but my long-held stance is that caster/martial disparity is very much intended in many of the systems where it shows up. Consider D&D 3.5 for example, often the poster-boy for this kind of imbalance, and this passage on designing strong villains: [Give martial villains magic.] A passage like that simply doesn't make sense in a game where martials were expected to be on even footing to casters. There is no mention of the reverse for example (where a wizard villain is encouraged to get a fighter on his team.) The message is very much "bosses need magic, at least past a certain level" and therefore that not having that magic is a recipe for failure.
Oddly enough I don't think anyone has. I just have one major question: Is this design intent or did they just realize that things were going wrong before they published the book? Or is awa correct and maybe it is a divide between PCs and NPCs?

On the other hand if martials are supposed to be "a core of martial skills amplified by magic" then maybe it is just a communication thing? Legend explicitly had that as a balance option, you could swap out some of your ability to use magic gear for more skills.

But this means we may have to revisit the older D&D editions to figure out if lack of caster survivability was intentional or not. Quertus might of had a stronger point that I initially thought.