How stronger would non-magic classes need to be to allow broad-non vancian magic?

[Ignimortis]

Imagine you have a character concept. Imagine wanting to instantiate that concept into an RPG. Now imagine the authors of those RPGs lacked enough creativity / imagination for their mechanics to be able to instantiate your character concept. Furthermore imagine those authors are quite creative when it comes to another character concept. So creative that it inspired your imagination and broke some of your mental blocks about your character concept. Now not only did the published materials fail to instantiate your character concept but, by being more creative when instantiating another character concept, they raised your expectations with regards to instantiating your own character concept.

It is not about power. Some people can imagine these high level characters but those that author the published content can imagine the high level mages but cannot imagine these other high level characters (non-magic, non-caster, at-will, etc, etc). So you get disappointed players that have character concepts that cannot be instantiated because the author's imagination failed them. And most of these are the harder concepts to imagine. Personally I get stuck somewhere in levels 11-16*. At that point my imagination fails to be able to generate mechanics to instantiate these characters. So I understand the difficulty.

This is the short end of the wand. Some concepts are harder to imagine == thus => harder to design mechanics for == thus => harder to instantiate into the game. Those concepts tend to receive worse instantiations and characterizations as a consequence of these mental blocks.

*Levels based on 3rd edition D&D scale. Different RPGs/editions go beyond that level or stop before it** but that is where I stop being able to write mechanical representations for these concepts.

** This is kinda what you did when you chose to delay some of the magic flexibility to higher level. You altered the scale.

Great post. That's why I keep getting disappointed by most high-fantasy RPGs that aren't Exalted or homebrewed to hell 3.PF.