Quote Originally Posted by Keltest View Post
I was talking about this on another forum, but even without any explicitly magical abilities, a level 20 already has super powers. Assuming that they use their ASI's on str or con and started with an 18 in one of those two stats, theyre already either superhumanly strong or superhumanly healthy/durable. And that's not even getting into the fact that they can walk off a fall from the upper atmosphere.

Any level 20 character is super, even if they aren't a spellcaster, because that's just the nature of high level campaigns. And i don't think that's a problem, except that 3.5 seems weirdly determined to not acknowledge that fact for martials. Whats the problem with a fighter blocking a red dragon's breath weapon with their shield? At least with respects to their own person. He's the legendary Fighter Man, let his shield act like a solid barrier. Let him stick a ton of javelins with magic rope attached to a dragon and tether it to the ground that way. If we stop trying to make the fighter look like Just A Guy and allow that he defies the laws of physics as much as a spellcaster does, the game becomes better for him and, dare i say, more fun for his player.
I just don't see it. For example, the weight lifting chart in the 3.5 PHB roughly matches up to real life records at about a 23 strength. Also, a level 20 character isn't really representing a real human, they are representing some sort of theoretical human paragon. The fatigue rules don't match real life, but the game doesn't really even try and simulate endurance.

I also don't see anything wrong with allowing a shield to block dragon's fire, assuming the shield is tough enough. Heck, Price Phillip does it in Sleeping Beauty, and he sure isn't a superhero. I even mentioned adding universal energy resistance to a shield as a potential fix in my above list.

Likewise the javelin thing is pretty cool and exactly the sort of game play I am afraid of losing. You wouldn't see that sort of thing if the fighter could just jump onto the dragons back and wrestle it to the ground like the Incredible Hulk. Sometimes making someone more powerful actually reduces fun and creativity.

As an example, in my last campaign, the sorcerer got a magic item that let them cast scorching ray at will without expending a spell slot. It made them much more powerful, but also made the character much more boring to play, to the point where the player in question couldn't wait to retire it. And going back looking through the campaign diary and proofing it for posting, I notice how much more interesting the descriptions of fights involving her are before she got it, where as before she would cast all sorts of varied spells and come up with creative uses for them, afterwards it was simply "she blasted it until it was dead" because that was the optimal strategy. A variant of "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail," I suppose.