The debates about martials, casters and a martial book confuse me: wouldn't a couple of martial classes with lots of options benefit everyone?

Or at least do no harm. Like, I don't understand who's against this, or why it hasn't happened. Classes like fighter and barbarian that just run up and take the attack action over and over, sometimes attaching small bonus effects, have people who love them. They love them! There's absolutely no need to make them more complex, given that there are people who enjoy barbarian as a basic thug who should be allowed to keep the class exactly as they already enjoy it.

But like... if you added a couple of classes that did get a bunch of choices, that played like a skilled swordmaster spending their turns going "hmm should I try dazing that group with Blade Dance or have Blind with Rage get the big one flailing around at his buddies?", doesn't that benefit everyone?

No classes work like that, so it's not stepping on any toes, and now people who want to play the very common fictional archetype of skilled, technique based combatant without having to be a spellcaster can do so. Existing martials stay exactly as they are for those who enjoy them AS-IS. Seems like the obvious solution? That's not to say WotC will do it, they seem creatively pretty bankrupt these days, but it seems strange that there's so much confusion about this.

If the people responding to their surveys really wanted this more than anything else, it would have been the first book they released after the PHB/DMG/MM.

They want to sell books more than anything else.

This isn't pf2e or dnd 3.5 there is no such things as options for martials except subclasses.

The easy solution is to get rid of the battlemaster, and fold their abilities into the rest of the martials.

Tada! Martial options.

I mean, this isn't academic. We had Tome of Battle at the tail end of 3.5, which was all about martials with options.

And there was some early weirdness, but the majority of the player base dug it.

4E ... implemented it weirdly, but still had more options for most classes beyond run up to the enemy and roll to hit.

And then 5E, and whatever the update is backtracked on that.

The problem with adding a new martial class with tricky mechanics is that either

1. It is balanced in line with casters, and makes the existing traditional martial classes obsolete.

2. It is balanced similar to a fighter, so the player with the new class is doing a bunch of fancy choices and not achieving anything more. So may as well just be a caster.

I dont know why people make out that caster vs martial is a big deal. Ive played d&d for decades and its never even a consideration. Everyone's doing cool stuff and having fun. Its just white room bullshit.

Most of the beefs with the divide are late game (level 20) but most campaigns never get to that level.

Why do you think Baldur’s Gate caps at 12?

Martials are stronger at early levels. Mages are stronger at high levels. It’s designed that way to have balanced parties and to have it pay off later in the campaign. You invest in a caster and feed them XP to benefit from them later.

How do you hand level a caster? Guard them with a few martials. It’s a team game. But individual players will whine about not feeling the same impact. But if you play a game from level 1 the only way that wizards is hitting level 20 is if they had a solid front line to protect them.

It’s main character syndrome. I’ve played in lots of campaigns as a martial and never had an issue with feeling my contribution.

You’ll only feel you’re lacking if you start a campaign already at high levels and then you don’t get to see the contribution you make to keeping that caster alive for them to break the game later.

The silent majority

Thing is that's really underwhelming as options go. There aren't many, they aren't usable very often, they don't get deeper as the game goes (higher levels you're just choosing from the options you didn't want enough to grab at 3, while the wizard was choosing scorching ray then and is choosing chain lightning now) and related to that, the range of effects is extremely limited.

Basically, every effect has to be balanced around being attached as an action less rider to the attack action, or being equivalent power to that baseline. Which means they're always going to be things like +1d8 damage and push back 15', never things like do a an earthquake smash with your maul that hurts everyone nearby and sends them all flying.

E6 says the beef starts at 7 with 4th level spells.

5e has generally avoided adding extra classes. Even when we do get one, it'll often get next to no support in subsequent books (Artificer only ever got subclasses in books that also included the core class, right up until the new ravenloft book this year).

Instead, they're adding 3rd party options onto D&D Beyond for the people that want them, so that seems to imply they reckon there's some demand, but probably not enough for them to make their own book.

For what it's worth, here's the free version of the martial support class they're adding:

https://www.kthomebrew.com/s/Warlord-v15-compressed.pdf

The same creator also made an "active ability" martial that moves away from the "attack twice and end turn" martial playstyle in favour of something more like a bunch of ultimate moves unlocked by your subclass.

https://www.kthomebrew.com/s/Kibbles-Paragon-v07.pdf

Here's the thing. Most of D&D isn't written into the rules, it's hanging out with your friends. Also, most of D&D is also played in the early levels, where casters have relatively few options too so it doesn't feel like a big deal because it's genuinely not a big deal. But if you're playing games above level 5, and you're actually playing the game and not just hanging out roleplaying (which is awesome, and good to do, but the rules don't really spend much time on it) then you quickly see that casters just have a world of options that non casters don't.