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| The excellent Head Lopper by Andrew MacLean. |
I often think about Fighters. I also like what others have written about fighters.
A regular discussion on the OSR discord has been the various ways in which people boost Fighters to make them feel a bit more like the archetype they promise, yet sometimes fail to deliver in the eyes of people.
I think LotFP did a step in the right direction, by allowing only the Fighter to get basic attack bonus.
I say go one step further. Only Fighters get to participate in combat.
Sounds silly when written out like this, but why? Class-based systems are mostly about carving out a niche. You pick the role you want to do in the game, and the system provides those with a handy class. Often the issue with why certain classes feel "weak" or "boring" or whatever other negative you want to assign to them is because another class (or multiple classes!) are intruding upon their niche.
Magic-users can cast spells. Clerics can turn-undead. Thieves can Backstab. And so Fighters should Fight.
If you want to engage in combat as a mechanic, then make it so the Fighter is the only Player Class who gets to do that. If you want to concede some ground on this, maybe allow combat hirelings to fight at half the effectiveness of a Fighter.
There you go. The Fighter now is back to having their niche well protected by incursion from literally every other PC.