Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixPhyre View Post
Honestly, I'd expect a "better" version of D&D would be to make that explicit. Make it clear, even if just in the class descriptions (ie no mechanical changes) that fighters and rogues are not just mundane earth people. That everyone with power in a fantastic world has fantastic power. No average joes allowed.
There were two wonderful tags in 3.P for indicating the presence of magical abilities that aren't spellcasting. They were called (Su) and (Sp).

The biggest issue with 3.5 is that it didn't use these nearly enough - the expectation was that you would PrC out of your base class, so they didn't care to ensure that the high levels of martial base classes began incorporating magic, or even be all that interesting in general. Pathfinder did a much better job of this with things like Rogue Talents and Rage Powers and archetypes tending to be more magical as you climbed, but they still didn't set that expectation as well as they could have.

Personally I would look to PrCs as examples for abilities that high-level martials should be expected to have baseline. Like a rogue gets high enough, they should be able to do things like jump from shadow to shadow, or briefly turn incorporeal like a child of night. A barbarian gets high enough and they can start tattooing certain powers onto themselves or cutting through magic, etc.