Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

[strangebloke]

Now it’s part of the way the system works, of course, doling our little chunks of abilities every level. And clearly the developers did not want to overwhelm the martial players.

Imo this is why part of the solution has to be improving the basic options available to all characters which martials are better prepared to access via stuff like extra attack and expertise. That way the cavalier can always run people over they just don't superlatively good at it until high level.

Devil’s advocate here, but I could see it just being adamantine. But I’m not exactly committed to that argument. Tolkien’s items of power tend to have fairly vague “make user better” effects.

Also never missed. Also never was lost. Also instantly killed a frigging dragon.

IDK man seems like you have to really force the reading that it's not overtly magical.

Or . . .

People don't play high level because they start at level one and real life interference ends the gaming group before or just about when those high levels are reached. It takes real world time to reach those levels depending on the individual gaming group. It took two and half years for my barbarian game to start at level 3 and end at level 20 using milestone. My paladin game is still going on. I'm 16th level now. We started at 6th level, in 2014. The DM is stingy with XP, but it's a flaw I can get over because the game is fun. We only meet once every three weeks and there was a huge break because of the Virus Apocalypse, but we're back. My artificer game plays every other week, using XP. We started at level 1. We're level 10 now and just had our 2 year anniversary. I just joined a new group playing a warlock. DM uses milestone. We started at level 1. We're now level 2. He wants the campaign to end at level 15, by June next year because that's when he has to move away for personal good news reasons. I was once in a game playing a Sorcerer. We ended at 9th level because the DM had to move away for personal bad news reasons. I was in another game as a Sorcerer that ended at 9th level because the DM could not be satisfied with the rules and stopped DMing altogether. My first 5E game I quit at 3rd level because I couldn't stand it anymore as the DM was a Tyrant whose quote I still remember "I'm a DM who believes a player should never get what he wants." and too many other players were That Guy.

If t3 was so great people would start in late T2 to get to the "good stuff" as quickly as possible, but universally this is not how things are done. Games start in early T2 at the latest and sometimes get through t3, with t4 being almost entirely the domain of one shots.

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That's a very good point too. The Captain America/Captain Boomerang/Xena character, who has a signature object that they can chuck at one person and then bounce off multiple subsequent other targets, a pretty low-level concept - well, it straight up can't be modeled accurately in 5e, but, you could get pretty close if you convinced your DM to let you use one of your extra attack attacks for each bounce. In which case you can't even get one bounce until level 5, or two until 11. Which means that something I would consider a level 20 feat for such a character - say, this scene - is completely out of reach, no matter how much preparation you do or how many resources you spend.

You probably can do it with a build designed precisely for this purpose like a fighter 2 Hunter conclave eleven with whirlwind attack but lol.

I agree with all this, with the caveat that Tolkien and Conan likely represent low-magic and possibly even low-level worlds if you port them into D&D.
i.e. you can't fight a Beholder and feel like a Tolkien character because a Beholder is above the weight class of almost everything in Tolkien except the literal demigods that were running around in the periphery.

Unless we're talking the silmarillion of course, where running up and challenging a dark God to a duel is absolutely on the table for the party paladin