Okay so first off I'm not advocating for either side of the Martial vs Caster debate but one of the martials biggest arguments is that Casters can perform amazing superhuman feats while the Martial can't barring magic items and a lot of Feats
So my question is how would you buff Martials without nerfing Casters in any way in order to eliminate the perceived disparity
What even game system are you talking about bruh?
Lets assume 3.PF as that is the system that usually suffers most from this issue
Gestalt levels for classes without spells
>So my question is how would you buff Martials without nerfing Casters in any way in order to eliminate the perceives disparity?
You don't. Martials represent the peak physical condition, casters tap into the nature of existance itself and manipulate the forces of time and space... They are not and should never be balanced.
You can hamper the Caster's progression or require amazing feats or quests to obtain a fraction of a component required to cast a single high level spell, but that's it.
People have been trying to fix 3e since it came out, it's a hopeless endeavour, unless you want to rebuild everything.
The closest thing to a fix is 5e, or maybe Fantasy Craft, which likewise tore the whole thing down and rebuilt it to not be ass-backwards.
You could go a ways towards fixing 3.5 though, by emulating the feat chains from Fantasy Craft. One of the big things that nerfs martials in 3.5 is how you have these big long chains of feats needed to do amazing stuff like "trip a guy", and if you don't have all the necesary feats then your Fighter is unable to figure out how to trip someone.
Replacing these "feats" with actual Feats (the kind of thing that would impress somebody) can go a long way, and FC's are pretty good in that department. The problem with importing them is they rely a lot on all the other changes FC made in order to operate.
Like I keep saying.
The right to instakill anything significantly weaker than him in a single blow, perhaps spilling over onto other weaklings. Generic Goblin walks up to a Lv5 fighter? Fighter has the right to declare him dead
Lets clear this up early
I don't want 200 shitpost about Martials vs Casters
Or whether or not there is a problem in the first place
Assume there is a problem and Martials need to be buffed
Casters are left alone NO ONE TOUCHES CASTERS
They do not get nerfed in any way
How do you bring martial to an EQUIVALENT LEVEL of power and ability
The problem is a fundamental double standard.
If you allow Martials to perform superhuman heroic actions as a core part of the system, it fixes everything.
But 3.PF and similar systems have an odd sense of 'Realism', where everything should be as close to reality as possible Unless it is explicitly magical. Which is fucking stupid, yet a lot of people buy into it.
Let's assume d20.
Instead of a 20-level base class for martials, we instead have a slew of Lv3, Lv5, and Lv10 base classes that all do completely different things, with capstones that say "Your character level is now your class level for the purpose of calculating the potency of your class abilities".