In the D&D discourse I've observed it is often supposed that in 5th Edition, spellcasters are more powerful than non-spellcasters (henceforth referred to as martials). Whether or not you agree with that doesn't matter, this is mostly just an exercise in categorization of game styles. Examining the way that this divide is treated and/or solved is valuable, even if it doesn't, so let's just pretend it does.
If you're not familiar with the argument I'm discussing, the very very basic idea is just that people feel like spellcasters do a lot more in comparison to martial characters, and often there's a lot of hay being made about whether or not that's true and how to fix it. Generally there's this worry that martial characters being balanced according to spellcasters will break realism in some way, which is what I'm thinking about now.
Often a lot of people's proposed solution to the divide includes giving martials more impressive stuff to do, because a big area of dissatisfaction is that their higher level abilities are more conservative in comparison to spellcasters' toys. A level 20 fighter gets 4 attacks, lots of HP, and the ability to shrug off a few effects, while wizards get the ability to summon meteors, teleport across the world, and travel between dimensions. Jealously eyeing the wizard's lunch, some people feel that your 20th level fighter should be endowed with Herculean, mythological strength. They should be able to cover great distances with a single bound, and cut through steel, and use your favorite daily ability from 4th edition, yada yada, blah blah blah.
When this idea is brought up, other people get upset because they want what the martial classes can do to feel more or less plausible for a normal human being to achieve, and then everyone fights about what realism means and why we should/shouldn't care about it in our games. I think a good overview of the different desires folks have for martials can be found rather succinctly here, in the TV Tropes article on Charles Atlas Superpowers. You can read through the article if you'd like, but I'll do my best to summarize the parts that I consider essential to the discussion here.
The Part of the Article in Which I Paraphrase TV Tropes at You
So, Charles Atlas Superpowers are superpowers that one gets through doing a lot of training. In the classical example, there's basically nothing magical about them at all, they're just the result of someone pushing human capabilities to their absolute physical limit through dedicated training. I believe the Ur-example of this is Batman and all of the nonsense we're told he can pull off by being crazy prepared, or from the techniques he learned training with monks, so on and so forth. The article describes the trope as having several gradients to it though, essentially splitting this trope into two. From the article itself:
Or, to put it a different way, there are essentially two different variations on this trope. The first, "Don't-Call-Them-Superpowers", is the western version and has the character performing feats that are not strictly realistic, but at least seem plausible enough...The second, "Skill-Trumps-Physics", has the character performing feats that are out-and-out impossible in real life, with an explanation not attributed to any Applied Phlebotinum but instead because "they are just that damn good".
Hey, look at that, we've got our two groups! Even better, 3rd Edition D&D is directly sighted as having a fair heaping of this trope, especially on the more fantastical side of things. I wasn't around for that one so I'll just have to take their word for it. Another quote that I find quite instructive, from later in the same paragraph:
The line between the variations can be messy and subjective, but as a brief example: a climber who can consistently scale a rock wall faster than the world-record holders would be ["Don't-Call-Them-Superpowers"], a climber who can scale a sandstorm would be ["Skill-Trumps-Physics"], and someone who can climb a slick glass skyscraper would be somewhere in between.
Whether you want Charles Atlas Superpowers at all in your game, and to what degree you'd like them, is something that's highly variable. Some people are going to be okay with the mundane players in the party basically being humans of average capability, while others are going to want their martial characters to be highly competent, but still within the ballpark of plausible human achievement. Some people, as mentioned, want their martials to be Hercules. I think these are all very acceptable positions to hold, and it sounds like they're going to be suited to different styles of gameplay more often than not. I'm partial to the middle of this scale, at least because it really gets my goat when someone can level a city block and the only explanation as to why is "he's a really good warrior," at least in the context of the world I'm trying to construct.
I wrote this post because I suspect if we have some slightly more sophisticated language we can sidestep more of those disagreements about realism and the like, I thought this was a suitable frame to examine things within. Often I see people express surprise at folks who argue against the far end of this scale. Sometimes they feel the need to point out the fairly obvious fact that D&D is already highly unrealistic to these folks, without considering that there are degrees to this. I like cool powers and I like PCs being able to do incredible things, but even so, sometimes something not being magic just feels implausible. If you don't mind that, more power to you! I can totally imagine a game where I wouldn't care in the slightest. More often than not though, that's not the game I'm playing.
Addendum: Categorizing the Classes
Let's take a look at 5e's classes and see if we can categorize them as "Don't-Call-Them-Superpowers" or "Skill-Trumps-Physics".
Out of the running right away, we have the pure spellcasting classes, which means Wizard, Warlock, Sorcerer, Druid, Cleric, and Bard are straight up magicians. Artificers, Paladins, and Rangers are out too, on account of their half caster status. That leaves us with four remaining classes, the pure martial characters: Barbarians, Fighters, Monks, and Rogues.
Now with these four classes things get a little weird as to where they fall on the scale. I'm fairly certain two have actual superpowers. The Barbarian's base class doesn't do a whole lot of magical crap, so they could qualify as a member of the Charles Atlas club in theory, but a whopping 7 out of 9 of their subclasses have very clear magical abilities, and the two that don't are widely considered to be the worst subclasses the Barbarian has to offer. In practice, you will never meet a nonmagical barbarian. Monks are the other culprit, and let's be honest, they're basically just wizards who went to the Jujutsu Kaisen school of spellcraft. If you squint you could maybe suggest that Drunken Master and Open Hand are mundane, but if the class isn't supernatural, all of its abilities are at the far, far end of "Skill-Trumps-Physics." This seems like the right place to stick both of these classes to me, since they could trend more or less magical depending on player choice, and I'm inclined to just take the average. Anecdotally, I think this is also a good place to stick their capabilities since I've heard folks who prefer a bit more mundane martial classes express disdain for the pseudo-magical powers they possess.
That leaves us with 2 character classes remaining, the Fighter and the Rogue. I'm honestly a little surprised that these are the only two we can plausibly call normal or low-atlas, I guess I never realized how limited the selection of nonmagical guys is in 5th edition. Even amongst these two classes, there's a fair amount of supernatural dickery happening in the subclasses; 3 of the rogue's 9 options, and 5 of the fighter's 10 are magical. Without those in the mix, the high level rogues and fighters can both do some crazy stuff, but I think it's safe to say they're still mostly normal guys, so we're going to throw them in the "Don't-Call-Them-Superpowers" bin. Poor, lonely fellas.
Addendum 2: An Alternative Approach
Draw Steel, MCDM's flagship roleplaying game, is not particularly concerned with realism or simulation, it's a very game-y game. Even still, I appreciate it's approach to this, it feels pretty in line with what I'm looking for. If we were to categorize Draw Steel's classes like 5e's we'd find pretty quickly that there are very few options you can consider non-magical (or non-supernatural, I guess, since psionics are a distinct thing from magic which throws things off). In fact, I think there's only one, and that's the Tactician, which is essentially our Fighter rep. Everything else, the Fury, the Shadow, and the Null (vaguely analogous to the Barbarian, Rogue, and Monk), all have some pretty explicitly magical stuff going on. The Fury can make portals to the primordial chaos, the Shadow is basically nightcrawler, the Null is very explicitly a psychic. Amongst all of the very supernatural shenanigans, I think the Tactician is really the perfect sort of mundane character, since their abilities don't really have to get all that weird. They're a support oriented class, a high degree of their abilities are focused on directing their allies to strike or reposition. This means the Tactician effectively scales with the rest of the party's crazy magic by using the rest of their party as weapons. I like it, something about it feels very Captain America to me, where their strength is focused on directing their teammates to higher highs. A good way to have your cake and eat it too.
