Min/Max Boards

To add my 2cents, before 3e magic may be pretty powerful, but had pretty severe drawbacks. Wanna craft your own stuff? Be ready to see your ability scores reduced.

Haste costed you years of life.

No concentration checks, a single point of damage was enough to disrupt your spellcasting, and you were gonna get disrupted whitout a meat shield because most spells weren't instant.

One I'm actually sort of surprised nobody has brought up (and one which may generate some backlash)

The player base, by and large, does not want a perfectly balanced game. 

3.5 was unbalanced; 3.5 was also very successful.  4e fixed most of the balance issues--and was not nearly as successful.

It doesn't actually matter who attacked whom first.

My point was that if the PC-lead goblins wiped out the dwarves, Olescamo would consider the PCs to be "monsters" regardless of how laudable the goblins would consider their actions.

But if the PC-lead dwarves wiped out the goblins, everything would be ok because the Good-aligned team won. 

The fact is, any setting that encourages killing sentient beings, presents genocide as an acceptable solution, and mechanically rewards combat and pillaging cannot be based on the Renaissance ideals of Human(-oid)ism and Enlightenment. 

We have people today who can "punch away death".  They're called doctors.  I used the word "punch" because you seem to think that that's all mundane warriors can do.

BUt what does a doctor do?  It heals, with mundane means.  Heals things that normally would be a ridiculous notion to be healed....without magic.  Or more literally, there's actually therapies that involve trauma of different sorts to heal.  Chiropractors, electro-shock therapy, accupuncture, massage, etc.  Open your mind to possibilities, and you'll see a number of "magical" things that can be achieved through mundane means.

Let me put it this way.  Nikola Tesla once claimed he could split the earth in two with nothing more than a few well-timed explosions.  He actually did use the earth as a conductor to create a 130' lightning bolt.  The man was not magical, but he was a genius.  There's a man who can survive in freezing conditions easily and actually climbed Mount Everest wearing nothing but sandals and bike shorts.  There are people who can channel energy through their hands, making them warm to the touch....burning to the touch, actually, and I'm not talking about myths of the Tibetan Monks or something, this is actually documented.  And in real life?  We are level 6 at most, most of us are level 2 or 3 by mid adulthood.  So just imagine what things a true high-level person would be able to do in real life.

False, as established MUCH earlier in the thread.

Common infantry have no better armor than leather and if they were lucky, chain.

However, firearms require less physical ability and training to load and fire rapidly than crossbows do, especially once cartridges were invented. The majority of any army is common infantry. Why outfit your entire army with weapons that work best against maybe 10% of the enemy army?

Ummm... no. This thread has gone to great lengths to establish the strenghts and weaknesses of early firearms. Being flat-out better was not one of them. In fact, Crossbows were probably better for a long time - more accurate, greater effective range, same or similar penetration.

I disagree here, too. With those superheroes running about it's quite simple to make a firearm that's not portable by a regular human, but quite portable for a superhuman hero.