To put this succinctly, part of what I believe is the problem with melee is that, well...
Casters can dish out damage far more efficiently, on top of everything else that they can do.
Because, really, when you are going for really high damage as a mundane character, you have, what, two or three distinct builds that are actually worth it? While a caster just gets damage handed to them on a silver platter, despite the fact that they don't actually use it, using the far superior SoDs or SoSs.
My proposed change is to change spells (and other "I roll a massive number of dice, lookit me" methods of damage) onto the Cure/Inflict metric, of yd8+x damage, to move them more on line with weapon damage.
Then, I'ma gonna nerf the damage that Power Attack deals.
"What?!?" you all shout at the screen, plainly perplexed that I would do that kind of thing.
Yep, and on top of that, I'm going to change how HP works (separate change; needless to say that it will pretty much cut HP by 2/3s, so that, even with lower damage rates, it's still less of a damage slog.)
Also, as a semi-connected change, I'm going to remove ALL of the special attack options (grappling and such) from the game, and I'm going to make them into Unarmed weapons (Grapple is 2-handed, Feint is light, and so on), with Improved <Foo> boosting them in a scaling manner, much like Superior Unarmed Strike.
Thoughts?
