Rejakor: You may be interested on this then. It basically allows the fighter to pick and use "strategies", wich range from hiting stuff hard, recruiting powerfull minions, making nearby people scared, following teleports and a bunch of other stuff. Never completed tough.
Meh it looks alright but doesn't really have a coherent flavour and the VP system is a bit.. wonky. I get the general idea, you want to give the fighter VPs for fighting, but why not just give him some at the start of every fight that has a chance of hurting him (CR-2 or better)? Or give him a bunch to use at the start of the day and he gets more by winning rolls(special attack actions), being in combat, taking damage, and dealing damage? It's a bit more flavourful but you end up with fighters trying to do stuff for metagame reasons (i'll get 10 VPs!) rather than in-game reasons, which leads to stupid things like ignoring the casters getting eaten in order to take a meaningless random overturned cart by killing the kobold standing on it.
Also, that fighter still gets 1hitKO'd by most spells that don't target hp.
And he has to spend feats on power attack or size categories or multiclass for precision damage in order to do 'damage people care about'. I've seen nearly all the fighter fixes. The one that uses to-hit as a mechanic. The one that uses Gambits. BWL's Art of War fighter. Even the Tome fighter is meh. People just DO NOT KNOW what a fighter is or does.
Well, looking at the historic things, my take on the fighter is this;
Primary: The Goddamned Fighter is Hard To Stop. Conan ducks the sorcerer's lotus powder. Hercules shrugs off deific curses and giant snakes. Rasputin gets shot, stabbed, burned, and poisoned. Despite enduring things that
any amount of lesser men would have
instantly died from, they somehow get out of it, live, and turn the tables. That's the Goddamned Fighter right there.
Secondary: Has cool goddamn toys. Thor has a flying chariot, immortal goats, a hammer that is a lightning bolt, a belt and gloves of strength, various doodads in his adventures, and a pile of golden super-apples that give him superpowers. 'Yeah, but DnD has magic items' I hear you say! Yeah, but while wizards use their powers to scry through crystal balls and are constantly making magic items that they then use to put people to sleep or take their hearts or whatever, MYTHOLOGICAL FIGHTERS SPECIFICALLY GET LARGE PARTS OF THEIR ABILITIES THROUGH MAGICAL DEVICES. And it makes a REALLY great excuse for all the gygax-worshiping weapon-focus loving DMs out there to keep thinking in their black little hearts that Fighters are still just Mundane Real Fighting Men Who Are Realistic if some/lots of their more esoteric powers come from magical items, plus, it makes a lot more sense to idiots who don't understand that Not All Monks Are The Same Monk if different fighters have different abilities if their abilities come from stuff they carry instead of stuff they can just
do. You could totally have a list of various effects and then you'd roll on a table to see what the item was called and what it looks like, ... gurps?... I want to say rolemaster... style!
Secondary: Can Do Stuff. Power-eating, power-baking, power-lifting, power-sleeping! The Goddamned Fighter can do stuff normal people can do, but he does it AWESOME. He doesn't craft mundane swords for peasants, he goes off and wraps himself in bull-hide under a waterfall for 2 years and then makes a sword that can ONLY BE USED TO SLAY GODS. Why? BECAUSE HE'S THE GODDAMN FIGHTER. He CAN leap that chasm that no-one else can. He DOES know how to block that sword. Maybe he's half-god. Maybe he studied under malayan martial artists. Maybe he's been in the military for 15 years. Maybe he's a super gladiator. Maybe he's a peasant farm boy with a natural talent and more luck than a god of luck and ravens. I DON'T KNOW. The point is that he can, and has, in mythology and fiction, and WILL, do these things. Most of these things are skills. So he needs to be able to do, at least, martial lore stuff, forging stuff, physical stuff, and leading stuff. Not every fighter. Not all at once. But the Fighter class needs to support those archetypes.
Tertiary: And of course, like EVERY OTHER DND CHARACTER, a fighter needs to be able to affect combat! He does so by soaking damage/spells/effects through being goddamn obdurium, and he does so by MAIMING PEOPLE. Now, as tests have shown, maiming isn't the most effective way to affect the battlefield, so, perhaps, some options to affect things in ways other than hp damage would be a great addition to the Goddamned Fighter. Why yes, I agree, that would be a great idea! Thanks for bringing it up!
Also veekie, I really have absolutely no idea what you're arguing. Complex decisions at the table? What? How are my suggestions changing anything at the table? Where did I advocate giving the fighter floating feats?
Oh, and, your 'styles' idea? Yeah, that's been tried. When it wasn't just stupidly underpowered (worse than vanilla fighter), it was, again, BORING AND WEAK. Being able to move and full attack is not a goddamn t3 class ability, people! Otherwise the barbarian would be t3! Whirlwind attack is not a t3 ability! Otherwise the dervish would be a +2 PrC and fighter/dervishes would be worth a damn!
Also, I don't really understand why 'hard to kill' isn't a central concept. Or for that matter how wizards have a central concept, since their entire class is 'pick some wildly varying stuff off this list!'.