...
Well, you get the idea. To get casters in the same boat as everyone else, they'd need the same depth of resources.
A D&D caster has:
Time - What can you do with your actions in and out of combat, out of combat spells and skills go here
Health
Casting Resource
Wealth
A D&D Fighter/Monk/whatever has:
Time - What can you do with your actions in and out of combat, feats and other permanent abilities go here
Health
Wealth
...
If a character (class, build, whatever) doesn't have some cool special thing it can do, then it's crap. There's nothing that differentiates it, and it doesn't have anything awesome.
I certainly think there should be abilities that fill that void that are, at least in flavor, non-magical ... i.e., "mundane" in nature. Even if their mechanics are not. I'm thinking of Aragorns or Roland Deschains or Conans or whatever.
I also happen to think that such things are, w/ some effort, buildable in D&D. I think it can be a bit challenging, in part for the issues w/ feats described above, but I think it's doable. I also think building a powerful caster is challenging, too, though -- the build is really easy (Wizard 20, Druid 20), but picking the right spells, wildshape forms, etc. is quite hard. We just have awesome handbooks to that effect.
So, I totally agree w/ Veekie, I guess, I just think there should be mundanely flavored options for those character resources. I kind of don't really care what their mechanics are -- I played a character who was a master woodsman who was mostly so b/c he was a Binder and Divine Anima Mage w/ Ranger spells.
For what it's worth, and not to hijack the thread too much (though it seems to have strayed a bit), maybe it could be nice to just present a set of solid melee builds, whether "mundane" or not. We talked about this a bit earlier in this thread, and I think it's really the sort of thing a thread like this can provide. Especially since this board is filled w/ all the awesome tricks casters can do (and I know, there are more of them), it's nice to collect a few solid things you can bring to the table if you want to smack the hell out of things. Back on the WotC boards there was a plague of gish handbooks, which I usually didn't find terribly helpful: sure I have a great BAB and lots of caster levels, now what do I do w/ those again?
Sorry, I'm rambling ...