D&D General One thing I hate about the Sorcerer

Sorcerers suck, Warlocks too. I never liked either as a core class. Always felt like they should be a subclass.

I don't hate sorcerers, but they don't need to be a class. Sub-class at best.

R_J_K75 said:

Sorcerers suck, Warlocks too. I never liked either as a core class. Always felt like they should be a subclass.

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why? not everything should be a subclass.

Heck if anything,the Bloodline Sorcerer and Accident Sorcerer should be split

Minigiant said:

Heck if anything,the Bloodline Sorcerer and Accident Sorcerer should be split

Class	Prime Score	Source	Subclasses	Class Features
Wizard	INT	Study	School	Spellbook
Warlock	CHA	Pact	Patron	Eldritch Blast, Invocations
Sorcerer	CHA	Ancestor	Bloodline	Sorcery, Metamagic, Sorcerous Blast
Magician	CON	Event	Origin	Arcane Powers, Magic Tricks, Mana Leak

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We also should have separate classes for fighters depending on whether they bought their sword, inherited it, or won it at the card table...

Crimson Longinus said:

We also should have separate classes for fighters depending on whether they bought their sword, inherited it, or won it at the card table...

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I mean, we already have separate classes for fighters who fight with precision and skullduggery and fighters who fight with mighty thews and determined grit.

It's almost like the class divisions are and always have been arbitrary, from the very beginning!

Crimson Longinus said:

We also should have separate classes for fighters depending on whether they bought their sword, inherited it, or won it at the card table...

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Um we have that

Fighter: Study
Barbarian: Natural Talent or Inherited power
Hexblade: Pact with Sword



Again too many concepts jammed together.

1. Break off the Hexblade from the Warlock.
2. Split the Barbarian into Natural Primal Talent and inherited Family Power
3. Create new class for Warriors boosted by magic events (lycanthropy, vampirism, Frankensteins, too many potions)

Minigiant said:

Um we have that

Fighter: Study
Barbarian: Natural Talent or Inherited power
Hexblade: Pact with Sword



Again too many concepts jammed together.

1. Break off the Hexblade from the Warlock.
2. Split the Barbarian into Natural Primal Talent and inherited Family Power
3. Create new class for Warriors boosted by magic events (lycanthropy, vampirism, Frankensteins, too many potions)

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Yeah, we've been over this before, we're never gonna agree. You want seven thousand different classes for every minute variation, I want few broad and customisable classes.

Crimson Longinus said:

Yeah, we've been over this before, we're never gonna agree. You want seven thousand different classes for every minute variation, I want few broad and customisable classes.

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I understand that. And that could work.

The main thing I always say is you will lose both mechanical power and narrative flavor with fewer classes. Because you cannot balance everything with everything else in the same package.

You see it with Cleric Bard, and Warlock. Trying to hit every flavor and every build in 1 class leads to broken crap like Peace and Twilight Clerics, Eloquence Bards and Hexblade Warlocks.

Go ahead combine classes. Nothing wrong with it. But you'll have to kill many ideas if they are mashed together. There is a reason why you don't see shape shifting druids, pact swordsmen, and every flavor of priest in those "low class number" RPGs. It's nearly impossible to mechanically support many flavors in a few classes and remain any idea of balanced gameplay

That's the problem. The "Divine Sorcerer and Celestial Warlock are the same thing. Combine them." always leads to busted gameplay or barely a semblance of Celestial/Divine flavor. Or Both.

Crimson Longinus said:

Yeah, we've been over this before, we're never gonna agree. You want seven thousand different classes for every minute variation, I want few broad and customisable classes.

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Alright. What are the pros and cons of each approach?

Your few-but-broad-and-customizable path has as its main pro that it's simple (but there's a catch--more on that later). It keeps things constrained. Other benefits are a reduction of potential multiclass cheese, since you can't MC with a class you already have; efficiency of page space, and in general an economy of rules text (the amount of text required for a single class is usually far more than for multiple subclasses); and in particularly good implementations, a sort of common "language" of design.

What are the cons? Well, for one, as we've seen with 5e itself, classes tend to get flattened pretty dang hard because they can't pre-invest too much, otherwise they'd be stepping on subclass toes. This means classes tend to get stuck with really generic features, reducing the distinctive flavor of each class in most cases (Warlocks being a major exception): Action Surge, Arcane Recovery, Sneak Attack, etc. Conversely, subclasses are really damn small. As in, rarely more than 4-5 features in absolute sum, all of which must be small enough and light enough to fit within the chassis established by the overall class.

And that's where the "it's simple" has its catch: for it to really be customizable with meaningful depth, you have to smuggle back in the complexity somewhere. Otherwise, as @Minigiant just put it, you end up having to strip out the elements that make the things meaningfully distinct.

The main con that everyone and their brother brings up with having multiple classes, which you mocked with overweening hyperbole, is that having more basal classes means more stuff to learn. DMs have to learn more, players will feel they need to learn more in order to make a meaningful choice, designers need to factor in the combinatorial explosion of à la carte multiclassing, etc.

But if slightly more complexity is the price paid for having classes that are actually weighty, that actually support the flavor and gameplay-experience they're billed as offering, then I'm absolutely willing to pay it. And that's why I keep saying things like "an Eldritch Knight isn't a swordmage. It's a Fighter who moonlights as a weak Wizard." It doesn't deliver on the concept; at best, it weakly imitates it. And that's why we keep getting more "it's a spellcaster...who uses swords!" and "it's a fighter...who uses spells!" subclasses--because the fundamental, underlying desire is not satisfied by these weaksauce, inadequate echoes of the class concept folks want to see come to life.

And, to your "seven thousand different classes" hyperbole: I've already gone through and pared things down to a realistic number. I think D&D has in it somewhere between 18 and 24 distinct classes--generally falling closer to the middle of that range unless you get real particular, or start adding more obscure options like "monster" classes or similar. Not even double the number of classes present in 5e as it currently exists, at the absolute most--and possibly not even 50% more.