pukunui
Legend
Hey that's pretty cool. Quite a bit of useful info there ...mearls said:One of the nice things about the roles is that they let you play around with power sources without messing up the basic structure of the game. You can totally do a no magic game with the PH by sticking to the fighter, rogue, warlord, and ranger. You wouldn't have a controller, but it is possible to create a martial one.
You can also roll things back another step and do some crazy stuff with the structure of the classes. Since many of the elements of character progression are unified, you could run classless D&D by allowing players to select maneuvers and spells from any class they want, mingling the two together, or start everyone with access to all heroic abilities and grant access to divine and arcane via feats.
The really nice thing is that this structure allows you to better depict many classic D&D settings and fantasy worlds. You can run pre-War of the Lance adventures in Dragonlance without clerics. You could run Conan with just the heroic classes for PCs and NPC spellcasters as villains and allies.
The one stumbling block is that the game expects fighters to wear heavy armor, but you could get around that by building a simple house rule (a fighter in light armor gets a flat bonus to AC to make up the gap).
1) Rangers won't have spells
2) 4e rules are super customizable
a) it will be easy to increase or decrease magic use in a campaign (eg. high-, low-, no-magic campaigns now possible with the core rules)
b) it will easy to customize classes (eg. just replace fighter's heavy armor dependency with flat AC bonus)
3) An adventuring party without a "healer" is a viable option (you can in the Dragonlance setting during the time when there were no magic-using clerics)
4e is more and more shaping up to be my kind of game! Even the anti-4e people should be getting a little excited by this ... it sounds like 4e will be easy for them to plunder and/or house rule to their heart's content.
@ the OP: you commented on the lack of non-adventuring skills. Although no one at WotC has said anything more than Craft and Profession are gone, that doesn't mean there won't be something to fill the gap. We know there's going to be a social encounter system. It's quite possible there will be some sort of craft/profession/way to earn money thing as well ... it's just that it may not be a "skill". Maybe it's like how there are now spells and rituals. Perhaps there are also skills and something else ... you can do crafting and make money but you don't need a skill, you do it in some other way.