Tony Vargas
Legend
But they'd hardly play differently at all - especially with opposition schools being ancient history - and they'd all be high-INT bookish occultists.For me the standard in a base class is that you could have a group of six players show up for session 0, and each one wants to play a character with the same class, but each player wants to play an obviously distinctive character with their own separate shtick.
For some classes it's fairly obvious how you could do that. You could have six wizards for example each of which has their own school or theme of magic that they specialize in.
A Paladin is dedicated to a deity. So is a Cleric. They could both be sub-classes of a broader, IDK, "Faithful" class that includes cloistered priests who are pure magic-users, and ruthless inquisitors and violent zealots and so forth.There is a fix here, but it's a radical one. I think you have to pull back from your preconceptions and ask if something like Paladin is a subclass of some base class, what base class is it really a specific implementation of.
You could compose a whole party of such sub-classes and cover all the traditional bases.