[MENTION=6802951]Cap'n Kobold[/MENTION] I've discussed this topic with you before, and from what I recall we have very different views about D&D and we agreed to disagree. You embrace the "empty calorie" "agnostically informative" subclass design / class-as-mechanics-not-identity philosophy. OTOH, I embrace the "recognizable archetype" subclass design / class-as-an-identity philosophy. So, with both of us understanding our fundamental division being what it is and unlikely to change...
Yep. I was commenting on the way you were phrasing your questions and justifications: You were coming across as wanting additional fighter subclasses simply because other classes had more, which I do not believe was your intent.
Either I've been unclear or you've misunderstood. The reason I think the "CORE FOUR" classes all merit more subclasses is because those classes – cleric, fighter, rogue, and wizard – encompass the greatest breadth of concepts. There are many types of wizard, fighter, etc. Whereas paladin, ranger, monk, and so forth encompass a narrower band of concepts due to specific flavor in those classes. It's absolutely NOT numbers for the sake of blind numerical symmetry.
I do not follow that logic:
I understand that the iconic core 4 encompass the greatest breadth of concepts.
I do not understand why that means that they must have more subclasses, particularly since of those 4, only the Rogue's subclasses are really tied in to the narrative concept.
Number of subclasses =/= number of possible concepts. You can have one subclass embodying a single concept, and another subclass that can embody almost any possible concept.
Players can provide concepts just fine.
Subclasses are only necessary for mechanistic differentiation.
A samurai concept for example can quite easily be expressed with a Champion: Noble background, picking Mounted Combat feat and roleplayed a certain way by the player for example.
A samurai subclass is only necessary if the 'Samurai' concept requires actual samurai-specific rules and abilities.
Furthermore, the existence of an actual samurai subclass can put a crimp on the breadth of possible concepts, particularly for newer players, who may think that they need to have the samurai subclass to play a samurai narrative concept.
What IS important to me is the radically different priority the designers gave to "many subclasses for clerics & wizards." For example, I could easily imagine a wizard with just 3 subclasses (apologies for the rudimentary names): Blaster, Controller, and Scholar. That differentiates three major ways wizards are played mechanically.
Yep. Then the bonuses with specific spell schools could be a separate decision within the class, similar to the fighting style choice in the Fighter.
That would be a valid way that the wizard class could have been designed. It wasn't the one that was actually used - possibly because there is some correlation in spell schools and function, and the role of the wizard could simply be expressed by the player by their choice of spells instead. But it would still have worked.
Maybe that's another place where we differ. See, I find the distinction between Sorcerer and Wizard really weak because it's mainly mechanistic in nature.
That is pretty much what I was meaning: they both cover the "primary arcane spellcaster" concept, with the difference being the mechanics used to express that. The wizard is the equivalent of the champion in that sense: Much better at the basics of the role, while the battlemaster and sorcerer have the similarities of secondary resources, much higher on-demand nova potential at the expense of overall endurance and round-by-round flexibility. Both are capable of very similar concepts: the difference being in the nitty-gritty mechanics of the game.
They could do the same for the fighter's fighting styles, for example, turning "Great Weapon Fighter" into a subclass and attaching additional flavor to it, making them sound like Gregor Clegane or The Hound from GoT. Why I think they didn't do that, as opposed to the spell schools where they did do that, is because you can more easily think of Great Weapon Fighters who don't fit the mold of The Hound...because the fighter is based in reality more, or at least something we can relate to more. That's why fighting styles don't make good sub-classes – because they are just expressions of a specialization/technique, rather than an expression of a character.
Precisely: Just like the PHB Cleric and Wizard subclasses: Which deity a cleric worships, and what they are like is more important to narrative concept than the mechanistic choice of which domain they picked: A cleric of the Silver Flame is narratively very different from one of the Mockery for example even if both picked the War domain.
You like how the PHB Fighter subclasses aren't limited in scope to specific concepts.
What about other classes in the PHB? Do you like how the Rogue subclasses are more limited in scope? Do you feel there's a design mandate for some classes to have subclasses based upon specialization/technique whereas others are based on a more focused narrative concept? If so, which classes fit on which side of the equation and why?
I don't feel that the Rogue subclasses are too limited in scope: I can happily play an Assassin narrative concept using the Theif subclass for example: the name is just a title designating a particular package of special abilities and mechanics. I don't think that any specific class has a requirement for more narrative subclasses than any other. In fact I think that a class can have some very broad-concept subclasses and some more specific ones: such as the Fighter when you take into account the UA subclasses as well as the PHB ones.
I'm happy to stick with whatever works rather than worrying about symmetry or believing that number of subclasses indicates designer priorities. To my mind, the current setup in terms of subclass design works fine.
This Fighter class may have other design or balance issues, but I do not think that giving it more tightly-focused subclasses is a requirement for fixing them.
