Crazy Jerome
First Post
What for you is the optimum mix of classes, roughly divided up as follows:
I'm not sure what my answer is. Reason I'm asking is that is seems to me there is this tension with classes between providing variety for what people want to do versus not dividing up niches too much.
If you have 8 classes, perhaps Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard, Bard, Druid, Paladin, Ranger (with spells), and only two of them have no magic at all, then that's great for letting Fighters and Rogues have a wide range of stuff, but not so hot if you want a party that is not heavily magical. If nothing else, it means that even with a group of 4 players and half and half mix, the players that prefer magical characters get a wider range of choices. With multiclassing it gets even worse--you've got one non-magical option, fighter/rogue.
OTOH, say you drop spells from the Ranger, and replace the Bard with the Barbarian. Now you've got a closer to even mix, though multiclassing still favors "the character has some magic." But you run into the issue of parsing out a rather small set of non-magical abilities over a wider range.
Those are just examples to illustrate what I mean. Is there a way to finesse this issue, or is this inherent tension something that has to be threaded?
- Not magical in any way (examples Fighter, Rogue)
- Definitely magical (examples Wizard, Cleric)
- Partially magical or pseudo magical (examples Paladin, Monk)
I'm not sure what my answer is. Reason I'm asking is that is seems to me there is this tension with classes between providing variety for what people want to do versus not dividing up niches too much.
If you have 8 classes, perhaps Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard, Bard, Druid, Paladin, Ranger (with spells), and only two of them have no magic at all, then that's great for letting Fighters and Rogues have a wide range of stuff, but not so hot if you want a party that is not heavily magical. If nothing else, it means that even with a group of 4 players and half and half mix, the players that prefer magical characters get a wider range of choices. With multiclassing it gets even worse--you've got one non-magical option, fighter/rogue.
OTOH, say you drop spells from the Ranger, and replace the Bard with the Barbarian. Now you've got a closer to even mix, though multiclassing still favors "the character has some magic." But you run into the issue of parsing out a rather small set of non-magical abilities over a wider range.
Those are just examples to illustrate what I mean. Is there a way to finesse this issue, or is this inherent tension something that has to be threaded?