D&D 5E Thoughts on Mearls' Comments on Fighter Subclasses Lacking Identity

[Quickleaf]

Indeed. Oddly enough, 4e did rogues subclasses better. It uses mechanical and flavor distinctions.

<snip>

But 5e, you're a thief, assassin, or a magic trickster. My "doctor who was a gymnast back in fantasy medical school".... yeah, he's a thief now. Student loans must have been bad. Dr Cool is stealing. All the honor is a lie, now.

While your example a liiiitle niche, I wholeheartedly agree. I feel the rogue, like the fighter, deserved a few more sub-classes. The detective/thief-taker & the acrobat/gentleman rogue/swashbuckler would have been welcome additions and should be in the game darn it!

A little from column A and a little from column B.

If you do all mechanical, you can do all the types of fighters but you do some of them very poorly and almost none of the great.
If you do all flavor, you can do any archetype you choose very well but you even up excluding a lot of them and forcing groups to wait or attempt to make there own with various degrees of success.

Yeah, it is a balancing act. The PHB fighter sub-classes are pretty much all mechanical. Sure, they can model many different types, in theory, but it models some of them very poorly and almost none of them great. Well said.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Seems to me, the issue of Fighter flavor was meant to be brought about the same way it was in 3E-- by the feats you selected.

The extra feats you got as a Fighter were the "sub-class" slots that you took an ability in that helped identify the type of warrior you were and thus pushed you down the road towards the "flavor" of your class. If you wanted to be a "Knight", you took the Heavy Armor feats and/or the Mounted Combat feat, and/or the Sentinel feat and got the abilities that focused you in that direction. If you wanted to be a Duelist, you took the feats that boosted that. So on and so forth.

Would it have been better to take all these abilities you potentially got from feats and instead baked them into specific flavorful "sub-classes" of the Fighter (and then slathered on a heap of "story" as to what the sub-class was?) Maybe. Maybe not. As we've seen, some would love to have the story of the particular collection of abilities you got hammered out and set down. Others would find that restricting, probably arguing "Why am I stuck playing a "Cavalier" if I want to be good at fighting from horseback? What if I'm playing a Valenar Elf from Eberron?" (for example).

This is why I still believe this probably belongs in UA or EN5IDER territory (if you hope to actually see it get done). Take the battlemaster, select the specific fighter style, maneuvers, and feats, and then "package" them as Thematic Sub-Classes. If you want to go as far as perhaps also taking away maybe one maneuver or one superiority die and exchange it for another wholey new ability or two created to help tie the Thematic Sub-Class together (perhaps boosting the abilities gained from Mounted Combat feat for "Cavaliers" for example), then do so. Or if you need to create a few more feats to help build specific flavors of fighter, then you do that too.

But in the end... there's really no reason why you shouldn't be able to build the mechanics of any particular style of warrior using the fighting style, maneuver, and feat systems. Then you just need to layer your background and story on top of it.

 

[Corpsetaker]

I believe subclass for a fighter was a mistake.

What they should have done was build a fighter chassis and then let you pick the abilities you wanted to create a fighter. Very much like one of those build-a-teddy workshops, or build-a-fighter.

They went with the universal "every class has a subclass" route and it really didn't work because subclasses aren't really going to fit with everything.

 

[Minigiant]

While your example a liiiitle niche,

Well a doctor would know more about anatomy and where to hit as a thief, assassin, acrobat, spy, gang member, or detective?

To be fair, I created my doctor rogue only because the DM was a Star Trek fan and the fighter/parthyleader's name was James. I made "super gymnast McCoy who stabs people" in a savvy way to keep the DM from screwing with my PC.

 

[Wik]

I snipped out your comment about the good necromancer because it's off-topic, but I totally agree.


Rogues can exist in the real world.

According to your logic, they should receive a similar sub-class treatment to fighters: that is, rogue sub-classes should be exclusively mechanical distinctions.

Obviously, thief, assassin, and arcane trickster are not purely mechanical distinctions. And there haven't been many complaints that I've heard about rogue sub-classes in-person or online.

Hence, I refute your logic

I knew rogues were going to come up when I mentioned this.

HOWEVER... they don't really exist, not as presented in D&D. Indiana Jones, master thieves, super spies... they're as much fantasy as, say, Gandalf.

 

[Manbearcat]

The Fighter distinction (leaving aside Eldritch Knight, which I have no problem with) between Champion & Battle Master is a purely mechanical one.

<snip>

If the Champion text felt anemic and directionless to you, compared to the Thief, that's because it is!

So I guess the question that leaves me with: Is there something UNIQUE about Fighters that mandates their sub-class design to being strictly mechanical?

Sounds like some folks are arguing "Yes, because there are so many possible types of fighters, we can't have thematic sub-classes for them all! But we can have thematic sub-classes for all wizards types, no problem."

To which I say: Who-the-what??

Quite true all. There is so much design-space (and intuitive at that) for the Fighter. Especially when you consider the prospects for robust, thematic (and mechanical) diversity in just the below 4 potential Fighter Subclasses:

Folk-hero
Gladiator
Marauder
Vanguard

 

[Quickleaf]

I knew rogues were going to come up when I mentioned this.

HOWEVER... they don't really exist, not as presented in D&D. Indiana Jones, master thieves, super spies... they're as much fantasy as, say, Gandalf.

Baloney

5e Fighters can heal their wounds with sheer force of will & at high levels can land 6-10 blows in 6 seconds wielding a great sword and plate armor!

What real world warrior are you using as your basis?

 

[Tony Vargas]

What they should have done was build a fighter chassis and then let you pick the abilities you wanted to create a fighter. Very much like one of those build-a-teddy workshops, or build-a-fighter. .

You mean they should have cloned the 3.5 fighter. It was an excellent design in some ways, elegant, even.

5e Fighters can heal their wounds with sheer force of will

Second Wind is no more healing wounds than resting an hour and spending HD is. Humans don't regenerate like trolls. Hps in D&D are a lot more abstract than 1hp=so much tissue damage.

& at high levels can land 6-10 blows in 6 seconds wielding a great sword and plate armor!

Six seconds is a long time when people are trying to kill you in melee. Fights you see on TV and in the movies are choreographed, stuntpeople take wide back-swings and slow it down so the audience can see what's going on, and cuts and dialogue extend the action scene. It's a 'reality isn't real' thing. Real fights tend to be real short. For most characters, a single D&D attack represents an exchange of blows. A very high level, action-surging fighter might, indeed, get down to 1 blow/attack, but that still doesn't make him superhumanly fast by realistic standards, just very skillful, and remarkably lucky that his weapon doesn't get stuck in someone/thing.

Of course, I have no problem with D&D being more in synch with the unreal reality of cinema. More fun that way.

What real world warrior are you using as your basis?

Almost any, really.

But, I really don't mind if fighters and/or rogues aren't well-represented IRL - certainly no other D&D class is, why should they be any different?

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] Haha, you certainly took my point and ran with it...

I was pointing out the double-standard of design between fighter sub-classes and rogue sub-classes in terms of theme/flavor/narrative resonance.

I used fighter and rogue as a point of comparison because they are the most "mundane" and traditionally "magic-less" classes in D&D.

My point was to illustrate there is no compelling reason to give rogues thematically differentiated sub-classes, while giving fighters strictly mechanically differentiated sub-classes.

That was the entirety of my point. Full stop.

...

I would argue that the 4 CLASSIC CORE D&D classes - fighter, rogue, wizard, cleric - should have more sub-classes than the other classes because they are (a) iconic, (b) have had more time to foster variants, and (c) anecdotally seem to still be the most frequently played. This argument is already halfway carried by the PHB which presents 7 sub-classes for cleric & 8 sub-classes for wizard. We could ask: Why did fighters and rogues get the short end of the stick compared to their magical CLASSIC CORE class brethren?

 

[Hussar]

What I don't want is pure class identification based on an ability. I don't want to be told I'm not a Knight unless I have ability X.

What Mearls should have done was have the Fighter class and then have the Ranger, Paladin, Barbarian, Eldritch Knight, and Battlemaster be the subclasses. If he wanted more flavour.

Why should we use a largely classless sub system for fighters but not for any other class? It's not like there are other archetypes that don't fit well into other classes.

The reason a Knight has ability X is because we're playing a class system where concepts are tied into fairly loose conceptual bundles. The 3e fighter with its feats was an attempt to have it both ways - a classless class built through feats. Only problem was, in play, the same half dozen feats or so almost always got chosen. Because of the way the game works, 99% of the feats went by the wayside in favour of a few. And, like a lot of point style based chargen systems, we wound up with cookie cutter characters with little or no variation.

It's all very well and good to point to all the choices, but, if no one actually uses most of the choices, then most of those choices don't really matter.