AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Honestly?!?
Get rid of the Fighter as an archetype. "Fighter" is a first level title. Its little better than Grunt, Peon, Thug or Girl with Sword. Eventually the Fighter grows up and actually makes something of herself. THAT is the class the character belongs to.
Yeah, that's a fine suggestion. In HoML there is actually (currently at least) no class which is called 'Fighter', per-se. However it is somewhat hard to do. Maybe its just that the idea of that class is etched deeply into the DNA of D&D-likes, but it does afford a lot of flexibility to players in terms of imagining their character's details. OD&D, with its 'big 4' (especially the Fighting Man and the Magic User) certainly was built around that concept at first. Admittedly the Cleric and the Thief are depicted somewhat more narrowly, so we can see things immediately starting moving in that direction. Still, it is tough with the fighter, especially since it often gets burdened with the "mundane sword-swinger" baggage. Once you make it that limited, then its hard to sub-divide it and get anything useful.
Anyway, HoML doesn't have THAT problem (neither does 4e). However I still find it hard to split fighters up. Is 'Knight' a class? If so, how does it differ specifically from 'Samurai' or 100 other such concepts. What class do you put "hard boiled mercenary" into? Is that a class? If so how do you mix it in together with culture-specific classes like Knight and Samurai? Or should the factoring be along some different lines? 'Noble Warrior', 'Common Warrior', 'Peasant Champion', 'Buccaneer', 'Thug', ....?
Its a HUGE can o' worms as soon as you open it! Rogue runs into equal issues, and adjudicating the dividing line between them when the criteria seems to be more 'story origin and background' vs actual mechanics (cause lets face it, a Knight and a Mercenary don't seem to really be mechanically very distinct) is VERY arbitrary and tricky.
At one point I had experimented with giving each character an 'archetype', basically a generalization of OD&D's 'big 4' (warrior, mystic, and trickster IIRC). It is probably workable, similar to the 2e 'class family' concept, but I also liked source/role too much and having a 3rd dimension was a bridge too far. Anyway, its not really clear where each class goes, even in that high-level of a breakdown, nor which things are 'archetypal' and which should be stuck firmly to 'class'. The end result felt like 4e with 3 classes and a lot of builds.