"Pure martials" - barbarian, fighter, rogue, warlord
"Kind of pure martial but with alternate magic" - monk
"Hybrid martial/casters" - paladin, ranger, spellblade (arcane "half-caster")
"Semi-Vancian casters" - cleric, druid, wizard
"Alternate casters" - artificer, bard, shaman [*], sorcerer, warlock
"Psionic classes" - psion and psychic warrior
At the back of the book, in a set of appendices, a fighter-y class for people who don't want their fighters to have fancy mechanical levers to pull, and simpler spellcasters.
[*] Ideally, evocative of 3.X spirit shaman, 4e shaman, or WoW shaman, probably with a different name, but the general idea being one who treats with local spirits, compared to the cosmic entities that clerics and warlocks deal with or the more abstract forces that D&D druids come across as drawing from.
The primary sub-systems for special abilities:
- combat exploits, which use points (I like the term stamina; I think ENworld's "level up" game does this and calls their points exertion);
- spells, which use spell slots (maybe sorcery points for sorcerers);
- psionics, which uses dice pools.
Each pure martial class would have easy access to combat exploits, with different classes favouring different sorts of exploits - barbarians like brute force, rogues like trickery, warlords like leadership, and fighters can run a gamut.
Each hybrid martial/caster class would have partial access to combat exploits, with paladins probably emphasising defense and a bit of leadership, and rangers switch-hitting between ranged and melee-but-not-quite-slugging-it-out-barbarian-style, and partial access to spells. Although probably what they'd look like is the current class base (1/2 spellcasting with a shtick to burn spell slots on not-spells), and with a subclass that leans into the combat exploits more
The monk kind of does its own things, with martial exploits (preferring skirmishing) enhanced with ki effects, with some monks going more for ki stuff (four elements) and some going more for martial stuff.
The "semi-Vancian" casters have spellcasting with some other secondary feature (wild shape for druids, channel for clerics, not sure for wizards), with their subclasses changing up some element of both as well as giving them alternate ways to use their secondary feature. (Clerics and newer druid subclasses are kind of where I would see this going).
Ideally, the "alternate" casters, while often using spells, can build to either be primary casters or somewhere between primary casters and the "hybrid" classes in terms of what they like to do, and with each having some particular shtick that differentiates it from the "semi-Vancian" classes, such as the way warlocks do Pact Magic instead of standard spellcasting.
