D&D General What is the right amount of Classes for Dungeons and Dragons?

[TwoSix]

I would be on board with this.

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

 

[Remathilis]

A lot of the problem comes from the fact that historically at design these problems were poorly considered. For example, the rogue is very tacked on to AD&D because AD&D lacked a unified skill system. Warlords in turn are tacked on because leadership or tactical ability was not considered in the 3e attempt at a unified skill system and well written feats to support "I'm a battlefield leader" weren't considered. So when the 4e warlord showed up, it was paradigm changing for people, but only because of the former silence on the concept. But it's just as tacked on and problematic as the 1e thief. And so forth.

The bitter irony is even for people who feel the Classic Four is the proper number of classes, they themselves are arbitrary.

Start with the original three. Fighting-man represents all martial concepts from barbarian to soldier to knight. Magic-user represents all spellcasting concepts from wizard to witch to occultist. And then there was the cleric, a mashup of Biblical miracleworker, knight Templar, and vampire hunter. None of which needed to be its own thing. Miracle worker fits magic user, knight Templar is a Fighting man, and vampire hunter isn't a class, it's a description. If D&D was designed to have customizable classes, turn undead would be an option. Likewise, if D&D was built with a skill system, thief would not be a thing. But the Hodge podge way D&D was built enshrined that warrior, caster, healer, and skill user are the backbone of the class system.

And 50 years later, we are stuck with the fruits of that system as no one is going to legitimately accept a D&D without 12 classes in the PHB, regardless how illegitimate you or anyone else feels about any given one. No one will say "well thank God that the ranger is gone!" They will ask "where is the ranger?" And build 30 different homemade versions of it.

Just like warlord. Just like psion.

Which is why I find almost every attempt to boil down the class list futile. Because any attempt to merge or remove classes will inevitably result in dozens of people reinventing them.

 

[Aldarc]

the priest works of principles of conviction and understanding compare to an arcane caster is all in on intellect and rational processes.
no idea how their druids work for that matter.

I say as much in what you quote.

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

Different show.

 

[Mind of tempest]

That's me, I lean into controversy!

My advocacy (for D&D, specifically) is for a concept that's not really discussed (or I've not stumbled across it); robust character creation options prior to game start, followed by somewhat randomized, "roguelike" progression triggered by in-narrative discoveries.

Since I'm basically arguing for "neotrad in the front, OSR in the back", my advocacy is doomed to fail.

it could be interesting but would take player buy in to work.

I am not really sure how that is a rebuttal. "Leader of men in battle" is entirely within the province of the fighter. If you think Conan the Barbarian is a barbarian and not a fighter, then you neither have a clear understanding of "barbarian" or "fighter". Neither Warlord nor Fighter have a "mechanical purpose". The purpose of mechanics is to empower you to play a character. The character doesn't exist to serve the mechanics.

I refuse to accept the argument "Fighters are meant to be narrow in ability. They are only supposed to be good at hitting things with sharped sticks". For one thing, it's horrible for balance as it's a major contributor to only spellcasters being worth playing past a certain level, or the idea that to balance fighters with spellcasters we have to make the spellcasters.

A warlord is just a fighter that focus some of their martial prowess on leadership and tactical skill. That's not even really a matter of debate. That's just what they are. If you have to make them some separate class it's because you've poorly implemented support for leadership and tactical skill in your core system and now you're tacking those ideas on as an afterthought.



I think you could in fact make a strong argument that the rogue class shouldn't exist because it is just a sneaky skillful fighter. In fact, this is a very common position by people who think introducing the "thief" class was a mistake. I don't in fact do so, primarily because I don't know how in D&D to make a pure skill monkey class well balanced despite a lot of time thinking about it, but I do understand the argument. I think of the Rogue as a compromise class there you are taking a skill monkey class and giving it a combat shtick/silo that while it is difficult or impossible to justify in fiction, is an acceptable compromise given most people are so accepting of the "thief" as a core class at this point they probably won't question it and it does then allow playing a skill monkey. But I'm not about to argue that having a Rogue is a requirement, just that removing it is hard.



I don't understand this at all. Mechanical variety for its own sake is just silly. What you want is character concept variety that has mechanical support.

the difference between a warlord and fighter is between a general and the guy you send in for combat by champion.
For example Deadpool is a fighter captain America is a warlord, a similar skill set but different things matter.
now I believe barbarian can be fused with fighter but not warlord.

No. You can perfectly well have a priest of the god of rational thought.

The difference between a priest and a wizard is what the source of the spells are - external power or internal power. The priest is acting as a servant to some external power that grants them spells to use in furtherance of the external power's goals. The D&D wizard as it's been come to be understood studies natural process to try to master them and uses their intellect and refined mental prowess and willpower and knowledge to create seemingly supernatural events.

Druid really shouldn't even be a class. It's too narrow and too confining and carries to much secondary baggage. The obvious proof of that is druids historically were confined to one small area of the world, and though we can't say much about them because the historical record is so thin, we can say that we shouldn't have a base class with such a narrow costume. The actual class is Shaman, which is a class about halfway between priest and wizard in its conception and represents animistic or occult magic where you make bargains or pacts with magical beings and use spells to command them. So you have external power, but lack the priestly concept of service to that external power.

you can have a god of anything, I was describing the wow class.
a shaman would be dealing with the smaller spirits of the world, not distant gods or are the occult as that has a rather load set of ideas.
they would work and communicate with the spirits but might have different approaches some nice some nasty, but yeah druid would be the animal shapeshifting subclass of that.

 

[CreamCloud0]

now I believe barbarian can be fused with fighter

if i were merging barb with anything i'd personally do it with druid, maybe a bit of a weird pick but barb's already got a good bit of the primal-y stuff going on, implement rage as a different use for wildshape charges, and the 'can't cast spells while raging' aspect of rage would actually provide an interesting decision point for a class that actually has, and has uses for, their spell slots

 

[Chalice]

the four are the classics but I do not see why we should be shackled to the classics?

Because they cover basically all the ground that I can see needs covering, is why they’re my own preference. Which is all I was stating, btw.

And fyi, I’m not “shackled to the classics” in any way whatsoever - I played and ran 3e for years, just for a start, and that should tell you something about my tolerance for “non-classic” stuff - nor do I think anyone else should be.. I mean, unless they want to be, of course.

 

[Mephista]

When I look at systems that do fewer classes well (Stars without Number) they tend to enable a lot of concepts within those 3 classes (hybrids between them) and by having more choices and flexible subsystems than 5e.

I'm basing this off the gw2 mmo, where there were lots of choices, specializations, support abilities, and each weapon brought a suite of 5 different abilities per weapon.

*Side note - weapon options seems like the worst differentiator possible for something that mostly should be a flavor choice IMO.

well, that's not how I've seen any game do things, not even dnd, so gonna disagree with ya.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Because they cover basically all the ground that I can see needs covering, is why they’re my own preference. Which is all I was stating, btw.

And fyi, I’m not “shackled to the classics” in any way whatsoever - I played and ran 3e for years, just for a start, and that should tell you something about my tolerance for “non-classic” stuff - nor do I think anyone else should be.. I mean, unless they want to be, of course.

define the ground then, please?

 

[Celebrim]

The bitter irony is even for people who feel the Classic Four is the proper number of classes, they themselves are arbitrary...Which is why I find almost every attempt to boil down the class list futile. Because any attempt to merge or remove classes will inevitably result in dozens of people reinventing them.

Definitely a lot of truth to this. The division between the rogue and fighter is as I indicated before, completely arbitrary, as you could think of a rogue as just a smart dexterous fighter and you'd probably avoid incoherence in doing so. Likewise, you could separate cleric from wizard solely based on the sort of 'pick' system I discussed earlier where the only difference is what spells you chose to be good at.

You'll note that I didn't list exactly what classes you should have, just that I thought you'd probably need about 10 but no more than about 15. And the reason for that is if you get classes too broad then design gets harder and balance gets harder. Someone earlier talked about the problem of putting too much into a class instead of siloing it away into other classes, and while I didn't agree with his particular example, I do agree with him that this is a problem. The closer you get to a point buy build your own class model; the harder balance gets. So there is definitely a tradeoff.

While I can't list the specific classes that you should end up with, I do have what I feel are objective markers that you did it wrong. Ironically though, because the traditional classes were done wrong, you are right that people will strongly resist correcting past mistakes.

One approach that sounds attractive but turns out to be problematic is imagining a pure magic class, a pure fighting class, and a pure skill monkey class and then thinking you can then build any character by multiclassing between those classes. And the big problem there is that the whole thing about the D&D class system is that unlike point buy it forces breadth on the character's abilities, and because D&D is so combat focused in its story telling (most problems can be solved by fighting) for a variety of legitimate reasons the pure skill monkey class has a huge problem. "Sherlock Holmes" and similar characters work just fine as classes through tier 1, but by tier 3 at the latest you start having big problems with inventing sufficient combat schtick for a pure skill monkey through skill alone because fighting is not defined in D&D as a skill but silo'd off on its own. And heck, in D&D, if fighting was a skill, then as a skill alone it wouldn't be broad enough to actually create sufficient combat schtick.

 

[TwoSix]

Different show.

I don't understand the question and I won't respond to it.