D&D 5E (2024) What should the 15th Class be?

[EzekielRaiden]

On that, you are simply wrong. Lots of people, the majority in fact, buy supplements, settings and adventures because they like the level of complexity WotC has set.

You have the numbers to back up this "majority" claim, yes?

You can prove that every supplemental book for 5.0 was bought by a majority of people who had bought the core books?

 

[Corinnguard]

Thats a weird distinction, surely once you've included the Planes in your definition of 'Nature', then Nature includes Spirits? Especially as the conjure spell outright stats that Druids are conjuring nature/fey/elemental spirits

What are Shaman doing differently besides adding an 'ancestral' category?

TBH, I was thinking of Laser Llama's Shaman class when I typed up my reply a moment ago.

The Shaman Class by laserllama

The Shaman Class by laserllama - Created with GM Binder.

www.gmbinder.com

Laser Llama's Shaman class deals with binding spirits to Totems.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

If I had had even the slightest success with getting 3PP material while playing 5e, I would take this much more seriously.

It's not players who insist on "WotC has to make it". It's GMs. Specifically 5e GMs, and their hyperconservative attitude toward this kind of content unless they specifically make it themselves. I have seen this attitude over and over again, I see it here on ENWorld all the time.

On the whole a majority of GMs don’t want the game to be more complex. WotC gets it about right for most people, that’s why 5e is so successful. Those people who want more complex classes are a small minority, so if you pick a random GM out of a bag the chance that you will get one is slim. There are people who are playing that stuff, but they probably have plenty of players already. The more complex the rules, the more skilled the GM needs to be to run the game. The more skilled the GM, the less likely they are to be short of players.

If WotC abandoned its KISS approach you would find the pool of available GMs got even smaller. It wouldn’t cause people to play the sort of game you like, because that’s not the sort of game they like.

 

[Remathilis]

And yet, there are zero complaints about the Battlemaster doing exactly the same thing. Or the Mastermind Rogue. We have a Trickery Domain cleric in our group that gives a skill buff as a blessing. No one has ever complained about that. "Don't you dare give me a big buff to my stealth checks!"

I don't think it's maybe quite as polarizing as all that. I think that the bigger issues - that it was the poster whipping boy for 4e - is the big tripping point.

For what it's worth, the complaints were about the maneuvers which forced movement, though I've heard a few complaints about the attack granting power feeling mandatory rather than an option. Together, you find the "Bob on his turn used sone ability to swap spaces and made me attack." Occasionally bred resentment.

Though I think Zaard found the guy who took that to the extreme.

 

[Minigiant]

Absolutely. I do find the insistence that “WotC has to make it” extremely tiresome. Smaller publishers have far more freedom.

I think it's more "My DM won't allow it unless WOTC and the 2 3PPs they trust make it".

A lot of 3PP products becomes bookshelf fodder if you don't DM yourself.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

For what it's worth, the complaints were about the maneuvers which forced movement, though I've heard a few complaints about the attack granting power feeling mandatory rather than an option. Together, you find the "Bob on his turn used sone ability to swap spaces and made me attack." Occasionally bred resentment.

Though I think Zaard found the guy who took that to the extreme.

In my opinion any class ability that lets one player do something on another player’s turn is bad. This was the problem I experienced with the twilight cleric. Not that was overpowered (although it was) but that it got to butt in on every single players turn. When it is your turn the spotlight should be on you.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

You have the numbers to back up this "majority" claim, yes?

You can prove that every supplemental book for 5.0 was bought by a majority of people who had bought the core books?

I’m pretty sure the statistics show that, yes. I don’t think anyone buys all three core rule books and nothing else. They either buy only the players handbook, or they have lots of books/digital books.

 

[Remathilis]

In my opinion any class ability that lets one player do something on another player’s turn is bad. This was the problem I experienced with the twilight cleric. Not that was overpowered (although it was) but that it got to butt in on every single players turn. When it is your turn the spotlight should be on you.

That's kinda the point.

Haste grants an extra attack. On the players turn, if the player wants to use it. The player is not bound to any obligation to use it if they had other intentions (cast a spell, flee in terror, whatever). If Bob the Warlord, says "Tracy paladin, roll an attack and add d4 to hit" on his turn, does Tracy have the ability to say "no thanks?" If yes and for whatever reason she says no, did Bob just waste his turn? If no, does Bob effectively control Tracy's paladin for that turn?

Now it is not a screaming issue because as most people point out, Tracy will most likely want an extra attack on Bob's turn. But it does get into some dicey areas about who gets to decide what the paladin can do, Tracy or Tracy + Bob. And most types of forced movement or action control abilities require saving throws on unwilling targets (well, they all do, but willing targets voluntarily fail their save) so a purely beneficial ability with no way to opt out can feel like Bob butting in to decide what the paladin does , just because it's the carrot and not the stick doesn't make it less of an issue to some.

I don't have an issue with a warlord in theory, I like playing support characters. But I think if they do go that route, they will have to rethink the lazylord type of "my primary attack is the barbarian" to avoid issues where it feels like Bob has say over Tracy's character when it's not Tracy's turn. Not insurmountable, but a design hurdle to consider.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I’m pretty sure the statistics show that, yes. I don’t think anyone buys all three core rule books and nothing else. They either buy only the players handbook, or they have lots of books/digital books.

So you don't actually have anything beyond "I'm pretty sure"?

 

[CreamCloud0]

Very, very much too late, yes. The concept has taken on a life of its own beyond D&D, and that now feeds back into D&D. Folks expect a "Druid" to be someone who can shapeshift. That this is a pigeonholing of those abilities, when they could otherwise have fit into a bigger and more thematically diverse package, is not of particular concern.

You can mostly blame Warcraft for turning this into a phenomenon. D&D Druids caused the Warcraft games to make their Druids work that way. E.g. Everquest Druids are still functionally priests, who get animal taming abilities, not the ability to take on animal forms. But Warcraft? It followed D&D, and thus made Druids a magical tradition specialized in shapeshifting. Technically WoW isn't the game to do this, but rather Warcraft 3, since that's the game that introduced Night Elves and their "Druid" traditions. But WoW's enormous popularity and cultural impact is what has permanently cemented "Druid = Shapeshifting spellcaster" in the fantasy zeitgeist.

Much the way that a couple pieces of fantasy literature, such as Three Hearts and Three Lions, are almost totally responsible for the word "Paladin" coming to mean "a divinely-ordained knight who fights for good and right on the basis of a sacred oath". Because prior to that....as far as I can tell it was only used for its original meaning, namely, the retinue of Big Chuck himself, Charlemagne, being his palace knights (the Knights of the Palatine.)

i really wish they would split the shapeshifting from the spellcasting with the druid, if not IMO ideally into it's own class then at least as an either-or choice at first level, you can have the shapeshifting OR the spellcasting to go with the rest of your druid abilities but not both (barring the inevitable subclass that tries to offer a worse version of both).

i think it's amazing (in a bad way) that THE primal caster kinda manages to feel so disconnected from the the various biomes that exist, land druid shouldn't be a single subclass(or rather it should be the jack of all trades druid that can adapt for every environment), each environment should be it's own subclass for them like how cleric has domains, circle of the woods, circle of the mountains, circle of the desert, circle of the tundra...