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I completely agree. Most of the compelling creatures informed by longstanding archetypes are covered in any edition's first monster book. Monsters in subsequent or third-party books tend to be extremely specific, modifications on tropes that are already covered, or ridiculous D&Disms. They're...

Curious. I have never played Elder Scrolls Online or even really read anything about it, but that's more or less the list I came up with: Warrior = martial heavy Rogue = martial light Wizard = arcane/high magic Thaumaturge = holy/divine Enchanter ~= nature/fey/green Diabolist =...

Agreed. Yeah, considering the Cleric's weird and gamist origins as a sort of a gish class that didn't get spells at 1st level and gained spell levels slower than a Magic User, the 5e Paladin and Cleric feel like they took that starting point, kept very similar theming, and went in different...

Man, thanks for the great and varied responses guys--one departing drastically from precedent and another doubling down on it. Thanks for being a good sport, it's all just a creative exercise in the end. I like the list of classes you ended with even though the class names weren't your...

Now that the thread has been going for a little bit, here is my entry: I organized the casters into broad themes (maybe more like tones) and the martial casters mechanically. New classes are in orange, places the current classes go are in blue. diabolist—casters with dark and ominous powers...

I know what you mean. It's hard to come up with thematic names for the broad categories that aren't already spoken for somehow. I like diabolist as a name for "scary caster with supernatural friends." Invoker is also a perfect name for this when used in its traditional sense: Invoke—from the...

I knew it was just a matter of time until that was suggested :LOL:

I recognize it's not the gist of your post but, incidentally, "shaman" is considered insensitive in some quarters as well--they even made it to the Wikipedia page :p

More misc. thoughts/comments: One thing I noticed in fiddling with the 6-class challenge myself is that half-casters don't fit in it very well. All the existing half-caster classes have a very strong theme and half-casting is too powerful to add as a subclass level feature if the balance of the...

I haven't heard of Stonetop. Could you elaborate on the nomenclature. Yeah that could work if well executed. So far we've seen folks organizing them around party roles, power sources, magic/fighty/skilled permutations, and others--no reason ability scores couldn't be the organizing device.

Oh, there are absolutely tons of ways remix and recombine classes and, as always, the OSR is full of strange variety. My favorite OSR-clone system, Simulacrum, has only two classes--warrior and mage. But, again, the challenge here is to get to 6 good classes. And 6, as opposed to 4 or 3, is a...

Interesting, that's a much different balance of full casters to non-full casters than 5e has currently.

I don't disagree. My Ideal class list certainly would not consist of 6 classes. But getting from 3 which make sense to 6 that make sense is the challenge :)

Which of those classes subsume which parts of the other 7? i.e. is barbarian being collapsed into fighter?

A while back there was a thread called "What Would Your Perfect 50th PHB Class List Be?" It had an interesting exchange in it: To the challenge then! Can you come up with a list of 6 mega-classes that elegantly contain the essentials of every existing PHB class? (bonus points for including...

Both points of view--verisimilitude vs. player freedom--are valid, but WotC needs to pick one. The half-measures they are currently using are kludgy. Small and medium creatures are dramatically more similar than small and tiny creatures or medium and large creatures. No PC creatures can be large...

First thing to note is that The Hobbit Gandalf, like the tone of everything in The Hobbit, is way different than Lord of the Rings Gandalf. Hobbit Gandalf is a lot closer to a wizard. LotR Gandalf is almost a non-caster. This is spot on, and it's what I answered, but there are things it...

Good on ya for stating your assumptions and trying to get the thread back to the intended focus. I'm afraid the board is liable to continue refusing the premise of your question, but that's how it goes. If Pathfinder is where you get your starting assumptions, then I would again recommend you...

Oh sure, that's an impossibility. What I mean is that, to my knowledge, there isn't a setting that does the 5e equivalent of what the tippyverse does for 3e.

There have been attempts. The ones that come to mind most quickly for me are Ptolus and the Tippyverse. There are also rather clever within-setting solutions why some D&D worlds might be stuck in the middle ages (here's a cool one for Greyhawk, based on Jack Vance's Lyonesse). But there are...