D&D 5E All classes should be broad enough to be split into subclasses

[Celebrim]

IMHO All classes should be broad enough to be split into subclasses

I'd like to state that a different way.

"All classes should be broad enough that if everyone in the party was the same class, there would still be room to make every PC distinctive."

IMO all these 3 classes could be split into styles as follows:

Warlord

- Is a charismatic and/or intelligent fighter that favors winning combats with his mind rather than with brute force. If the fighter class can't incorporate leaders of fighting men, then its not broad enough.

Barbarian

- Is not a class. A 'class' that implies culture, beliefs, or personality is not broad enough. Barbarian is background, and a 'barbarian' could be any sort of class whatsoever. The concept underlying what is thought of as a barbarian ('beserk warrior') is broader than the background itself, and includes such things as patriots, templars, and really anything that relies on emotion, fury, and zeal to push themselves into feats that they couldn't otherwise do. I call this class in my game 'Fanatic' and it really has nothing at all to do with having the 'barbarian' background.

Assassin

- Again, this is a background and not a class. Since pretty much every PC class can be good at killing things, any class could have this background - the cleric of a death god, a fighter that works as a hit man, a stealthy rogue sniper, a dead or alive type bounty hunter, a wizard specializing in save or suck/die spells, even an expert that simply is good with poisons, disguises, and subterfuge. So some blend of any of these.

Of the classic base classes, I consider the following to be subclasses rather than classes:

Barbarian - Subclass of Fanatic (cultural baggage must also be removed)
Paladin - Subclass of Champion, wrongly limited to 'good' or 'lawful good' and indeed to very narrow models of what is 'good'. (For example, not all good philosophies would choose smiting things as being an example of the highest degree of virtue.)
Ranger - A very narrow multiclass build based on a Hunter/Explorer/Shaman type class. Lots and lots of baggage, none of which is necessary. Basic ideas of 'Hunter' and 'Explorer' need to be removed to separate classes and expanded on.
Druid - Subclass of Shaman (cultural baggage must be removed). Lots and lots of baggage, much of which makes the class OP.
Sorcerer - Subclass of itself, with an unnecessary lack of identifying features beyond different mechanical variation. Bloodline requires more exploration to give the class diversity.
Assassin - A very narrow multiclass build based on a Rouge/Hunter/Wizard type class. No pressing need for a separate class provided your base classes are strong enough.
Monk - Subclass of Fighter, specializing in hand to hand combat and 'ki' type powers, with possible dips into some sort of Paragon or Shaman/Mystic/Wizard type concept. Never has really worked right as a base class, and has a hodgepodge of largely unrelated abilities on a very fixed progression. Way too much cultural baggage, and too much implied personality. Concept needs to be taken apart and its abilities put in the proper silo.
Psion - Subclass of Sorcerer or possibly Wizard, with little excuse for its existence other than it supports an variant/alternative magic system. IMO, use the Psion as the Wizard/Sorcerer or the Wizard/Sorcerer, but not both. Both constitutes mechanical variation for its own sake, in that you are mostly choosing a perferred game mechanic, not a preferred class/concept.

I consider 3.0's clerical domains as an example of a fairly elegant mechanism for rendering subclass into a sufficiently broad base class. Likewise, I consider the 3.0 Fighter class with its 'select fighting powers to taste' to be an elegant in concept means of attaining this goal, if however lacking in the implementation (since 3.X feats are overly weak and conservative in their design as shown by the need to create 'prestige classes' to fill in the gaps).

 

[Celebrim]

Of course i remember! For those who say that Barbarian should be specialty or should be renamed as Berserker (because its main shtick is rage) i recommend Barbarian from Ultimate Classes, which main shtick called Savagery is divided into Blood Bond, Fetish, Frenzy, Rage, Shouts and Tattoos. All these categories are related to barbaric customs and only two of them could be considered as type of Rage.

I like Ultimate Classes, but think it is a mistake to ignore the fact that 'Barbarian' is a background and not a class. Among things like "Blood Bond, Fetish, Frenzy, Rage, Shouts and Tattoos", most of these sound mystical to me, and if they aren't general things available to everyone, then they ought to be part of some sort of shaman/mystic/witch type class (depending on what you want to call it). Of course, it would be perfectly acceptable to be a Fanatic/Shaman, having embued your body with magical gifts and invoking magical abilities.

One of my rules is, "If your class ability could be a spell, it probably should be." If your class is simply, "I'm an X, but I can cast Y a certain number of times per day", then you are probably X multiclassed with a spellcasting class and forcing that spell Y to be something particular is overly narrow. Even the 'rage' ability itself treads really closely to this ground, to say nothing of 'fetish', 'blood bond', 'shouts', and 'tatoos'.

 

[Drowdruid]

Re: Celebrim

I want to quote what said Grimmjow in the different thread:

"Shouldn't fluff and mechanics go hand-in-hand?

If you start with the fluff: a sorcerer gains arcane magic because of a power creature who helped sire his bloodline. In this case a dragon. Now you have to use mechanics to show both his arcane power and the powers from the dragon that sired his family.

If you start with mechanics: You have a class that can use arcane magic and a few dragon like powers. Now you have to explain both the arcane magic and the dragon powers."

With this in mind i would not go into creating hybrids like fanatic/shaman instead of barbarian even if barbarian class imply heavily Savage background and is almost magical in its nature (primal power source). Besides I personally will go with Barbarian class based on multiple power sources (ie. Wild Temperament: Frenzy Of The Berserker will be Martial or Primal, Might of The Hulk purely primal, Madness of The Maniac will involve demon possession, thus elemental, Zeal of the Fanatic will be divine etc.). In this my proposition from OP Barbarian is really class that RAGES but on many ways and always in warrior-like manner not in mage-like manner like Wilder class.

But I also agree with you that Paladin which includes Causes for all alignments will better be named Champion.

 

[Drowdruid]

Re: Warlord

You said:
"Warlord is a charismatic and/or intelligent fighter that favors winning combats with his mind rather than with brute force. If the fighter class can't incorporate leaders of fighting men, then its not broad enough"
and i mostly agree but I will change word fighter as it imply class into warrior which is very broad class category along with mage and adventurer.
These categories rely on combat, magic and skill accordingly, but aren't really classes

Edit:
[MENTION=7635]Remathilis[/MENTION]: I want to preserve as many classical classes like Barbarian, Druid, Psion, Wilder, Runepriest but eliminate one-trick ponies like Avenger or Seeker. This thread purpose is also a justification for classes by creating subclasses (builds) that cover at least 3 fairly different archetypes.

 

[Remathilis]

I'm sufficiently convinced there is a large section of the D&D player base that does NOT like D&D as a class-based system.

ATM, there are two classes: One that uses maneuvers (subtyped: combat-oriented and skill oriented) and one that uses magic (subtyped divine/healer and arcane/nuker). It appears for many that these alone are sufficient to building every possible class that is, was, or ever will be. Everything else should be a background (because "ranger" to me screams 4 skills and a RP trait), a specialty (which still gets trotted out as the answer to class features despite WotC being adamant they're just streams of feats used to give a class a particular playstyle) and now build options (which forces druid to be a "deity", barbarian to be a fighting style, warlock to be a tradition, and bard to be a scheme) as means to remove any and all "other classes" from the PHB. Heck, the sorcerer and warlocks were built around alternative casting methods and people threw hissy-fits that their wizards couldn't use spell points!

WotC, may I make a humble suggestion right now? The core four are looking pretty good. Its time to look at those additional classes now. Decide if assassin in a specialty, barbarian a background, druid a deity/domain, etc. If not, give us some previews of where these classes are going. Else, we're going to continue this round-robin debate on X is/isn't a class.

 

[Remathilis]

[MENTION=70268]Drowdruid[/MENTION] ,

I'm not all that concerned about some of those bloat classes returning. Most of them are niche enough that I don't foresee them returning, or there being a giant clamoring for them. Some classes transcend their initial appearance (warlock being the most recent poster-child for that) and become mainstays, but for every warlord or sorcerer, the road is littered with Cavaliers, Anti-paladins, Gypsies, Mystics, Spellthieves, Swordsages, Seekers, Runepriests and Wardens. If their is a calling need from the players to design a class, it will come no matter HOW you try to build the system around avoiding it (see: Essentials Warlock -> Hexblade and Binder) and I'm sure the mainstays (paladin, ranger, bard, monk, druid, warlock, etc) have more than enough following to get them in the PHB, despite the railing some in the community make against they're inclusion.

 

[Drowdruid]

[MENTION=7635]Remathilis[/MENTION]

I agree mostly with your point of view. But I think there is more classes that are fairly oryginal although niche like for example Runepriest.
Earlier in this thread I propose building homebrew key features and now i will present it for Assassin, which i agree is fairly narrow concept but IMO as different from Rogue as Warlord is from Fighter.

Assassin: Assassin's Guild
1. Snake Guild = Deadly Backstabber
2. Scorpion Guild = Poisoner
3. Spider Guild = Saboteur (someone who procure arranged accidents)

This is only minimum but this are 3 quite different archetypes that could be associated with Assassin class. If someone have another concepts please share them with us?

 

[Michael Silverbane]

I cannot fathom why people keep trying to cram dozens of interesting archetypes into the same four jars time after time...

Some of us think that four jars is more than enough...?

Personally, I would be happier with only three jars. Physical Butt-kicker, Arcane Butt-kicker, and Divine Butt-kicker.

 

[Celebrim]

"Shouldn't fluff and mechanics go hand-in-hand?

That very much depends on what you mean by that. "Go hand-in-hand" is a very vague phrase, and which fluff and which mechanics you mean aren't really specified either.

Consider the case of the sorcerer. The core mechanical concept of this class appears to be: "Innate magical ability" Ideally, you want to give the class therefore fluff that encompasses all sorts of innate magical ability and all concepts which can be distilled down to innately magical. Likewise, you'll then want to provide mechanics that capture all the possible magical abilities that may be implied by any of those concepts. If you suggest in the fluff of the class, "Sorcerer's derive their magical power from dragons.", what you are really saying is, "In my particular setting, I want all innately magical player characters to derive their power from having dragons as ancestors."

But this raises any number of problems. The first might be, "If that is the case, why aren't sorcerers more, well, dragonish? There is nothing about the class that suggest draconic nature?" And the second and even more important is, "But my character's magical powers don't derive from having a dragon ancestor, but from having a Marid ancestor." or "from ingesting a magical serum made from a rare spider" or "were granted as a gift to me by fairies at my birth" or "from my parent Loki" or "as the result of a random mutation" or "as a result of exposure to a powerful magical artifact" or "I was raised by ghosts in a graveyard" or really anything you can imagine. When presented with this challenge by the player, a DM might say, "None of that exists in my campaign world.", but the designer of a more generic fantasy RPG better not say anything so stupid.

When you realize your fluff is getting in the way of the player's concept, you have one of two choices. You can either realize that the fluff really adds nothing to the core concept - "Wielder of innate magical power" and discard it in favor of a embracing a wide variaty of fluff, or you can decide to sacrifice the elegance of your system and instead sell more books by creating a new class for every concept you can think of. So now we have a spell-casting class for people with dragon blood, and a spell-casting class for people who injected magical spider serum, and another for people who have fairy gifts, and another for divine parentage, another for genie parentage, another for being raised by ghosts, another for magical mutants, and so on and so forth.

Other than selling books, the advantage of the latter approach is that you can easily answer the first challenge and make each class have a unique set of abilities that really capture the fluff. But on the other hand, if you do that then you certainly aren't creating base classes that are broad enough to split into subclasses. More importantly, you are ignoring the fact that you could give Sorcerers a simple generic distinguishing feature (similar to domains with Clerics) and allow customization by the player by letting them choose a spell list to taste. And the huge advantage of the latter is that your rules set will be much shorter and easier to understand, easier to balance, and most desirably of all won't be telling the player what they can and can't play on the basis of what classes exist. Players will be able to play anything they can imagine using just the base classes you provide, and with DMs needing to invent new base classes and new prestige classes to incorporate any new idea the player may have.

If you start with the fluff: a sorcerer gains arcane magic because of a power creature who helped sire his bloodline. In this case a dragon. Now you have to use mechanics to show both his arcane power and the powers from the dragon that sired his family.

Agreed. But note that if your base class is flexible rather than inflexible, when the player approaches the game carrying the fluff (that is, his idea for a character) you have a ready made answer. The mechanics can be made to fit the concept, rather than forcing the concept to fit to the provided mechanics.

With this in mind i would not go into creating hybrids like fanatic/shaman instead of barbarian....

I'm afraid you don't understand. I can tell from how you go on to explain yourself that you and I are actually largely on the same page. What you explain is a generic 'Fanatic' class designed to serve as a base class for anything from the King's loyal bodygaurd, to brainwashed cultists, to a noble oath-sworn Templar gaurding a holy site, to a maniacal madman, to drug crazed addicts, to a tribeman of a ritual beserker cult, or a demon possessed brute and many other things that we might not be able to imagine immediately. Such a class may or may not need a customizable power source, similar to a clerical domain, that slightly alters the classes abilities according to its background - call it a 'power source'.

When I mention the multiclassed Fanatic/Shaman it is not to imply that the standard Barbarian need be anything other than our generic 'Fanatic' class. It's merely to point out that via multiclassing, you can add things like 'wields fetishes, has magical battle cries, and magical tatoos' to the basic concept of 'primitive tribesman from a ritual beserker cult'. But since you are using multiclassing, you can also have 'primitive tribal witch doctor' as a concept completely apart from the notion of 'beserker' and the class I'm calling here 'Fanatic'. This concept now falls completely under or 'Shaman' class (but we could call it Mystic if we preferred) which has as its root concept, "Magic gained by making bargains with, understanding or controlling magical beings", and might include all sorts of witches, shamans, diabolists, animists, binders, healers, magical cultists, spiritualists, wu jen, sha'ir and even a few generic 'magicians' that didn't fit in to the 'wizard' mold. And of course, it is easy to see that from various mixtures of Fanatic and Shaman we can get all sorts of things, not just Diablo II style 'Barbarians'.

My point is basically that a base class must be sufficiently generic in its mechanics and its fluff to encompass a very wide range of character concepts rather than so tightly wedded to unnecessary fluff that excludes a huge number of character concepts. Unfortunately, D&D implemented classes so rather well, and is so iconic, that certain D&D-isms have been so successful that people have been rather blinded to the range of possibilities. Instead of imagining all the possible concepts in a setting, they fit the setting to the range of concepts provided by D&D. This tends to make for unimaginative class design, and I don't really foresee 5e making any bold progress in that regard.

 

[Celebrim]

Some of us think that four jars is more than enough...?

Personally, I would be happier with only three jars. Physical Butt-kicker, Arcane Butt-kicker, and Divine Butt-kicker.

I think that the real answer is probably between 3 and 15. There is a real trade off here.

The more classes you have, the more evocative you can make them and the more variation you can provide without jumping through complex pointbuy hoops and class variations so complex that they would be more simply explained simply by making each variant a separate class entry.

But on the other hand, if you have too many classes, you get rules bloat, unexpected multiclassing consequences, games that are impossible to play test, too much mechanical overlap and or gaps in the concepts, and classes so narrow that everyone who makes a character of that class ends up playing the same character.

I'd have great respect for a 3 class system. I'd have great respect for the design of a well done 12 class system. But any game system with 30 or 60 classes is junk. Period.