NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6040418" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.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.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.</blockquote>

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