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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6637019" data-attributes="member: 4937">A fighter certainly could be a hunter.  As could, as you say a wizard or a thief.  I partially agree, in as much as I think having more than at most 12-15 classes in a class based system suggests that the underlying problem is your classes are badly designed and too inflexible.  But I don't agree that it was ever a given that the original set of classes represented anything anyone could want to be in game.  Indeed, I think the opposite was true.  It was pretty much a given right from the moment people started wanting to be a someone rather than a piece in a tactical wargame, that the original base classes had not spent enough time defining either 'who you are' or 'what you could do'.  This was manifested in all sorts of ways, with a proliferation of classes in Dragon magazine sort of incoherently attempting to address one question or the other, or people breaking off of D&D at a very early point to create games like C&S that explicitly attempted to fix the problem.I don't think this was immediately realized, and if you'd asked someone in 1977 the purpose of classes I don't think they could have easily articulated that.  They probably would have said that the purpose of classes was to define your role, and in saying so would have completely justified the need for a 'Hunter' class and a 'Trapper' class because the concept of a profession and a class and their relation hadn't really been separated or clarified.   So in early D&D you see concept classes - a fighter - get mixed up with profession classes - an assassin - and no one really articulates the differences much until 2e comes around and people start saying things like, "Heck, a wizard could be an assassin."  I just cut and pasted the entire class from my house rules, but I in no way claim that outside the context of my house rules and my campaign the class in any way balanced.  Inside my campaign, I can prove by example that the class is fair and interesting and shares sufficient spotlight to be called balanced, with examples of characters being built with dips into hunter (primarily to get the benefit of "Additionally, by applying secret lore, their keen senses and knowledge or their prey, hunters may make critical hits on their favored enemy even if favored enemies of that class – such as undead, oozes or constructs – are normally immune to critical hits.") and players building single classed hunters to create optimized ranged attack/skill monkeys.  And in any event, I don't really think that proliferation of classes is necessarily driven by the desire to be more point buy like in your build.  In fact, I'd say the reverse is more likely to be true.   The smaller the number of classes that you have, the more flexible they have to be and the more point buy like elements that implies - a buffet of abilities is not that different from point buy in its flexibility while still constraining you against the one trick pony approach point buy tends to encourage.   A modern three class approach (warrior, spellcaster, expert), would make building each class very much like point buy, in as much that each class would not define exactly what the character would do but let you choose from a broad array of in flavor abilities.  A buffet of classes, particularly without 3e style multiclassing, is very unlike point buy in that you are likely to be locked into a specific single build and progression of powers if you have large numbers of classes.   If you look at the state of class development in late 1e, it's definitely nothing like point buy.  The prestige class approach seems intended to lock characters into a stereotype, but in practice by late 3.5 merged into the buffet of abilities approach because everyone was dipping 1-2 levels into 4-5 classes to get very specific ability synergies.  But I think that was specific to the 3e design rather than a general attribute of large numbers of classes, since in most games you can only take one class and you have to stick to it.  Its that inflexibility that I think really drives the proliferation of classes.   For me, it feels like some number more than 5 and some number less than 20 is necessary to both tightly define the concepts yet leave them flexible enough that any two members of the same class are not mechanically identical but have a niche of their own that is more than flavor or self-imposed restriction.</blockquote>

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