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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5373919" data-attributes="member: 4937">I agree, but some butter can be nice.   Also, with that few archetypes you aren't offering alot of combinations of BAB, saves, HD, and skill points.   Unless you have classes with variable HD and skill points, effective 'subclasses', it becomes overly hard to achieve certain results.  Also, having slightly more than 3 options means that its easier to deal with balance issues because you've made the choices for class abilities just a little more rigid.   Also, counter-intuitively, it's usually easier to force characters to make just a little more well-rounded of a character from a class than it would be with a more flexible system because you can force players to 'buy' things that they don't want.  I mean, when you get down to it, even the above is 'butter'.  In theory, you could have one class 'Adventurer', and you'd have effectively a skill based system where on leveling up you could decide what saves, features, BAB, and so forth you wanted to buy.   But of course, under such system you'd inevitably end up with a lot of spellcasters that sacrificed any BAB progression for better saves or more hits points or other things of more obvious utility to them.   You'd also probably end up with no spellcasters that couldn't heal at least a little, and it wouldn't be that suprising to see the same list of spells appear on every spellcasters list, and if certain skills always appeared.   Sure, table dynamics might mean that players deliberately eshewed the obivious routes to power or didn't highly prize combat utility, but without self-limiting players the system would be subject to the same problems pretty much all point buy systems I've seen suffer from.My approach more or less began with asking what was wrong with the 3.0 base class list, but you could probably do the same thing from first principle by enumerating the combinations of HD/Saves/BAB/Skill Points/Spellcasting Progression you felt were balanceable, assigning how many bonus feats (or equivalent) you felt were necessary to make up the difference, and then creating the classes from those skeletons.   I suspect however there is more art than science in producing balanced classes, and too much rigid formalism will get you in trouble.Three base classes strikes me as excessive and unnecessary rigid formalism.</blockquote>

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