Mustrum_Ridcully said:
I think 3.5 paved the way for the stronger focussed classes, by the way.
I agree, but it was not a trend in 3.5 that I liked.
In 3.0, there were next to no new core classes in the splats. But 3.5 supplements contained more of them. I think this was in realisation that some concepts just didn't work so well with the existing classes, and rather trying to make this possible with PrCs or new feats, they tried to make it work with entirely new classes.
There was some of that, I agree. However, I think just as often classes were created from a mechanical concept and built around that. This actually started in the PH with sorcerer. At its heart, sorcerer is a class defined by its variation on the normal spellcasting rules. It wasn't necessarily that you couldn't build the concept, its that mechanical variaty was being provided. I look at classes like the Ninja and the Warlock and see mainly variant rules. Is the Ninja necessarily a better ninja than a ninja built using a rogue? IMO, not really.
Classes like Knight seem to me to be built more around, 'How can we have a Knight class that is mechanically different from a knight built using the Fighter class?' than anything else. It seems to be mechanical variation, if not for its own sake then one in large part justified by having a class named 'Knight' for people who want to play a knight.
3.x generally had a problem with some classes being very broadly defined, and others were narrowly defined. Compare the Rogue to a Paladin.
I agree. I felt that 3.X frequently confused the notion of character class with character concept. Between that and the sometimes ill-thought out or incomplete feat trees, it frequently found itself needing variant or alternate classes to deal with a concept.
In 4E, instead of making the Paladin a PrC (or PrC equivalent), all classes get a narrower focus (though some classes, like the Paladin, apparently get a little braoder)
Right. And that's valid design. It's just that the design I wanted and expected used Rogue, Cleric, or Fighter as a template of good design, and not Paladin, Monk, or Barbarian.
In the general RPG forum, there is a dicussion over whether or not D&D is a rules heavy game. Some site the complexity of a system like HERO and suggest that D&D is by comparison 'rules-lighter'. However, others note that with HERO any sort of character concept can be designed from rules compiled in a single volumn, and they suggest that this means that on the whole HERO is more rules-light than D&D is. I tend to think that both arguments have a kernel of truth in them. A HERO character is a good deal more complicated than a D&D character. But the simplicity that D&D gains by using a relatively inflexible character creation system has a tradeoff. It results ultimately in higher system complexity as a whole. Once you add in all the different possible character creation rules, D&D becomes an enormous stack of paper. Very few of those rules will be interacting with the game at any one time, but its still not elegant in the way HERO's character creation system.
It really doesn't matter too much to me whether WotC prints 100 core classes and 400 PrC's. I'm not going to buy them one way or the other, so it doesn't impact me much. But I would like to have seen a further attempt to unify multiple concepts under a single flexible class. Third edition took the ever expanding concept of a 'specialty priest' and found a way to unify clerical concepts into a single class. It may not have captured all the mechanical variaty of the 2E specialty priests, but it did capture the concept of almost any cleric. From 4E I wanted to see more refinement in that direction. Instead, it seems that we are moving back from 3E's single unified flexible classes, back towards 2E's goal of providing a class and variant class for every concept.
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