Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8692446" data-attributes="member: 18">You're illustrating the problem.D&D 5E has really messed up here. There aren't many ways 5E has messed up, but the "Sword and magic guy" is absolutely one of them. Instead of putting in a "Sword and magic guy" to fit the fantasy archetype (which is a very popular and common one, especially in anime/manga/JRPGs, but even in stuff like Pathfinder), individual 5E designers insisted on taking their own, eccentric "runs at the problem", all of which are hyperspecific, and thus very poor at fitting the fantasy archetype. Classes, in general, shouldn't be hyperspecific - and that's why this needs to be a class, not a random pile of subclasses for other classes.The reason 5E messed up with that it was an "Apology Edition", and terrified of doing anything novel for the first, what 2-3 years it existed (including as Next).So they instead of having the class 5E needs, 5E has a multitude of half-arsed, hyperspecific subclasses, which don't, in general, get at the root/core issue in the way that something like 4E's Swordmage, 3E's Duskblade (one of several base classes like this in 3E!) or Pathfinder's Magus do. The person who wants to be the lightly-armoured warrior with Magic doesn't want to be an Elven Bladedancer, or Warlock (at all), and they absolutely hate the idea of being an Artificer (because the whole concept of Artificer is opposed to this, even if the mechanics almost work if you squint hard at them). Normal players do not like "reskinning", either. They want a class and subclasses that work out of the box, and that make sense to them.D&D 5E hasn't messed up a lot class-wise, but this is a place it definitely has (the other biggest misses are Monk and Sorcerer - Monk because the archetype is wildly outmoded Boomer stuff, Sorcerer because it's a class justified by mechanics not fantasy, which is not a good justification for a class).But what you're demonstrating is that it does not. A bunch of half-arsed subclasses which touch on a concept that obviously should be a class is not a smart or effective way to handle things. Something 3E, 4E, and Pathfinder 1E and 2E all understood, I note. I'd say it's curious that 5E didn't, but it's not curious at all - it's because of the "Apology Edition" factor. If 5E had been similar but not an "Apology Edition", I have no doubt Swordmage would have made the cut into 5E, either in the PHB or in an early supplement.</blockquote>

Verification