DDXP: Did these seminar titles give us hints?

[Knightfall]

I just noticed this on the D&D 5E Info page.

Class Design: From Assassins to Wizards (Friday) - Designers Monte Cook, Bruce Cordell, and Robert Schwalb discuss their approach to class design, including the difficulties in creating iconic versions of the classes that speak to players of all editions. Should the cleric be more martial or more healer? Does the default ranger have an animal companion? What level of complexity should the fighter have? Seminar to be followed by a Q&A session.

Does this mean that Assassin is going to be a class for the first playtest? Does this confirm that clerics, fighters, rangers, and wizards are already in? And, what does it mean by "default ranger?"

And I have to admit I like this phrase: "iconic versions of the classes that speak to players of all editions."

That makes me hopeful.

Reimagining Skills and Ability Scores (Sunday) - The role of skills has fluctuated throughout the life of Dungeons & Dragons, and ability scores have been of varying importance in each edition. Find out what the design team has done to reimagine these aspects of the game, and how they arrived at a system to marry the two concepts more closely together. Seminar includes Monte Cook, Bruce Cordell, and Robert Schwalb, and will be followed by a Q&A session.

Add, does this seminar mean that skills are definitely part of the core? Or are skills now a subset of a character's ability scores? It sounds like a merger of two related mechanics.

 

[Pour]

I think they were going for 'A-Z', but there are no classes Z, Y, or X, so Assassin to Wizard, though that does exclude Artificer and Ardent, doesn't it...

 

[Gadget]

I think you're reading to much into the statement (although you could be correct). Assassin has been a character class in several previous editions of the game and is fair game for discussion, as D&D next wants to incorporate elements of all previous incarnations of D&D. Plus it was likely chosen to be a play on the idiom from A(ssassin) to Z (there is no character class that begins with a 'Z' so they went up a few letters to 'W' with wizard).

Given the stated design goals and marketing hype, I would be surprised if the cleric, fighter, and wizard are not in the 'base' game in some fashion. As to rangers, there has always been some debate over the best way to realise this archetype (or even what the archetype is), so it would not be a shock to discover various incarnations of the class are available, maybe tied to the complexity dials spoken so much of lately.

 

[Dausuul]

It is worth noting that in both 1E and 3E, assassins were in the core books. So it's by no means unprecedented to include them in 5E. In fact, you could argue that it's traditional to put assassins in the core books for odd-numbered editions.

 

[YRUSirius]

Especially with the Assassins Creed video games in the mainstream media...

I'd expect the Assassin to be some kind of sub class or specialized class of the rogue base class, and the ranger class a sub class of the fighter.

-YRUSirius

 

[trancejeremy]

I think they were just being cute with the title.

But I would hope they have assassins. Part of being more inclusive is being open to non-heroic types. Some of the bigger novels that inspired D&D (Vance's Dying Earth and Leiber's GM/Fahfrd) were not particularly heroic.

EGG's own favorite D&D character (at least the one he wrote about most) was basically a knock off of the GM. Not an assassin, but most certainly a thief, not a "rogue".