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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 3442316" data-attributes="member: 3586">To some extent, D&D assumes four basic roles (as shown in the Complete series) for PCs. A "balanced" party has at least one of each role.The Warrior - mainly distinguished by a full Base Attack. Classes that try to fill the warrior role without full Base Attack generally seem lacking; see Monk and Soulknife. Good examples are the Fighter and the Barbarian.The Arcane - mainly distinguished by a wide range of utility and offensive spells. Arcane casters tend to need to be able to teleport, fly, cast area effect damaging spells (such as fireball) and suchlike. The Wizard and Sorcerer do well as the arcane, but the Druid comes close, strangely enough (especially with the SC).The Adventurer - is a weird classification, but generally a class with Search as a class skill and Trapfinding fills the role. So, Rogue, Factotum, and Scout all work. The basic point of the Adventurer is to be able to deal with non-combat threats, especially traps and hidden features. The Divine - mainly distinguished by the ability to cast healing spells. In particular, a good divine must be able to heal damage, ability damage, ability drain, level loss, and death, especially as the levels increase. Unfortunately, amongst the PHB classes, only the cleric can fulfill this role. The inability for the druid to cast restoration and thus remove ability drain and level loss is a massive drawback.After that, there are the so-called "Fifth Wheel" classes, of which the Bard leads the pack.I've sort of foisted these choices on the group who will soon be playing the Shackled City AP - there are only four PCs, and the AP tend to need all the bases covered. (It looks like, at this point, we'll have a Dwarf Fighter, Human Factotum, Human Cleric of Zagyg, and some arcanist).Personally, I think the inability of the druid to cast Restoration is a mistake. If I was doing some redesign of D&D, I'd probably make a special feature of the cleric that they could cast cure spells as a swift action - the problem with a cleric isn't really their abilities, it's that they lose half their actions (or more) to keeping the party alive.Wizards have been good at designing adventurers of late, and the Arcane blaster is well covered, and in some ways a lack of Utility spells from a Warlock or similar in the arcane position can be covered by magic items. (esp. using MIC).So, what do you think?Cheers!</blockquote>

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