D&D General Ditching Archetypes 6E?

[Remathilis]

Who's forcing anything?

The class is what it is and does what it does, and if you don't want to play it then don't. If no-one wants to play it (which can be true of any class or role, depending on the specific group) then either you go without or recruit an NPC.

My goal is not to be bored when playing my character. If all the fighter can do it fight, the cleric heal, the thief find traps and the wizard whatever (idk, become God? What even is the wizard's role?) and you just sit there because you can't contribute otherwise, you don't have an RPG, you have pen and paper Gauntlet.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

My goal is not to be bored when playing my character. If all the fighter can do it fight, the cleric heal, the thief find traps and the wizard whatever (idk, become God? What even is the wizard's role?) and you just sit there because you can't contribute otherwise, you don't have an RPG, you have pen and paper Gauntlet.

iirc the wizard was originally utility

 

[Faolyn]

Warriors:
--- Knight (shiny armour, etc.)
--- Swashbuckler (light-armoured, ranged or melee)
--- Veteran (basic mercenary type)
--- Ranger (woods warriors, non-casters, no animal companion)

I'm not seeing all that much difference between the Knight and the Veteran. The difference in reality was one of money and social standing (you had to be able to afford your armor, weapons, and horse), and there's nothing preventing a Veteran from fighting on horseback or a Knight from fighting on the ground.

This list is definitely forgetting a few thing. There's no ranged-weapon specialist (archers and knife-throwers are quite different from Swashbucklers) or Brute/Brawler (artless smashing or trained punching).

The only reason why Rangers shouldn't start with an animal companion is that animal companion should be an ability available to anyone. There's no reason why a fighter shouldn't have a loyal dog or horse, or a thief can't have a trained monkey, or a cleric can't be accompanied by an animal considered sacred to their faith.

Rogues:
--- Thief (basic sneaky-scouty type)
--- Assassin (hired killer or spy)
--- Charmer (talky persuasive type)

Anyone with a high enough Charisma can be a talky persuasive type. The only reason it's commonly associated with rogues is because media often has "charming rogues," because if they weren't charming, it would be too obvious they're actually @$$holes.

--- Dancer (genericized wire-fu type, replaces Monk)

This... doesn't make much sense. There's more to "wire-fu" than moving around a lot.

Casters:
--- Cleric (divine caster as usual)
--- Nature Cleric (a.k.a. Druid, covers Shaman as well)

I have to say that if you think Druids should be kicked because they're part of one particular culture, then Shamans should be as well. It also refers specifically to a single group (indigenous Siberians) and some people think it's been misappropriated--and it certainly doesn't mean the "savage tribal magic user" that a lot of people envision it as and that AD&D has historically used it to mean (along with Witch Doctor--a concept invented in England to refer to English people who protected themselves and others from English witches during the 16th century). If anything, shamans are clerics who have the ability to communicate with and command various spirits, including ancestral and divine spirits, not just nature spirits. The name shaman also certainly isn't a catch-all term--according to Wikipedia, Native Americans do not like that term being used with them. If a 6e were to have such a class (which would be cool), then it should probably be called something like Spirit-Caller or Spirit-Talker, and the concept of the spirit world should be more fully fleshed out (and not just relegated to being a type of fey), and an educated cultural consultant and sensitivity reader should be employed.

--- War Cleric (covers Paladin also)

I was in a game once that had a paladin of Chauntea--the Realms' agriculture goddess. Considering the sheer number of homebrew cleric domains you can find, there's a large call for clerics that aren't just "kinda paladins" and healers. Same for paladins; the idea of the holy warrior isn't just for deus vulting infidels.

--- Diviner (divnination spells etc. mostly go here)
--- Illusionist (mind-screwers, charmers)
--- Necromancer (they make things dead then play with the corpses)
--- Summoner (summoning, gating, conjuring spells and familiars/animal companions exclusively go here)
--- Mage (artillerists and buffers)
Oddballs:
--- Psionicist (if it can be made to fit without hosing Illusionists' screw-with-your-mind niche, debatable)
--- Tactician (maybe best as a non-adventuring class?)

Why make them a non-adventuring class? For that matter, it wouldn't be hard to give a tactician adventuring abilities.

--- Artificer (or Tinkerer; specifically for games/settings that have lots of devices and tech)

If anything should be a non-adventuring class, it should be the Artificer or Alchemist types, since it should take days, months, or years to make the things they make, not rounds or a long rest.

What's intentionally missing?
--- Swordmage - the classic "I wanna do it all" class - gone in any form.
--- Bard - can't make it fit between Charmer and Illusionist - gone.
--- Warlord or Leader - classic "I'm the boss" class, also healing is strictly Clerical.
--- Barbarian - can't make it fit between the other Warrior classes except as a very boring one-trick pony - gone.
--- Multi-classing - gone.

I vaguely agree with Bard not for the reason you posted. I have zero problem with a "dabbler" class--a little bit of fighting, a little bit of magic, a little bit of thievery. I feel D&D doesn't do a good job with the idea that magic takes on different forms for different magical traditions (they talk about the idea at times, but don't show it mechanically). For instance, every class uses the same components, even sorcerers, who theoretically should at most need something to help them focus but not require verbal or somatic components. And they definitely don't take cultural differences into consideration. Hence, the reason I vaguely agree with Bard is that all the magic being the same except that Bardic magic is also musical seems weird. Musician can be a background.

(The ideal solution would be to take in-setting cultural differences into consideration.)

However, Level Up gives Bards "Battle Hymns" (in addition to full spellcasting, which I feel is a bit too much), which is one way to give Bards magic that is both useful and thematic and doesn't step on anyone's toes, and such a concept could easily be expanded to give them a wider range of abilities.

That being said, thematically, Bards are different from Illusionists, since their magic is (or should be, IMO) more about communication, diplomacy, and entertainment than it is about messing with other people's minds and senses. And the Charmer isn't needed because anyone can take that role.

As for the others:

I'm not personally a fan of swordmages but I don't see a problem with them. They can do two things, not "all," and they tend to not be not nearly as good or versatile as full fighters or full casters.

Warlords/Leaders: No, magical healing shouldn't be strictly cleric. Or if it is, it should be strictly the province of clerics of healing, life, fertility, and similar things. There's little reason why a war god or smith god should have healing clerics, after all. Also, this is that old "are hit points actually meat points?" argument again. If hit points aren't purely meat points, then there's no reason why a Warlord--or Bard, even--can't restore some; they're not healing wounds, they're increasing morale and giving the listeners a stronger desire to survive the battle, and restoring hit points is how that's represented.

If anything, limit magical healing and make nonmagical healing more effective; healing potions, at least the weaker type, should be more common, cheaper, and easier to make by people with knowledge of herbalism or alchemy. If we can assume magic is real, then we can also assume that there are plenty of semi-magical plants and other materials that can be cultivated and used. Let people with herbalism spend some time in the forest and then boil up a healthful tisane.

Barbarian: While I'm also not a fan, I think that many people would say that they are not even remotely boring. However, they should not be "savage tribal warriors," since a berserker concept is definitely not limited to that idea. It's a type of warrior that can be said to enter a very violent fugue state. If you have no problem with a presumably dispassionate assassin who kills for money--equally "one trick"--the barbarian shouldn't be a problem. They could also be turned into a semi-magical fighter; instead of spells, they channel magical forces, elemental/natural (storms, earthquakes, infernos, or simply bestial forces), otherworldly (madness from demonic GOO, or chaotic sources), or even divine, like the Greek Maenads. That would give them a niche.

And no to getting rid of multi-classing. Many people like to fully envision their characters before they make them, and it's not always going to be in a way that completely maps to a single class. And lots of other people find that play takes their character in different directions to what they imagined. I didn't start Rime out thinking she'd be as much of a front-line fighter as she ended up being, but once her role became obvious, it made sense to multiclass into fighter.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

My goal is not to be bored when playing my character. If all the fighter can do it fight, the cleric heal, the thief find traps and the wizard whatever (idk, become God? What even is the wizard's role?) and you just sit there because you can't contribute otherwise, you don't have an RPG, you have pen and paper Gauntlet.

Hell, you barely even have that. At least in Gauntlet, it's always some kind of combat challenge so you're always contributing.

 

[Remathilis]

iirc the wizard was originally utility

Utility is a fancy word for "do everything". They were useful in combat (fireball, magic missile), exploration (invisibility, dimension door), social (charm person, friends) and knowledge (detect magic, see invisible). Yet they don't really map to a specific pillar or role the way fighter, rogue or cleric do. Even 4e had a hard time trying to make the "controller" role work since every class got some form of control and the wizard was still chucking fireball at people.

I mean, if the fighter excels at fighting, the cleric at healing, the rogue at exploration and bard at social, the wizard really just kinda does all of that and is only limited by what spells they have at that given moment.

 

[Lanefan]

My statement does not imply those three things. Maybe point two, but one and three, no.

My point is simple: Game designers, most of the time, do better than someone making homebrew. The reason is simply - time. They are literally paid to sit forty hours a week to work on the game. Homebrew designers generally work a job, and then put their extra time and effort into game design.

I by no means discount they can't come up with good ideas. That they can't help out a class and make it a bit more balanced. But homebrew, as in changing many rules or creating your own game or world takes an enormous amount of time. And to do it properly, it takes 40-hour work weeks.

Creating a setting from scratch to playable took me about a year of nowhere-near-constant effort, while working a full-time job. At a ve-e-ery rough guess I'd say it came in at well under 100 hours total. Most of the time-consuming busy-work lay in hand-drawing and colouring the maps.

Subsequent expanding and refining that setting has taken me about the same amount of time again, but a lot of that consisted of putting online and tidying up things I already had on paper. (though digital mapping is every bit as time-consuming as doing it longhand!).

As for creating one's own system, that's different. Kitbashing an existing system into something you're willing to run/play can be done in a few somewhat-intensive weeks, but the tweaking and refining and fine-tuning after that really never ends - says he, over 40 years in to that process.....

 

[Lanefan]

My goal is not to be bored when playing my character. If all the fighter can do it fight, the cleric heal, the thief find traps and the wizard whatever (idk, become God? What even is the wizard's role?) and you just sit there because you can't contribute otherwise, you don't have an RPG, you have pen and paper Gauntlet.

They can all talk, they can (and, I hope, do) have memorable personalities and character quirks, they can all try to do things outside their normal sphere only they won't be very good at it.

And yes, it helps if one accepts as a fact of life that not everyone is going to be involved all the time.

Good point about the wizard's role, though. Personally I'd like to see it reduced to artillery and buffing, with mind-messery, necromancy, and summoning-conjuring split off into their own separate and distinct classes (and I could probably live without summoning-conjuring).

 

[Lanefan]

I'm not seeing all that much difference between the Knight and the Veteran. The difference in reality was one of money and social standing (you had to be able to afford your armor, weapons, and horse), and there's nothing preventing a Veteran from fighting on horseback or a Knight from fighting on the ground.

Perhaps. I'm trying to separate chivalric (or anti-chivalric) knight types out from common fighters as I think there's class-design space for both.

This list is definitely forgetting a few thing. There's no ranged-weapon specialist (archers and knife-throwers are quite different from Swashbucklers) or Brute/Brawler (artless smashing or trained punching).

Brute-Brawler comes square under common fighter; they just choose 'open hand' as a weapon proficiency. As for ranged specialists, yeah, I have a hard time fitting those in anywhere.

The only reason why Rangers shouldn't start with an animal companion is that animal companion should be an ability available to anyone. There's no reason why a fighter shouldn't have a loyal dog or horse, or a thief can't have a trained monkey, or a cleric can't be accompanied by an animal considered sacred to their faith.

One of my unstated goals is that animal companions, familiars, and the like go the way of the dodo. Very-short-term (as in, one combat's worth) summoned critters are fine, but long-term pets etc. are IME way more headache than they're worth.

Anyone with a high enough Charisma can be a talky persuasive type. The only reason it's commonly associated with rogues is because media often has "charming rogues," because if they weren't charming, it would be too obvious they're actually @$$holes.

Someone's niche has to be the 'face' role; it used to be Bards but they're no more in my proposal, therefore a variant of Rogue gets it. The deceiver, the flatterer, the con artist - sure, not nice people, but long-standing archetypes.

This... doesn't make much sense. There's more to "wire-fu" than moving around a lot.

True. Just trying to subsume the existing Monk into something more broad-based and less culture-specific.

I have to say that if you think Druids should be kicked because they're part of one particular culture, then Shamans should be as well.

Agreed. I mention them only to indicate that the concept - along with Druid, Witch, and a few others - gets swept under the Nature Cleric banner.

I was in a game once that had a paladin of Chauntea--the Realms' agriculture goddess. Considering the sheer number of homebrew cleric domains you can find, there's a large call for clerics that aren't just "kinda paladins" and healers. Same for paladins; the idea of the holy warrior isn't just for deus vulting infidels.

Hence, War Clerics. One could, though, keep "Paladin" as a not-always-complimentary label for the most extremist of War Clerics in any faith.

Why make them a non-adventuring class? For that matter, it wouldn't be hard to give a tactician adventuring abilities.

Perhaps, but I can't see an avenue that gets there without making the class an "I'm the boss" type

If anything should be a non-adventuring class, it should be the Artificer or Alchemist types, since it should take days, months, or years to make the things they make, not rounds or a long rest.

In the adventuring sense, they don't make the tinker-toys; they just know how to use them far better than anyone else.

I vaguely agree with Bard not for the reason you posted. I have zero problem with a "dabbler" class--a little bit of fighting, a little bit of magic, a little bit of thievery.

This is exactly and specifically what I'm trying to avoid.

I feel D&D doesn't do a good job with the idea that magic takes on different forms for different magical traditions (they talk about the idea at times, but don't show it mechanically). For instance, every class uses the same components, even sorcerers, who theoretically should at most need something to help them focus but not require verbal or somatic components. And they definitely don't take cultural differences into consideration. Hence, the reason I vaguely agree with Bard is that all the magic being the same except that Bardic magic is also musical seems weird. Musician can be a background.

I'm fine with Bards having a bespoke magic system based on sound and sonic energy but I can't otherwise make the class fit between the others without squashing a bunch of niche borders.

That being said, thematically, Bards are different from Illusionists, since their magic is (or should be, IMO) more about communication, diplomacy, and entertainment than it is about messing with other people's minds and senses. And the Charmer isn't needed because anyone can take that role.

Anyone can try to take that role. The Charmer knows how to do it.

Just like anyone can pick up a weapon and try to fight.

I'm not personally a fan of swordmages but I don't see a problem with them. They can do two things, not "all," and they tend to not be not nearly as good or versatile as full fighters or full casters.

Similar to Arcane Tricksters, they seem to be nothing more than an attempt to squash what should be two classes into one in order to provide more "do everything" flexibility.

Warlords/Leaders: No, magical healing shouldn't be strictly cleric. Or if it is, it should be strictly the province of clerics of healing, life, fertility, and similar things. There's little reason why a war god or smith god should have healing clerics, after all.

Agreed; not all deities have to support all types of Clerics. A war deity, for example, might only support War Clerics. A forest deity might only support Nature Clerics. And so on.

That said, I don't break down deities' spheres of influence to that extent other than a vague handwave, and they're often quite broad. The Dwarven war god Clanggedon, for example, covers war, battle, death.....and poetry, go figure.

Also, this is that old "are hit points actually meat points?" argument again. If hit points aren't purely meat points, then there's no reason why a Warlord--or Bard, even--can't restore some; they're not healing wounds, they're increasing morale and giving the listeners a stronger desire to survive the battle, and restoring hit points is how that's represented.

Increased morale can be mechanically reflected as a to-hit bonus, a bonus on saves vs fear, and so forth.

If anything, limit magical healing and make nonmagical healing more effective; healing potions, at least the weaker type, should be more common, cheaper, and easier to make by people with knowledge of herbalism or alchemy. If we can assume magic is real, then we can also assume that there are plenty of semi-magical plants and other materials that can be cultivated and used. Let people with herbalism spend some time in the forest and then boil up a healthful tisane.

We have a whole subsystem in our games devoted to herbs and herbcraft, including healing herbs. Way ahead of you there.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

They can all talk, they can (and, I hope, do) have memorable personalities and character quirks, they can all try to do things outside their normal sphere only they won't be very good at it.

Genuinely: Why should we design a game with the expectation that characters will be kinda bad at most of the things they'll do, and only decent at (say) a quarter of things they do? That's not a particularly wise game design, I should think!

And yes, it helps if one accepts as a fact of life that not everyone is going to be involved all the time.

Why should we accept this? Why should we not involve most people most of the time, and design a game so that it is effective, productive play to be involved and participating?

Your reason seems to be "it's possible for things to not work out if there's any overlap", but as we can see, it's possible for things to not work out if there isn't overlap either, so that doesn't really make any distinction between the two. It would seem that, in the absence of a better point of distinction, we should choose a design that aims for greater, not lesser, player engagement.

Good point about the wizard's role, though. Personally I'd like to see it reduced to artillery and buffing, with mind-messery, necromancy, and summoning-conjuring split off into their own separate and distinct classes (and I could probably live without summoning-conjuring).

Doesn't this still run afoul of your own descriptions, though? Artillery is combat. It would seem you're already giving the Wizard power in the Fighter's allegedly-exclusive domain.

This is part of why the hyperfocus on perfect niche protection is such a design quagmire. If you can't allow even the tiniest overlap, it's not niche protection anymore--and with the history and structures of D&D as it has been these 40-50 years, you'll be constantly stumbling over parts that feel so important but have to be discarded. You'll often leaving classes so diminished, it will be hard to see the point, but hard to dispense with something so iconic. Would you scrap the Wizard if you found "utility" to be too overbroad or, when trimmed, too limited to be worth keeping? Magic-User literally dates back to the oldest days of D&D--very little could be argued to have more tradition behind it.

 

[Lanefan]

Genuinely: Why should we design a game with the expectation that characters will be kinda bad at most of the things they'll do, and only decent at (say) a quarter of things they do? That's not a particularly wise game design, I should think!

Two words. Party interdependence.

Assuming the default style of play to be a group of characters going out on adventures (an assumption that doesn't seem too controversial) then doesn't it make sense to design in such a way as to encourage and support that style?

If each character is good at a quarter of the things they can do, then put four of 'em together in the right combination and between them they're good at everything.

That, and I'm quite fine with bigger parties than just four even if there's just four players.

Why should we accept this? Why should we not involve most people most of the time, and design a game so that it is effective, productive play to be involved and participating?

"Most of the people most of the time" still isn't "everyone all the time", which seems to be what some want.

That said, IME even when a character is mechanically inept in a situation (e.g. an Illusionist in a party facing a bunch of illusion-immune undead) its player still finds ways to participate in-character and have the character do things.

Doesn't this still run afoul of your own descriptions, though? Artillery is combat. It would seem you're already giving the Wizard power in the Fighter's allegedly-exclusive domain.

Terminology issue, my bad. When I say combat I usually default to melee; and a wizard who wants to start dropping artillery into melee combats won't be around for long once the survivors among his allies get to him.

Further, artillery can also be useful against structures. Foes hiding in a wooden building? Fireball it, and see how long they stay in there.

This is part of why the hyperfocus on perfect niche protection is such a design quagmire. If you can't allow even the tiniest overlap, it's not niche protection anymore--and with the history and structures of D&D as it has been these 40-50 years, you'll be constantly stumbling over parts that feel so important but have to be discarded. You'll often leaving classes so diminished, it will be hard to see the point, but hard to dispense with something so iconic. Would you scrap the Wizard if you found "utility" to be too overbroad or, when trimmed, too limited to be worth keeping? Magic-User literally dates back to the oldest days of D&D--very little could be argued to have more tradition behind it.

It's also a question of defining each class' niche. If for example divination spells could be entirely removed from arcane casters and given to divine casters, they then become part of the divine-casters' niche. If charm-dominate effects could be removed from generic wizards and given solely to Illusionists, they become part of the Illusionsts' niche. Lather rinse repeat until generic wizards are left with artillery and spot damage, buffs (e.g. Fly, Invisibility, etc.), and some oddball stuff like Identify at one end and Wish at the other. And artillery becomes their niche; as such, Clerics lose spells like Flamestrike, Call Lightning, etc.

Even with that, niche protection will never be perfect. But here, perfect is the enemy of good enough, and it can still be made a lot stronger than it is right now.