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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 9749793" data-attributes="member: 7006">Archetypes (or Kits, or Subclasses, or whatever) to me have always been mainly more specific narrative descriptors of a particular PC.  Which means they aren't necessary for the game if the player is one who actually spends the time really delving into who their PC is and what their "job" is... but I would imagine at least 9 out of 10 players don't actually do that.What kind of Fighter is your PC?  Where did they learn to fight?  What is the organization they fight for/with?  What fighting style do they fight with?  These are all things that a player can come up with on their own... but it certainly doesn't hurt when they can just see some ideas out there that have been pre-designed and pre-built for them to choose from, like a Swashbuckler, or a Gladiator, or an Arcane Archer, or a Cavalier etc. etc.What kind of magic does your Wizard focus on?  Are they an Illusionist?  A Necromancer?  A Warmage?  A Theurge?  A Scribe?  These choices can help guide a player towards how they see their Wizard and thus the types of spells they select and use.And to me... I actually don't really care whether any of these are actual Classes or merely Archetypes/Subclasses of other Classes-- because all those two buckets do is reflect the number of game mechanics that are duplicated OR unique to that specific character narrative.  If they are Archetypes/Subclasses, then they will have like a half-dozen unique mechanics and the rest are all duplicated same as all the other Fighters or Wizards out there.  Or if they are actually Classes themselves, then most mechanics for it will be unique to it (because why else would it be its own class if they weren't?)The important thing to me about any of this is that it is the narrative, story, and description that will get applied to the PC that actually means something, moreso than the special game rules it gets when playing the tactical combat mini-game.  Being a hermetic druid that can see and interact with the spirits of the land as part of the Circle of the Shepherd is the actual juice of the game... not the fact that at 2nd level I can use my Reaction to grant Advantage to an ally's attack roll if they are within 30' of a specific point.  There are already dozens of ways to grant allies Advantage, so why is this game mechanic supposed to be a big deal?  It's only because that specific point is where my "spirit ally" is (as per the narrative description), and thus the actions and relations I have to that "spirit ally" and how we interact with each other (and how the spirit interacts with other characters and NPCs) is what makes the story interesting and compelling.  And these kinds of things get added to the game when we use Classes/Archetypes/Subclasses.  So they are only a good thing as far as I'm concerned.</blockquote>

Verification