Do classes built for the 5E D&D *ENGINE* NEED sub-classes?

[Tony Vargas]

Even though the wizard has the mechanics that could support some of them now, it still has mechanics that actively undermine the concept , and while these can be ignored, it is only a little better than playing a feeble and frail waif with Con 19. And the wizard still represents its own distinctive -and rigid- archetype. For the sorcerer and warlock to be truly superfluous, the wizard would have to become more generic, to the point it no longer properly supports the D&D wizard/mage/MU

5e spellcasting mechanics vary so little from one class to another - particularly in that all cast spontaneously - that it wouldn't've been any great trick to implement the Vancian wizard, pact-making warlock, and innate-power Sorcerer as sub-classes of a single class, or even backgrounds. Mage w/Sage background: wizard, for instance.

Conversely, the Sorcerer, as the Warlock was, could've been made /more/ distinct from the wizard. Sorcery points don't go very far in that direction.

 

[Bacon Bits]

Generally, the buzz I've heard from players at my FLGS is that the Ranger is just ridiculously awful, period.

It's not that bad. If you know how the class works, Hunter is extremely potent. The level 3 and level 11 abilities are all good. Particularly when you go ranged, and doubly so when Feats aren't available. With Feats, Fighters are able to keep up a little too well.

The class itself has got four core problems:

1. Favored Terrain and Favored Enemy are the primary, defining abilities of the entire class, and they don't do anything. In the overwhelming majority of encounters and overland travel in the campaigns I've played in, they're functionally non-existent abilities. The DM often has to go out of their way to make them do something. Their benefit is that they eliminate penalties that usually get hand-waived away (Favored Terrain) or they grant benefits for rolls you essentially never need to know or for which you have to succeed (Favored Enemy, knowledge and tracking, respectively). Literally the best benefit of these abilities is the bonus languages that you learn. Amazingly, it's Rangers, not Bards or Wizards, that are the best linguists in the game.

2. Land's Stride, Hide in Plain Sight, Vanish, Feral Senses, Foe Slayer, and everything from Superior Hunter's Defense either a) never come up like FT and FE, or b) all come 5+ levels later than other classes get similar abilities.

3. The basic class design is far too narrow. With the exception of Hunter's Mark (spell) and Fighting Style, all damage boosting abilities this class gets come from the subclass. This means that every subclass they add needs to pack in essentially nothing but combat and damage dealing abilities. This is why Beastmaster is extremely poor in actual play. It spends all it's abilities making the companion able to kind of keep up, but then makes the Ranger burn all his actions to do anything with it. It's like an extremely bad Summon Monster spell that requires spending actions instead of maintaining concentration.

4. The class concept is wedged into an extremely small design space, and much of it isn't what players want anymore. The class is part fighter, part druid, part stealthy hunter. However, that means the class is stuck between Fighter, Druid, Rogue, Barbarian, and Bard (the other blended class). That's a very, very narrow design space. Simply put, there isn't much left to carve an identity out for the Ranger. The only remaining big concept is "pet class" because Druid gave that one up, and pets are extremely weak in 5e. It doesn't help that the iconic rangers are Drizzt and Robin Hood. Aragorn, the namesake, is kind of a blend of Fighter, Ranger, and Paladin. Who else do we have? Daniel Boone? Jim Bowie? Davy Crockett? Very few players care about exploring untamed wilderness like a frontiersman anymore. Our world has no wildernesses left to tame. Those that remain need protection, not exploration and subjugation.

I was handed a ten page packet by the Ranger player of a something-something Arcana version of the Ranger. It just seemed way too complicated. "Rangers have advantage on attack rolls against their favored enemies" was a one-sentence hot-patch that fixed MY issues with the Ranger class, although I understand the ten page print out had primarily to do with the Ranger's Terrain mastery features. Anyway if there's one thing I can definitely unreservedly agree with it's that groupthink is indeed a thing.

Unearthed Arcana's Revised Ranger. There have been several versions. The first version was very OP and I don't think anybody should actually play with that version, particularly that version's Beastmaster. The second verison was much more fair, but the designers still didn't like it.

 

[MoonSong]

5e spellcasting mechanics vary so little from one class to another - particularly in that all cast spontaneously - that it wouldn't've been any great trick to implement the Vancian wizard, pact-making warlock, and innate-power Sorcerer as sub-classes of a single class, or even backgrounds. Mage w/Sage background: wizard, for instance.

Conversely, the Sorcerer, as the Warlock was, could've been made /more/ distinct from the wizard. Sorcery points don't go very far in that direction.

Maybe, but quoting an old book on my father's library "The more general something is, the least appropriate it is to do anything". A generic Mage class would indeed be able to cover the three classes, but only so much. It would either fail to cover what makes the D&D wizard iconic, or it would do a poor job covering sorcerer and warlock.(As was the case during the playtest, the Mage was tailored for the wizard, and would have saddled sorcerers and warlocks with a lot of wizard baggage) And what for? just to satisfy a minimalist impulse? to have subclasses with subsubclasses? to prevent multiclassing among the three classes?

Now, maybe having the classes be more different from each other could work, but that comes with its own set of problems. Warlock and Sorcerer are too much like the wizard in some aspects -causing a bunch of misguided "why bother?" comments-and too little like it in some others (preventing them from contributing and causing them to be less desirable to the party). Accentuating the differences could add more differentiation in the former, but could as well cause even more of the latter, making it harder to keep these classes balanced. And from experience designers historically have a tendency to overcompensate when it comes to innovate for the sorcerer.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Maybe, but quoting an old book on my father's library "The more general something is, the least appropriate it is to do anything". A generic Mage class would indeed be able to cover the three classes, but only so much. It would either fail to cover what makes the D&D wizard iconic, or it would do a poor job covering sorcerer and warlock.(As was the case during the playtest, the Mage was tailored for the wizard, and would have saddled sorcerers and warlocks with a lot of wizard baggage) And what for? just to satisfy a minimalist impulse? to have subclasses with subsubclasses? to prevent multiclassing among the three classes?

MCing among casters already necessitates a special sub-system to handle combining their casting advancement, so that doesn't sound like a terrible idea. Rather, a character who wanted to split the difference between, say, innate-talent Sorcerer and book-learn'n Wizard would take some combination of class options associated with each, rather than going all in one way or another. But, that's get'n super-hypothetical, since 5e doesn't offer that level of player-side customization.

Now, maybe having the classes be more different from each other could work, but that comes with its own set of problems. Warlock and Sorcerer are too much like the wizard in some aspects -causing a bunch of misguided "why bother?" comments-and too little like it in some others (preventing them from contributing and causing them to be less desirable to the party). Accentuating the differences could add more differentiation in the former, but could as well cause even more of the latter, making it harder to keep these classes balanced. And from experience designers historically have a tendency to overcompensate when it comes to innovate for the sorcerer.

The key problem I see with 'doing' the 3.x Sorcerer in 5e (the 5e Sorcerer does the 4e Sorcerer fine, it just needs to cover each 'build' with a sub-class), is, again, that lack of player options to customize the character. Each sorcerer you could have made in 3.x would require a sub-class tailored to it.