Do you have any class? The class discussion thread (Paladins and Warlocks and Clerics, OH MY!!

[Tony Vargas]

. These classes exist in one game. There's tons of games out there without classes - I daresay, more games without than with.

IDK, that sounds like support for the idea that classes don't have a lot of utility in modern games.

Once a game goes class-based, though, it's embraced a brand of 1TW - each class representing the way you can do a certain sort if concept in that game.

So, really, I don't see the point as particularly valid these days.

Given the resurgence & dominance of D&D, you could argue that "modern RPG" isn't terribly relevant. I'll concede that.

 

[ccs]

Paladin is a perfect example. I've seen numerous references to Steve Rogers (aka Captain America) as the go to archetype for paladins. But, while that would certainly be true in earlier editions, it's not true anymore. There are, what, seven different kinds of official paladins now and each of them is very, very different.

And there's a reason for this. Too much lore in a class means that the class is locked into a single archetype. Everyone who plays that class has to play within a very narrow set of parameters defined by that class. 5e, with it's Archetypes, breaks out of that. If I want to play a First Nations inspired paladin with a spear dressed in doeskin leathers, talking about the spirits of the land and how we should respect our elders, I can. That's an Oath of Ancients paladin, right there.

Hey, guess what? I can play that straight out of the PHB in 1e.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Captain America isn’t even an old school Black And White Morality, uncompromising, Lawful Jerk Paladin. He fits the 5e devotion Paladin pretty well, but he is much more into compassion than he is like...the law.

Check out the Ultimates Cap, for a good look into everything Steve Rogers absolutely is not, has never been, and would never, ever, allow himself to be.

 

[FrogReaver]

I've yet to see a relatively balanced classless system. I'm not saying it's impossible for one to exist but one certainly doesn't exist yet. There's to much interdependencies on abilities and so no one has really mapped out a methodology for handling this complexity. Though at some point it may be possible to map out a relatively simple system that captures enough of those interdependencies to make a relatively balanced game.

 

[FrogReaver]

Class systems handle balance and identity very well. I read another poster talk about classless systems being able to behave like class based systems by having packages or whatever they want to call their groupings of abilities. My take away is that taking a class and renaming it to a package doesn't fundamentally change what's happening.

 

[FrogReaver]

My take away is that having a game with both heavily lore based classes and more general less role base classes is great.

That said I wish 5e would encourage changing lore up more than it currently does.

 

[Seramus]

Grab bag of abilities. The fluff is there as a collection of stereotypes and tropes that new players can draw upon for inspiration on how to play the class, and that works fine. It’s an amazing guide. But I can also take the rogue chassis and play a bookish librarian, an opportunistic soldier, a bumbling apprentice, or Indiana Jones.

 

[Hussar]

Hey, guess what? I can play that straight out of the PHB in 1e.

And yet, funnily enough, I've run into more than a few DM's who have told me, in no uncertain terms, that what I described was a ranger and could absolutely not be a paladin.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

The keys of a base class are:

- Right balance of power, of course.

- Fun gameplay. If class features are useful but boring then players will not want to play with this. For example the psychic enervation by the psionic wilder class wasn't very popular. In the Pathfinder there were options about this.

- Interesting background. A class is like cosplay or Halloween costume, or clothings by a certain urban tribe. It needs its own mark of identity. The soulborn and the incarnate from Magic of Incarnum were too similar to the paladin, with powers too linked with the alignments.

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I imagine samurai and ninja as base classes with martial maneuvers (let's see "Tome of Battle: Book of the Nine Swords") with ki power source. Some vestiges would give different types of powers as psionic, incarnum soulmelds or ki martial maneuvers

I miss the binders and the pacts with vestiges. I imagine the pact magic like a mini advance/prestige class everyday you could play a different one.

Favored souls now are a subclass, but there was a great potential as hook to create stories about conflicts and love-hate relations with the rest of divine spellcasters. I imagine them with subclasses like a softer version of monster templates (half-dragon, half-fey, half-celestial, half-infernal, half-elemental, pseudonatural, half-troll).

If wizards are power by study and sorcerer by training innate talent (like elite athletes or artists) the warlocks is the power by the astuteness, negotiation and logrolling. I don't like classes about buffer and nerfer powers because their are too boring as characters in the fiction adaptation. I would rather buff-breakers (for example curses where enemies lose damage reduction).

* Sometimes I try to imagine a fantasy setting where there is an arm races between warmages(3.5 complete arcane) and gunslingers (pathfinder class) creating tricks against each other in the battlefield. Who would you hire as mercenaries if gunpowder is cheaper than magic wands, but easier to suffer sabotage? (Isn't it a challenge for your creativity?).

 

[Hussar]

Well, I think, and IMO and all that, that the more lore that is built into a concept, the less it becomes a class and the more it becomes an archetype. If you look at most of the classes, before they choose an archetype, they really don't have an awful lot of lore built in. There's some - a cleric is a holy dude or dudette, a barbarian comes from the outskirts of civilization (typically) but, you could take any of the classes in radically different directions based on the archetype.

That's why you see fairly serious and pretty well supported arguments that some classes might be better served as an archetype. If paladins were limited to the LG paladin of earlier editions, then, really, they'd be an archetype with an alignment restriction. Why waste an entire class on such a limited concept?

It's one of the strengths of 5e that they use the base class and then branch off with archetypes. It makes the game simpler, for one, in that you don't have thirty different classes in the game, many of which are just variations on a theme. I mean, not to pick on @LuisCarlos17f, but, ninja and samurai are archetypes, not classes. A class needs to be a bare bones chasis that you can bolt archetypes onto.

What can you do with a Samurai class? It's so limited that you can't really build archetypes off of the base concept. Same with ninja. 5e HAS ninjas - a couple of them - Assassin Rogue, Shadow Monk, and I'm sure I could build a decent ninja using a warlock as well.

It's a really interesting concept that is found pretty much only in 5e. It might have some ancestry in Prestige Classes in 3e, but, not really. 5e has build in the notion that before 3rd level (most of the time) you're not really anything. You don't really get into your "class" as such until you get your archetype.