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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 5895515" data-attributes="member: 6688937">Okay, without reading the rest of the thread first...1. The Fighter Is the Best at . . . Fighting!Sounds good. I have a minor concern that this is a lot of weight for one class, given the breadth of what "Fighting" entails in a game like D&D. 2. The Fighter Draws on Training and Experience, not MagicOkay.3. The Fighter Exists in a World of Myth, Fantasy, and LegendOkay, not sure why this and #2 aren't some kind of joint point, but whatever.4. The Fighter Is VersatileThe fighter is skilled with all weapons. The best archer, jouster, and swordmaster in the realm are all fighters. A monk can match a fighter’s skill when it comes to unarmed combat, and rangers and paladins are near a fighter’s skill level, but the fighter is typically in a class by itself regardless of weapon. And this is where my problem with #1 comes up. This idea is okay, I think, except that we don't seem to want the realm's best archer, jouster, and swordmaster to be the same guy! I'll rant below on this.5. The Fighter Is the Toughest CharacterMy Barbarian's toes say "ouch."6. A High-Level Fighter and a High-Level Wizard Are EqualAbsolutely no problem here. Although I prefer taking the Wizard down a few notches by making magic riskier than it has been of late. Anyway, I generally don't object to the overall tone, except to the #1 & #4 rant below.Begin Rant, Ignore as you will:The problem with #4\#1 is pretty fundamental. So the fighter is good an everything with every weapon. Fine, so long as I have only one at the table. A recent BECMI-ish game that I played in saw three fighters at the table. We were functionally identical.  It made magic item distribution an argumentative chore, with the added bonus that we were defined by our stuff...I thought that was a bad thing. It was bad enough that the DM retrofitted in some subclasses for us by 5th level. So 3.x approaches this problem with feats. The fighter got the most, and they helped spruce them up with specialties. The problem is that now the mechanical weight is on the feats, not the class. So I can't look at (or write up) a Fighter without looking at his list of feats to find out what he can really do. Suddenly, the idea that the fighter is best at fighting becomes questionable. A specialist with his weapon can be far more effective that a non-specialized fighter. Which brings up another question:Which fighter do you balance with the Wizard? Is the super-swordsman or Joe Generico the fighter who is equally effective as the spellchucker? If you make something (anything) like specialization count so little that this difference is academic, then I (as a DM, if not player) will resent the extra effort that it burdens me with. If you later add in an Archer class, should he be better than the Fighter at Archery? If you do take that route (and don't splatbook sales demand it?), is a large party better served by dumping the Fighter and instead having an Archer, Swashbuckler, and Weaponmaster?End RantMaybe themes will help make this a bit easier? Obviously, I don't know how well they will help this, but the possibility is there. Tacking "Lurker", "Slayer", or "Academic" to the top of the Character Sheet might make it a bit easier to tell right off how they work. I just hope that themes are already mechanically optimized. I hate the idea of having to again build NPCs tiny piece by tiny piece. Anyhow, time to read the rest of the thread and find out how crazy I am.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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