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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 5773225" data-attributes="member: 32536">Cynical? Disspirited? Sorry, but you're completely mistaken there. I'm actually rather optimistic about 5E. I vastly prefer to like things rather than hate them, and my wishes are closer to being a hope for positive change rather than a despair about an unfixable solution.The real issue, I think, is that I simply have very different likes and dislikes than you. I want different things from the game than you. I have different ideas for what a well-designed class is than you. But, I think it is rather inappropriate to label either of our viewpoints with negative terms like "cynical".There are a lot of reasons why they can't (or rather, shouldn't) be done in a single Fighter class. A big part of this is that I don't hold a single Fighter class as an ideal worth striving for. At no point in my life have I ever done so. In general, I prefer a larger number of mechanically simple classes with clear focuses, rather than a small number of 'toolkit' classes designed to be customized into other things. I think my preferred approach has more mechanical elegance and brings out the flavor of a class better.I mean, let's look at the example of two reasonable non-magical combatant archetypes: the heavily armored melee fighter and the lightly armored archer. These two archetypes are almost complete opposites, with opposing strengths and weaknesses. The armored knight would be able to safely take many hits and is skilled at fighting in close quarters, but would be very ineffective at ranged combat. On the other hand, the archer would want to avoid close combat at any costs, but is very good at fighting from a distance. In many ways, the archer is more similar to the stereotypical Wizard than he would be to the armored knight, and the armored knight is more similar to the Paladin or Barbarian than he would be to the archer. Those two archetypes belong in different classes, not the same class.It would take me a bit more effort, but I'd argue the same for many of the other archetypes and concepts I mentioned in the first post. Their differences outweigh their similarities, so trying to create a catch-all Fighter class simply serves to diminish your ability to create any of them.I'll also admit that I'm not at all a fan of a 3E-stlye skill system. I'd rather see such a system removed entirely, rather than elaborated upon. I think that'd be the subject of a different thread, though....What I said is not cynical, a solution to some unstated "problem", or a method of "letting non-magical characters still perform magic". I don't even know where to begin with this one...Of course everyone should be awesome. Of course not everyone should be a spellcaster. That doesn't mean non-magical should equate to "basic attacks and skill checks" while magical equates to "complicated sub-systems".Personally, I think there should be a wide variety of very different sub-systems of varying complexity and style. Non-magical warriors need to be able to do cool stuff, and things like maneuvers and powers are perfectly appropriate for that in my book. At the same time, these maneuvers and powers should work in a very different way than something like Arcane spells, which should use a different sub-system to achieve different effects with different mechanics.I'm a little bit confused here... You seem to move from disagreeing with something I didn't intend, to agreeing with important parts of what I did try to say, to disagreeing with one of my key points... Maybe I'll just talk some more about the subject and hope I express my point a bit better, then.Mounts are not at all useful for exploring a traditional dungeon. They wouldn't have the room to maneuver needed to play to their strengths, and they might very well not even fit in the corridors. Exotic mounts like gryphons would be even more disadvantaged, though possibly still useful for other reasons, I suppose. As such, mounted combat is a trivial concern for dungeon-diving. A Cavalier class would be useless in a dungeon-focused campaign.That said, the mounted cavalry soldier is one of the more absolutely important warrior archetypes in history. For any campaign that focuses on something outside of the dungeon, mounted combat becomes really, really important and interesting. A Cavalier class would be really useful in any of these campaigns.Generally speaking, I'm not a fan of the idea that any class, class feature, or mechanic needs to be equally useful in every campaign. That idea isn't true anyways, because I don't think there has been anything in D&D that everyone wanted to use. Thinks like "poké-mounts" are a terrible solution, because they built on reducing what should be a core part of a class's identity to something optional and minor. Sure, a Cavalier is not going to fit in every campaign, but, well, neither are Elves, or Clerics.</blockquote>

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