Blue
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
Had an interesting case of this yesterday. I've recently started a West Marches campaign with a few other DMs, and we're also playing on each other's adventures as we get inertia going. While the idea is to have a stable of character, two of the players had just joined and only had one character each, and another player really wanted to play her druid, she was on track to be our first 4th level character. (Which she accomplished, yea!) That druid was the only character I knew, having DMed for her before, but this time I was playing.
So we had a moon druid, a fighter, and a paladin. The other player woth choices and I discussed - he brought in a sorcerer, no overlap. My choices were: a druid - exact class, a fighter - exact class, or a battlesmith artificer. I brought in the artificer - very defender-y front line, but also some rogue, INT skills, some spell. Not a huge overlap I thought.
Now, it turns out the vhuman Fighter had the sentinel feat, the Paladin had the interception fighting style from Tasha's, and my Steel Defender has his reaction defend as well. All of us tanky, defendery, and not specializing in damage. Plus a moon druid with CR 1 forms, so not a lot of damage but very tanky.
So even though we were different classes, we ended up having a lot of overlap at the table. In hindsight, both my gnomish Circle of Stars Druid and my grappler Fighter would have played more differently in combat. On the other hand, I had a completely different set of skills (and tools!) with the Artificer.
In the end, we all had fun. The moon druid stayed more caster, and we all took turns defending each other. But if the combats were more challenging we weren't well positioned to deal with it since overlap in characters led to gaps elsewhere, like ranged combat. We made it work, but I think we'd rather have been able to show how cool we were in our own niche.
So we had a moon druid, a fighter, and a paladin. The other player woth choices and I discussed - he brought in a sorcerer, no overlap. My choices were: a druid - exact class, a fighter - exact class, or a battlesmith artificer. I brought in the artificer - very defender-y front line, but also some rogue, INT skills, some spell. Not a huge overlap I thought.
Now, it turns out the vhuman Fighter had the sentinel feat, the Paladin had the interception fighting style from Tasha's, and my Steel Defender has his reaction defend as well. All of us tanky, defendery, and not specializing in damage. Plus a moon druid with CR 1 forms, so not a lot of damage but very tanky.
So even though we were different classes, we ended up having a lot of overlap at the table. In hindsight, both my gnomish Circle of Stars Druid and my grappler Fighter would have played more differently in combat. On the other hand, I had a completely different set of skills (and tools!) with the Artificer.
In the end, we all had fun. The moon druid stayed more caster, and we all took turns defending each other. But if the combats were more challenging we weren't well positioned to deal with it since overlap in characters led to gaps elsewhere, like ranged combat. We made it work, but I think we'd rather have been able to show how cool we were in our own niche.