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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5947532" data-attributes="member: 22779">Yeah, despite Tony V's cynicism, I do remain hopeful for a neglected middle.  Look, I LOVE the fact that 4e classes are fairly well balanced.  I do.  And, I don't believe that the balance came at the cost of creativity.  However, I do accept that some do believe this to be true.  Honestly, I think a large amount of it is in the presentation, not in the substance.  Nobody truly wants unbalanced games.  Not really.  If we did, then 3e wouldn never have replaced 2e and we'd likely all be playing RIFTS.  We want ... balance is such a loaded word... parity.  The classes don't have to be exactly the same, but, they have to at least be playing the same game.AD&D largely did achieve this for fighter types.  The fighter types dealt so much damage that if you wanted something dead, the fighter was certainly a viable option.  Or ranger or paladin, doesn't matter.  The thief was a bit more problematic but, honestly, I saw the workaround for this with the multiclassing options.  An MU/Thief or a Cleric/Thief, or ever a Fighter/Thief needed about the same xp as the other classes because thief xp was so low.  A Fighter/Thief doesn't need a whole lot more xp than a ranger, for example.  So, you're not really giving up anything.That's kludgy though, so, I'd prefer the thief/rogue to get some serious loving - like it did in 3e.  Unfortunately in 3e, the casters got so much loving that it becomes problematic.  Now, there's no going back to the AD&D idea of having sharp limitations on casters because that's going to annoy far too many people who want to play casters and want to cast spells most of the time.But, if you present the classes in such a way that the descriptions show how strongly the classes are differentiated, then I think many of the criticisms go away.  4e made the mistake of trying to show how much each class was the same - they all use largely the same mechanics - and people reacted negatively to that.  People want class to differentiate characters.  Some people want unique mechanics for each class.Well, I think we can have our cake and eat it too.  Themes are where you differentiate characters in the game world.  Make the themes actually matter, and you have two totally different characters, even though they might be the same class.  The classes are the basic chasis - mostly the fundamental stuff like AC, HD, attack bonuses, casting capabilities and whatnot.  So, classes are going to look fairly similar on paper - just like if you look at two classes in the D20 SRD, they don't look terribly different.  Open a tab in your browser to a d20 SRD Druid and a D20 SRD Wizard and those pages look pretty close.  They should, both classes largely use the same mechanics.Sorry to ramble on so much.  Just sort of following a train of thought to see where it goes.</blockquote>

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