If this is the case, then I have
absolutely no idea whatsoever what you meant by the following text from your original proposal.
Because this, as you phrased it, explicitly means separating the parts ("split[ting] power source...from professions and roles and themes and archetypes.") As a player, you pick (perhaps in no particular order):
- Power source ("divine," "primal," "skirmishing," presumably others)
- Role ("archer," "spellcasting," "warrior," presumably others)
- Profession ("Ranger" being the common thread)
The way this was presented, these are totally separate things. You pick your Power Source, and it gives you some set of features which are common to all Primal characters. You pick your Role, and it gives you the set of mechanics to fulfill that role. These two things, as presented, are totally separate from one another; you could choose to be a "primal warrior" or a "divine warrior" or (presumably) an "arcane warrior," and you'd get exactly the same "warrior" component because that's the Role you've chosen.
So, if you
did not mean to step away from classes, if you
did not mean to have this viewed as "pick your Source from the Sources list, pick your Role from the Roles list, and pick your Profession from the Professions list,"
what on Earth DID you mean?
Because if "Paladin" is still an actually distinct thing, with actually distinct mechanics that
cannot simply be boiled down to "well I have Channel Divinity, the common feature held by all characters using the Divine Power Source, and I have Defender's Mark, the common feature held by all characters of the Warrior Role," then I literally don't understand how
anything whatsoever has changed about Sources or Roles. In which case...why specify those things first and foremost, turning their names into optional parentheticals, when it's still exactly what it was before? Why refer to it as "split[ting] power source...from...roles"?
Part of the reason I'm pushing back here is that what I'm responding to--whether or not it is your position--is something I actually
do see a LOT from people wanting to "fix" 4e. They go for either pooling together all powers from a given Source or (even worse) pooling together
all powers from all sources, and delete "class" entirely, replacing it with the choice of your power source and role. These are both really, really unwise design choices if your goal is to preserve the heart of the 4e experience, which most of these folks explicitly seem to want. The people saying this seem to have a good idea of what 4e is and how it works, and want to achieve something that respects that foundation while improving on it. But in doing what they propose to do, they rip out the part of 4e that holds the most mechanical interest--the intentional, focused design of each class to achieve a particular class fantasy and play-experience--and replace it with something
intentionally generic and de-contextualized.