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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8955147" data-attributes="member: 82106">4e is designed in such a way that it is VERY CLEAR what a class is supposed to be. When you start designing one you would be pushed to define its thematics and core mechanics in terms of role and power source immediately. From there you develop class features to express those along with the 'concept' of the class (that you will have to come up with yourself) and then create powers, feats, PP, and ED perhaps, etc. to go along with that. Its generally not a solo sort of thing if you want success. I'd point out that WotC employed many people to do this work, and the results were almost entirely consistently really good stuff.Contrast this with 3e classes, about 90% of which are, frankly, garbage. Nope, 4e is a regular class design KIT, it just doesn't promise that the work will be easy, when in fact it never is.Only if you are firmly fixed on just leaning on the tactical aspect of 4e and not the other aspects. I mean, I just don't do boring "you enter a room there are 4 orcs" kind of combats that people will complain about lasting an hour. MOST of the ones I do are really dynamic, and only incidentally involve one side wiping the other side out completely. Definitely seen some fights break down into a less fun mode, but I hate to tell you that every other D&D has the same sort of problem. By the time we set up a 1e fight with minis and got all into it, you were almost surely burning an hour!I thought about this, and I wrote such rules even, but they just didn't prove to be compelling at all. Like, just have some minions show up and don't even fight it out is better. Let the party make a low complexity SC to see if they take a couple surges worth of damage. ANOTHER resolution system just seemed one too many, but that's just me, go for it!Well, Binder can simply go away. It was a nothing both thematically and mechanically, definitely the closest to a 'fail class' in 4e. I've personally no use for the e-classes either, several of which are virtually worth nothing IMHO. I'm not SURE where your 23 comes from, I count 22 full classes between three PHBs, and then there are the ones from the settings, Swordmage, Artificer, and then post-Essentials has Vampire, and then there are some heavily variant subclasses like the Skald and the Berserker, which technically aren't classes, but kinda are, as well as the Bladesinger, which definitely is, though it steals its powers from Wizard. There's also the Elementalist, which is another pretty variant 'build' of Sorcerer. Finally we have 2 Assassin classes. So AT LEAST 28, and I'm not even counting the Binder in that, or the Blackguard, which is a pretty variant paladin. Now, I'm happy to ditch psionics, which gets rid of three, Seeker is OK, but we could live without that. Runepriest is very fiddly and thematically seems like a cleric, and we can do without the post-e classes, except the Vampire, which rocks. I think that gets us to 19 classes that I would consider ones I don't want to give up. Yes, there are some that not everyone thinks are very thematic, like Invoker, but I bet those people haven't PLAYED an Invoker either! And I think some of the classes I just put on the block other people won't want to get rid of either.Warden's kick butt, and they are thematically NOTHING like barbarians! Just wait until your warden uses 'Form of the Walking Conflagration' lol, or 'Form of the Stone Sentinel'. I remember when my group's Warden powered THAT little gem up. Yeah, the heck with all your high damage bad guys, I'm just going to stand here and not care! lol.Yeah, I think you CAN do a pretty serious trim on Feats, but you WILL have to basically rewrite 4e to cut back much else, or else really rip out a lot of extremely good content! Also, who cares if there are 9000 powers? Honestly, what difference does it make? Your character only needs like 10 of them right now. Feats are a bit harder question, because you really do end up milling through a LOT of feats every couple levels.</blockquote>

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