Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Polama" data-source="post: 5592843" data-attributes="member: 6678002">Honestly? It depends heavily on the system in question. The most general answer I can think of is that rock-paper-scissors is one of the core forms of a balanced system. In warrior/wizard world, who wins in a fight? Then why be the other choice? And how much work is it to keep the two choices balanced but distinct?    Alternatively, while D&D often seems to have overpowered wizard problems, the expert can validly serve as the generalist. When wizards are frail and spells slow to cast, the wizard is in danger on a battlefield. Then the warrior is the master of the combat domain, the wizard is master of non-combat situations, and the expert passable at both. That's a distinct role in life. The wizard turns invisible, the expert merely hides in the shadows, but can still sneak past.    Or you can view the expert as the rule-breaker. The warrior is "supposed to" bash down the door and kill the orcs. The wizard has a collection of specific spells (either to kill the orcs, or confuse them, or whatever). The role of the expert is to find an unexpected solution. Disguise yourself as an orc. Scale the tower. Steal enough riches to hire an army. Then the warrior is the strong one, the wizard the smart one, the expert the cunning one.    Indeed, themeing should be a sufficient raison d'etre. You have the jocks, you have the nerds, and you have "the rest". You can expand out the class list to include the bard, the rogue, the monk, the herbalist and the monster trainer. Expanding the list is never hard. But if you want to reduce the list to the most basic, you end up needing a misc. category. Can you say "heroic/supernatural?" sure. You could also say "adventurer" and be done with a single class. The defense of the expert is that the third category makes the classification of enough literary heroes/tropes easier to warrant its existence</blockquote>

Verification