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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6910298" data-attributes="member: 2067">Here's the crux: preferring a toolbox/generic style that lets you make every special snowflake you can imagine is all well and good, but there are tradeoffs to be made for doing that.One big tradeoff from a design perspective is that this is newbie poison. If you want to give your game a broad, open appeal, you do not want to have to educate new players on the relative benefits of a pool of dozens upon dozens of options. People will just not bother - there are better things to do with their time than learning how to build an imaginary dragon elf or whatever and getting it to do what they want it to do. From my perspective as a big ol' nerd, a big tradeoff is that generic classes with lots of options have an emphasis on building a character. Wading through a sea of options to curate the perfect mix just reeks of Paradox of Choice - none of these options are increasing my enjoyment of playing the character, where I won't be picking character options at all. In fact, given that some options will be better than others (because any group of two or more things can be ranked), there's a real risk of this turning into "not really a choice" or "a choice between being flavorful and being effective," and leaving me less satisfied than I would be if I had no choice! None of that means your preference is wrong, but it does mean that not being super-duper flexible isn't some flaw with the class's design, but is an intentional decision that, in getting rid of the ultimate in generic flexibility, stands to significantly improve the class in the estimation of a broad swath of the gaming audience. To put that away just so someone can imagine a "light bender" and a "dimensional witch" and an "arcane thief" and a dozen other preciously unique options all with one class that must also be named "Sorcerer" and who is barred from offering these as archetype options....that's a pretty big ask a pretty marginal gain. That same result can be pretty easily realized in practice by throwing more subclasses at the existing sorcerer 'till yer face turns blue. You can ignore any fluff as long as the DM lets you. I'm in a game with two sorcerers, and we've got more than enough options between us to avoid doubling up on mechanics with room to spare. My actual play experience says there's enough variety there. White-room speculation on all the hypothetical character types you miss out on doesn't affect the actual enjoyment of the class one little bit. Also, if you want to ignore fluff, you could be approaching this from the other direction. You can ignore fluff and make a wizard who doesn't use a spellbook and who is tough and strong, or an Arcane Trickster with a mysteriously magical origin, or whatever floats your boat. That's as easy as ignoring warlock pacts. My actual play experience as a wild sorcerer alongside a quite-blasty (though not exclusively blasty) dragon sorcerer is making it hard for me to believe the white-room analysis of the Internet Comment Brigade this time around.</blockquote>

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