Kill the fighter

[Hautamaki]

It reminds me a lot of the design of Champions Online. You could mix and match just about anything you wanted. Gaining greater powers of a particular type only relied on greater investment within that power-category. IE: the best fighters are the ones who dig deep into the fighter tree. However, slight cross-polination was common, even to extremes it was common because it provided for very thematic(and effective) character creation. However, system mastery reigned supreme. The guys who could put together the right points here, the right powers there, were 1000000 times more powerful than anyone else.

I think the key here is to learn from 4e's "Hybrid Classing" system. Put a cap on how many classes you can take. Establish some form of loss for multiclassing as well as a gain. Taking a level in rogue after having a level in fighter may only net you half the stuff the guy who took rogue as their primary class got. The result of a fighter taking wizard levels should be different than a wizard taking fighter levels.

Yes agreed with the second paragraph. Also you have to be careful of stacking modifiers from different classes/class items.

 

[Sunseeker]

Yes agreed with the second paragraph. Also you have to be careful of stacking modifiers from different classes/class items.

Certainly, though I think there could be a reasonable limit on gaining those modifiers, perhaps like WOTC is thinking of gaining your base class features over multiple levels, you would be required to take a minimum of 3 levels in any class. This would go a long way to prevent the 1 Fighter/1 Wizard/1 Cleric/1 PunPun class building.

 

[CleverNickName]

I think that at it's core, D&D really only needs 3 classes. All other classes are really just a combination of those 3.

1) the Fighter/Martial class. (snip)

2) the divine/cleric class. (snip)

3) the arcane/wizard class. (snip)

The trouble with this configuration is that it makes rogues just another type of fighter, and that doesn't feel right to me. Rogues/thieves are not martial fighters...they are skirmishers at best, but in an ideal situation they are not "in combat" at all. (Except for the occasional sneak attack or ambush, of course, but even these situations are more about the use of traps, subterfuge, and stealth than martial force.)

I think a fourth class is necessary for non-magic/non-martial characters...rogues, assassins, catburglars, aristocrats, experts, etc.

 

[Hautamaki]

The trouble with this configuration is that it makes rogues just another type of fighter, and that doesn't feel right to me. Rogues/thieves are not martial fighters...they are skirmishers at best, but in an ideal situation they are not "in combat" at all. (Except for the occasional sneak attack or ambush, of course, but even these situations are more about the use of traps, subterfuge, and stealth than martial force.)

I think a fourth class is necessary for non-magic/non-martial characters...rogues, assassins, catburglars, aristocrats, experts, etc.

Fair enough, it's really a pretty arbitrary distinction since you could easily have just 2 classes-martial and magical, with customization from there.

The reason I drew a distinction between divine and arcane magic is I feel deep down the magic systems themselves should be fundamentally different from a game-play perspective, even though that is not how they'd been done in the past in D&D. For my homebrew rules divine magic users have a limited set of prayers they can attempt as many times as they like per day, while arcane magic users have a large number of options but a limited number of uses.

But you could just easily draw the same distinction between fighty and not fighty non-magical classes. The reason I didn't is that I view combat as probably the closest thing to the central element of D&D and I view classes that can't contribute equally (differently, but equally) in combat as fundamentally imbalanced for D&D, at least the way I play it, not that I'm trying to tell anyone else how to play it.

 

[Hussar]

My apologies, I found a major mistake in my stats as listed in post 92 this thread - while we've still had more Fighters played than any other class, the numbers are nowhere near as overwhelming as first posted. See edit in that post for actual numbers.

Lan-"needs more statistician training, it seems"-efan

Ahhh, that looks better. Still a heck of a lot of characters, but, much, much better.