D&D 5E L&L: Subclasses

[Li Shenron]

The Fighter says "Choose a weapon and/or combat style. Your sub-class is a fluffy job that might USE that weapon and/or combat style."

How does that make any sense? If I'm a Fighter and I want to focus on light armor, light weapons, and perhaps a bit of archery... why do I have to be assigned the JOB of "Scout"?

Because we used to have Fighting Styles that made sense, and the USUAL complaint came about "why can only Fighters do that? why shouldn't my rogue/ranger/paladin/barbarian be able to learn that?", so once again they had to bleed all the fighter's stuff out of the class into being available to everyone.

Although all in all I'm not really against the new idea, but I see your point that we already had backgrounds for knights and other "jobs".

 

[I'm A Banana]

Should we keep going? How about we throw in a Fighter's subclass? He's now a Wood Elf Commoner Fighter Skirmisher Samurai Pirate.

Wait, what?

What does it mean to be a pirate? Is it incompatible with being a samurai? Not necessarily. Like we see with the assassin: anyone can kill for money. Anyone can rob people on the ocean. If someone also chooses to be a samurai while doing that, it might make sense for the setting (Privateers of Feudal Japan!), or for the character ("Kenichi is a pirate who trains with a ronin on an isolated island to some day kill the daimyo that killed his wife."), or for the mechanics ("My pirate uses an exotic blade!").

If that player or that DM thinks that concept works, why insist that they make a false choice there?

I mean, maybe a "Bandit" fighter would make more classical sense, but I'm not that guy at that table making that choice, so I don't feel any need to specify it.

 

[Ajar]

I wasn't suggesting that there should only ever be one way to achieve a given feel within the character creation rules, but I do think that having multiple (3-4+) ways to achieve highly unique/specific flavours is problematic for new/casual players. Gladiator is fairly generic; vampire is not. Having a couple of ways to make a gladiator -- e.g. background or specialty -- is fine. Having four ways to be a vampire would not, IMO, be fine.

 

[DEFCON 1]

What does it mean to be a pirate? Is it incompatible with being a samurai? Not necessarily. Like we see with the assassin: anyone can kill for money. Anyone can rob people on the ocean. If someone also chooses to be a samurai while doing that, it might make sense for the setting (Privateers of Feudal Japan!), or for the character ("Kenichi is a pirate who trains with a ronin on an isolated island to some day kill the daimyo that killed his wife."), or for the mechanics ("My pirate uses an exotic blade!").

If that player or that DM thinks that concept works, why insist that they make a false choice there?

There's no false choice. If you want to make a Pirate Samurai... go ahead! But you can do that the same way as when I suggested the person chose to be a pirate in the previous post-- the player said "My character is a pirate." He just made that decision. It wasn't the game assigning him a specialty of "pirate" or a background of "pirate" or a class of "pirate" or anything like that. His character concept was a pirate and he build the character to BE a pirate. But unlike these Fighter sub-classes... none of the other choice points he makes (from race to class to background) run counter to that choice.

By the same token... if that player decided his character concept was Samurai Pirate... he can put that story and fluff onto his character without any need for the game to do it for him right at the beginning. But what happens when he goes through the whole character design process and then finds out that he wanted his Pirate Samurai to be lightly armored and focus on light weapons... and yet the only Fighter sub-class whose expertise dice (or whatever mechanic the fighter now has) goes towards light armor and light weapons is a SCOUT... well, now he has to be a Pirate Samurai Scout! For absolutely no reason.

I really just cannot see what is gained by making Fighter sub-classes JOBS, rather than fighting styles or weapon groups. I just can't. It's a proliferation of fluff that adds only a little to a small subset of characters, but changes most other Fighter characters completely on their head when the player doesn't want it.

And as far as your continued use of the Assassin as an example... I'm not exactly crazy about the rogue schemes in that way either.

 

[Ratskinner]

Actually... that's not completely correct. At least, that's not the real focus of my point.

My main point is not that any one "fluff" based character element should appear only once in the game... but rather that no character should need more than a couple of these elements in their character design. Because the more "fluffy" elements you keep inserting into your characters, the more watered down the fluff becomes.

We decide what our character is when we create it. If we want him or her to be a pirate... we can just say "my character's a pirate!" We've been doing it that way for decades. But now, let's start layering in the fluff. We choose race, he's now an Elf Pirate. We choose sub-race, he's now a Wood Elf pirate. We choose background, he's now a Wood Elf Commoner Pirate. We choose class, he's now a Wood Elf Commoner Fighter Pirate. Let's throw in a specialty. He's now a Wood Elf Commoner Fighter Skirmisher Pirate.

Should we keep going? How about we throw in a Fighter's subclass? He's now a Wood Elf Commoner Fighter Skirmisher Samurai Pirate.

Wait, what?

I must say I find myself conflicted, but generally in agreement that this quickly gets silly. We are starting to get wayy too many fiddly bits and paths to fiddly bits flying around. The way I see it, if we have sub-classes, we don't need feats/specialities anymore. Race & subrace, Background, Class & subclass...That's already 5 character customization choices at creation and we haven't even touched ability scores, spells, equipment, sub-sub-choices or purely fluff things like hair color. Given that they seem to want to keep serial multiclassing...I'd say let that handle all the rest of the weirdness. Attaching fluffy names to hard mechanical bits is a recipe for trouble. I'd like to see the mechanical choices with names as "sterile" as possible to avoid the silliness mentioned.

Personally, it seems to me that most of the "fluffy" things are most closely related to background, and so should stay there as much as possible. "Background" can expand into "History" as a character progresses in fluffiness. I don't see that this requires a whole bunch of fiddliness or mechanical definition. Which is good, because then you can redefine them more easily for your world. If Sea Elves are your world's gladiators...great! Write Gladiator in your background and take whatever bonuses to skills and interactions that comes with it in your world. Does that mean he's also spiffy with a net & trident? Maybe. If so, take the "Weapon Specialist" Fighter subclass designating trident and shield. If you want to be a Wizard...it doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that a DM seeing a Gladiator Wizard would allow the character to use net & trident without penalty. (Or whatever makes sense in that world.)

 

[Ratskinner]

What does it mean to be a pirate? Is it incompatible with being a samurai? Not necessarily. Like we see with the assassin: anyone can kill for money. Anyone can rob people on the ocean. If someone also chooses to be a samurai while doing that, it might make sense for the setting (Privateers of Feudal Japan!), or for the character ("Kenichi is a pirate who trains with a ronin on an isolated island to some day kill the daimyo that killed his wife."), or for the mechanics ("My pirate uses an exotic blade!").

If that player or that DM thinks that concept works, why insist that they make a false choice there?

I mean, maybe a "Bandit" fighter would make more classical sense, but I'm not that guy at that table making that choice, so I don't feel any need to specify it.

It seems to me that the solution there is campaign or character-specific backgrounds with general rules for applying them. The False choice only comes from telling them that "These are the sacred 20 backgrounds, choose wisely." If he's free to write "Ronin-trained Pirate" on his background slot the choice disappears. The player still has to make the non-fluffy choices about class, etc. to make that work as they see fit. The silly comes in when you have a Pirate who just wants to use a Katana and then has to write Samurai on his sheet, instead of Exotic Weapon Specialist (or something else relatively neutral and appropriate to his concept.)

 

[Dragoslav]

Doesn't this controversy over subclasses remind anyone of the complaints about classes in 4e?

"I'm going to make my Fighter be an archer"
"Then you should play a Ranger, they're built for archery"
"But I want to be a FIGHTER!"

And now, with 5e, we have:

"I want my Fighter to use exotic weapons"
"Then you should pick the Samurai subclass, they get exotic weapons proficiency"
"But my guy isn't a samurai! He's a pirate!"

It seems like it comes down to whether people are comfortable with reflavoring. Sure, there's a default flavor that comes with the "gladiator" subclass, but if you want your PC to use gladiatorial combat styles and weapons without having to be a gladiator in his backstory, you can do that. "Gladiator" is just a word on your character sheet that describes how your PC fights.

 

[jrowland]

Should we keep going? How about we throw in a Fighter's subclass? He's now a Wood Elf Commoner Fighter Skirmisher Samurai Pirate.

Wait, what?

I would say the fluff is the same: "Pirate". All those other terms (Wood Elf Commoner Fighter Skirmisher Samurai) are crunch keywords that point to mechanical abilities/scores/skills, etc.

The game DESIGN is all crunch, no matter what title WotC uses for a class, specialty, background, etc.

I already made and played a Shaman in 5E. I am willing to bet anyone on these forums could do it. I am also pretty sure we all would have a different way to do it. If they published a "Shaman" class, it would not invalidate the "Shaman" I already built and played. I've been playing Cleric/fighter multiclass (my usually go to build) since 1E. I've always called it a Paladin, and played accordingly, even with a published Paladin available. Both Shaman and Paladin are fluff concepts I have and at the same time are titles of D&D classes. Can this be confusing? Sure. But I think both can exist at the same table.

 

[Ratskinner]

It seems like it comes down to whether people are comfortable with reflavoring. Sure, there's a default flavor that comes with the "gladiator" subclass, but if you want your PC to use gladiatorial combat styles and weapons without having to be a gladiator in his backstory, you can do that. "Gladiator" is just a word on your character sheet that describes how your PC fights.

I think it makes more sense to just divorce the fluff from the mechanics in the first place...generally.

 

[jrowland]

I think it makes more sense to just divorce the fluff from the mechanics in the first place...generally.

Yeah, but then you'd have "melee-based class alpha" in stead of "Fighter" and "melee-based class beta" instead of "Gladiator". I think that would be worse.

Ideally, 5E will go along the lines of:

Basic - Warrior
Standard - Warrior, Gladiator, Duelist, and a few other customizable "pre-made" builds
Advanced - Here's the building blocks. Have fun, Good Luck.

My guess is that most people on these boards at this time are very comfortable with "Advanced" D&D 5E, even if they would then assemble the building blocks into an alternate "Basic" warrior, and play/DM with that only. Most of the "arguments" arise around that tricky "Standard" game: Whats in, and whats out. (or in this case, what's it called).