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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kobold Stew" data-source="post: 6125398" data-attributes="member: 23484">The trick will be making subclasses work without negatively impacting the effect of backgrounds and specialties and straightforward class features.It's interesting that the article singles out fighters, because the fighter was getting to a pretty good place:  both with the maneuvers (last packet) and the choice offered by the class abilities like Death Dealer (in this packet), there was a fair degree of freedom to specialize in sword-and-board or ranged or whatever, or to dabble, and take one ranged ability, one shield ability, etc. For the fighter, subclasses would be more constraining.Another example: Necromancer (present as a specialty in the very first test packet, and not seen since, IIRC). This is ideal as a specialty, since it gives players options: cleric necromancer will have a different feel than a wizard necromancer or even (dare we think it) a Paladin necromancer. This was an example of the best kind of modularity, in my opinion, allowing combinations that players want and not forcing or pre-judging anything.Similar to this would be gladiator. That, to me is an ideal background (though I could see it working as a specialty as well), but it'd be great if one could be a cleric (lightbringer) gladiator, or a wizard gladiator, even if the combination is optimized for a fighter gladiator. Of course, it is always possible to provide more than one way to achieve a given end. The problem with this is that it sacrifices elegance in design. If there are three different ways to achieve a nearly-similar end result, then the sweetness of good design has been sacrificed to a nuts-and-olts toolkit, in the worst sense of that phrase. Where we're seeing this most (in my view) is with the rogue: the rogue was in a real sweet spot two test packs ago, with flexibility and diversity coming from the availability of multiple backgrounds, combined with cool tricks that could build an assassin or a charmer. I like the thought of building a rogue with almost any ability as primary (i.e. not just dex or str but cha or int as well). They seem to be moving away from that, and the hints in this column about the future of rogues doesn't look like they will be returning to that.</blockquote>

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