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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6195058" data-attributes="member: 2067">It might help you to think about it this way: a player who knows they want to play a dude in heavy armor with a big sword who blasts fire all around has a distinct archetype that they want to play. Their decision-making is streamlined: they will pick abilities that enhance their armor, that enhance their big swords, and that enhance their ability to toss around fire. Their chosen kind of character might make perfect sense at the table and with the group. There might even be a group of fire-using warriors in the world that the character fits into. It's not exactly a traditional D&D archetype, but for that player, in that game, it is a kind of character that makes a lot of sense and sounds like fun to them.All they need is the Fighter class, and then to swap some of the fighter abilities for big blasty fire spells (like burning hands and fireball and wall of fire and maybe meteor swarm). Should be something an individual DM can do easy and quick -- a simple swap-out of certain abilities at certain levels for others. It's still streamlined decision-making, it just involves being given Fireball in place of some other fighter feature that is irrelevant to the character.So, if 5e uses class groups, and sorcerers are "mages," even illiterate, barbarian sorcerers will be able to use (or "get extra effects out of") mage-group items like scrolls and tomes. Meanwhile, if 5e uses a system more like I'm proposing, they can perhaps use "Spellbook Proficiency" as a prerequisite to using scrolls and the like, and now no illiterate barbarian sorcerer will be able to use the items, and also a scholar-priest who prepares a spellbook WILL be able to use them, and all that makes a lot more sense. Because if he learned how to heal himself, he wouldn't be as good at sneaking and stealing, and he wants to call himself a thief. There's an opportunity cost to learning an ability: when you learn X, you can't learn Y or Z at the same time. In order for him to learn to heal his wounds, he might've had to trade, say, expertise in Stealth -- maybe some thieves would trade that, but not any of them who wanted to be really good in stealth. It's not that exceptional -- 4e-style bards are thieves who learn healing magic, and though their fiction is different, they're going to be just as irked if only priests get all the good healing effects. They belong to a criminal underworld of skulking characters who dwell in shadow and live by their wits, they just also happen to be able to heal. They sound like rogues to me.But then that's part of the issue with the class groups: defining them isn't going to be consistent or obvious.</blockquote>

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