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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 7673410" data-attributes="member: 2067">The main downside with new classes isn't imbalance - it's bloat.The lesson from 3e and 4e (and to a certain degree even 2e): a game will drown in its own bloat. Given 3-5 years with monthly releases and maybe 4-6 new classes each year, the game will drown in unused options and meaningless distinctions.Nothing happens to the mechanics - and nothing happens to the folks who are using those new classes just fine, or to the people who can sort through the bloat, or to the folks who digest the steady stream. Their games work fine.But to begin with, each new class is a brick in the wall separating current players from potential players. Every new mechanic, new option, new design scheme, is another thing to learn, another thing to sort through, another option that might not actually grant much meaningful distinction. Every thing you add is another step closer to having too many options to make any of them really relevant.WotC was fairly open in late 4e with what they found in DDI: most people played the core four classes and the core few races and no matter how many options they released, only a few of them got used by most of the player base. That's more the cost of new classes: unused, irrelevant, unsupported, thousands of design dollars spent for ever-diminishing returns on things that never saw the light of day, they hang on as meaningless, useless cruft. Psions, artificers, whatever - that's the price we all pay for them being full classes. It can be worth that price, but it's not obvious that it is. It's a choice that is made about each potential new class: if we make this a class, how does it enhance and grow the game as a whole?There's a lot of versions of psionics that, if we simply lifted it up and dropped it into 5e, wouldn't do that. 3e psionics wouldn't. 4e psionics wouldn't. 2e psionics...generally wouldn't, but there's a few ideas in there. And before that, the idea of a psionic-specialist class isn't on the table, so of course they wouldn't. You could make a version of psionics in 5e that did, but it wouldn't look a lot like psionics as it has existed before, mechanically. And since mechanics and fluff should reinforce each other, the new mechanics would suggest a new fluff, or at least a different fluff. Which is part of why investigating the fluff is relevant. If it's science-y, it should feel science-y to use it (charges! energy! light!). If it's 1920's style occultism, it should feel that way, too. If it's ancient greeco-roman crystal spires, it should feel that way, too. And D&D isn't always comfortable with pulpy sci-fi in its fantasy. I mean I tend to think it's kind of amazing, and part of D&D's DNA, and something that medieval purists kind of need to lighten up about other people doing, but I'm not in iron-fisty control of D&D's desitny. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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