Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 7400633" data-attributes="member: 1465">Wait, I am confused...Not releasing new classes is pretty much a way to deal with this problem. When you publish a new class in a supplement, you are pretty much guaranteed that only a minority of DMs and players will ever have that class available to use; after that, if additional books provide extras for such class, such material will be usable only by those who own the previous supplement with that class. Some people (probably those who buy nearly all books anyway) appreciate having a "books tree" or "books web" where each supplement crosses over with others, but other people really hate to buy a book that since the start seems to require others to fully usable. WotC kind of made it explicit at the beginning of 5e that they wanted the least number of required purchases, and in fact they even released Basic for free so even if someone only ever buys a single adventure, they can play it without buying any of the core books.But these are not IMHO considerations that matter to WotC when it comes to class design, and with the SLOW releases of 5e there isn't much of a problem either. They are rather focusing on what major options (both narratively and tactically) they can add to the game, while minimizing the design cost. For that purpose, a subclass is almost always a better choice, mainly because it consists in a smaller set of features, something like 4-5 levels worth, so maybe 20-25% the design & playtest effort required by a class. A full class requires 20 levels worth of features, which means a high risk of ending up re-using a lot of stuff from other classes, thus decreasing the interest of customers.It's not that they won't do it, in fact they will almost certainly publish the Mystic and Artificer classes. It's just that they are reserving this option to limited cases, when it seems difficult to fit all they want to fit under an existing class, and when the character concept is different enough from all the existing ones.In parallel, they've also told us that they are exploring the design option of alternate class features. This is not going to change the narrative significantly, so it's mostly tactical variants, but it is related to the subject because it can be used in fact to substitute single levels, while subclasses are used to substitute multiple levels, to increase characters variety.</blockquote>

Verification