D&D 5E (2024) New Classes for 5e. Is anything missing?

[Aldarc]

I still want a Friar like in Dark Age of Camelot. I have tried unsuccessfully to use feats and multiclasses to recreate the feel in every edition.

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Can you elaborate on that with more than a doodle please?

 

[Minigiant]

Heh, as a Norwegian, I object to 6 and 7.

Horns? It seems the Viking Period lacks musical instruments. They know about the Saami shamanic drums, but dont use these themselves. Mostly, the Norse of this time sing vocally. In England, York has musical instruments, but that is Roman town.

Berserkar are a kind of shamanic warrior, with a reputation for being dangerous, animalistic, and antisocial. They can function as bodyguards, but to employ them is somewhat scandalous.

Don't blame me.
I didn't name the classes.

Can you elaborate on that with more than a doodle please?

IIRC

The Friar was basely a cleric that wore light armor and wielded a staff.
Basically a Cleric with a version of Martial Arts that allow light armor.

DOAC was a weird game that had 3 realms each with their own versions of the same classes.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You can't say there is enough classes, it is like saying Barbie has got enough clothes. Always there is a player who wants something different to feel her character is special.

That seems needlessly dismissive. I look for solid mechanical support for a theme and concept in classes. If the mechanical support isn't workable as a subclass, but the theme is still worth exploring, it should be considered (not automatically pursued, just considered) for development as its own class. E.g. Ranger has shown how hard it is to design a good pet-focused subclass (I believe the Drakewarden is considered decent, so it only took them 8 years to write a decent pet-focused subclass). If, instead, the pet is the core of the class and the other parts are where you tone down the power, you can get a much more effective

The vestige pact binder was an interesting idea, but maybe too complex.

This, for example, is why things like Warlock exist. I could totally see a Pact of the Binder that modifies Invocations or has a lot of specialized ones, which should work as a reasonable approximation of what the Binder class did in 3e.

Yes, they should have a feature that let's them get always-on magical effects and features that represent their bloodline. You could call them invocations...

Oh please. Are you really claiming Cambion Merlin and Faust are the same archetype? You don't "invoke" wings, they're an essential part of your being. And if Sorcerers are just Warlocks, then the Book of Shadows, that lets you cast a bunch of ritual spells, is apparently just a thing people can spontaneously fart out because great-grandma was a succubus? Or being the distant descendant of a dragon allows you to spontaneously manifest a magical necklace that you can give to friends to power them up? And if for some reason you decide "eh, I don't really like the magic book I spontaneously manifested because I have vampire blood...I'd prefer to stab people instead" you can just do that every 4 levels, changing the blood-inheritance you got. Because that totally makes sense for a person with a magical bloodline to do.

 

[Minigiant]

Just saying.

People would understand Warlocks better if there were a Warrior class with Invocations.

I mean 40k fans understand the difference between a Chaos Marine and a Chaos Psyker.

 

[Aldarc]

Let's admit it. The spellcasting classes of 5e are a bit of a garbled mess mechanically and thematically, either being too narrow or too broad. [Followed by the usual quip: "Um, actually... that's a feature, not a flaw."]

 

[Irlo]

Your sarcasm is not productive. I was genuinely hoping you had an answer besides "you're dumb for thinking that people voted against something because it was new." Because yeah, that sort of thing happened a lot during the playtest. It wasn't just confined to things I liked, e.g. Mearls tried very hard to get the community to go for proficiency dice instead of proficiency bonus but eventually relented. (AIUI, he loves rolling fistfuls of dice, so he overruled the normal response to anything that wasn't polling supermajority positive, but it stayed unpopular over time.) Nor to things I had any real feelings about at all, as that's what killed Specialties (and thus the Warlord-style Fighter, which had originally had explicit support...but then was turned into a Specialty, and when Specialties got dropped it had nowhere else to manifest so they quietly stopped talking about it.)

I apologize for the sarcasm earlier. It felt to me that opinions were being dismissed as invalid, and that bothers me. I don't need to react to it.

In this case, there are a few valid reasons to dislike proficiency dice. It's not necessarily a gut reaction against a new idea. Proficiency dice slow down the game, complicate calculations of roll results, and add randomness to a system that already has a d20 worth of randomness. That's what I was trying to get across. What appealed to Mearls didn't appeal to a wide swath of gamers. I think it's possible that what appeals to you, to me, and to some others can be rejected without dismissing the criticism as a hating new ideas or some other failing.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Let's admit it. The spellcasting classes of 5e are a bit of a garbled mess mechanically and thematically, either being too narrow or too broad. [Followed by the usual quip: "Um, actually... that's a feature, not a flaw."]

Oh, for sure. "Wizard" collects the spellcasting traditions of dozens of different works all under one umbrella, while Warlock is pretty narrowly focused on the Faustian Bargain archetype and its tropes. Sorcerer should have a ton of lore elements to it because "born with special powers" is a very broad category, but because 5e is aiming for "traditional" (read: 3e) versions of classes/mechanics, in practice it's "Wizard, but Limited." Cleric is essentially unique to D&D, as divine spellcasters are usually more robe-and-sandals prophet types than heavy-armored-warrior types, and even games rooted in the D&D tradition often break back to that older concept (e.g. Final Fantasy's White Mages, Warcraft's Priests, Dragon Age's "basically all magic-users are Mages," etc.) Druid and Bard technically have historical roots, but are so far removed from most of those trappings that it's more accurate to call them loosely inspired by historical things than actually supported by tropes or tradition that predates D&D, though both have won a bit more cultural cachet than the Cleric has, since "vaguely-priest-y person able to transform into animals" and "roguish ne'er-do-well with a dollop of every major skill" have both found support in fantasy more widely.

There is no single common thread across the various classes in terms of what grounds them or why they're included. Some are well-focused on single archetypes, others are highly generic, and a few don't really have archetypes that they weren't responsible for creating in the first place--meaning "does it represent an existing archetype" isn't a useful metric for determining a class's staying power. Some are absolutely sprawling in terms of what approaches they support, while others are a lot more narrow unless you engage in some heavy reskinning, so versatility alone isn't a useful metric either. Even if you restrict things to just the "core four," the problem persists: Cleric is pretty idiosyncratic to D&D itself and works rooted in it, while Fighter, Rogue/Thief, and Wizard/Magic-User are about as generic as things come thematically. Yet Fighter and Thief are pretty narrow in terms of what particular things they're focused on doing, while Wizard (and to a lesser extent Cleric) sample from basically the entire spectrum of fantastical things that magic-powered protagonists or supporting characters have been able to do.

I apologize for the sarcasm earlier. It felt to me that opinions were being dismissed as invalid, and that bothers me. I don't need to react to it.

In this case, there are a few valid reasons to dislike proficiency dice. It's not necessarily a gut reaction against a new idea. Proficiency dice slow down the game, complicate calculations of roll results, and add randomness to a system that already has a d20 worth of randomness. That's what I was trying to get across. What appealed to Mearls didn't appeal to a wide swath of gamers. I think it's possible that what appeals to you, to me, and to some others can be rejected without dismissing the criticism as a hating new ideas or some other failing.

Apology accepted. It's entirely valid to dislike things, my beef has been more with WotC's (at least during the playtest/the first few years of 5e) apparent fear of doing anything that isn't objectively popular. I have heard reports--obviously secondhand, since we'll never truly know exactly how things were done internally--that anything which didn't poll at least a solid majority positively (edit: during the playtest) would be canned, no matter how much work had been put into it, with the proficiency-dice thing being a rare exception specifically because Mearls was so fond of the idea. Hence, we saw just one, very-early version of a Sorcerer that worked rather differently, and because it wasn't an instant hit, it got deleted forever and will never see professional publication.

As a Dragon Sorcerer, it was more of a gish-type, and as you spent your spell points for the day, you'd slowly transform, taking on characteristics of your second soul. It was mostly a fluff thing, but the text spoke of poor sods who had fully lost control and been consumed by their second soul, leaving them as twisted monsters that could only be put down because the person they used to be had literally been eaten from the inside. That was a ton of really evocative, interesting flavor, and I strongly suspect that the vocal minority that spoke out against these things is why we got relatively flavor-light classes in 5e. It very much came across as people thinking that, because this specific type of Sorcerer was more gish-like (gaining armor, resistances, and melee attacks as it burned through SP), that ALL types of Sorcerer would ALWAYS be gishes, and that erroneous conflation plus the newness of the concept led to a massive overreaction. It seemed perfectly obvious to me that this was just one flavor of Sorcerer and that they would provide additional options.

And at least for my part...I was there and active on various places at the time. I saw the responses. A lot of people--many of them not even Sorcerer fans in the first place--took one look at this new and different thing and said, "No, that's weird and bad, just make the Sorcerer like what it was before." That sentiment, phrased a dozen different ways, was the common refrain, that both the Sorcerer and Warlock were too "weird" and needed to be made simpler and more straightforward. So WotC listened...and that gave us a Sorcerer that looks a lot like a weaker Wizard. And now we have these calls to delete the Sorcerer (or Warlock, or both) entirely, because it doesn't do enough to justify its independent existence. It's a vicious cycle; classes that justify their independent existence are "too narrow" or "don't fit" or whatever; classes that pass that bar are "too generic" and "should just be an X."

In other words, class reductionism pushes a Morton's Fork: "if the class is generic, it should be merged with other, similar classes to save space, 'cause we don't need redundant generalists; if the class is specific, it doesn't allow people to play it as they like, so it should be deleted to save room for classes with broad appeal."

 

[Frozen_Heart]

Ironic that after the gish styled playtest sorcerer, the sorcerer is now the only caster with no melee options.

It's like they were so scared of the idea that they won't put a melee subclass on the sorcerer even years later.

 

[Frozen_Heart]

In other words, class reductionism pushes a Morton's Fork: "if the class is generic, it should be merged with other, similar classes to save space, 'cause we don't need redundant generalists; if the class is specific, it doesn't allow people to play it as they like, so it should be deleted to save room for classes with broad appeal."

I never understood the extreme dislike of redundancy and overlap.

So you want to play a 'divine' themed spellcasting warrior in DnD 5e. You could pick paladin. Or maybe a war cleric. Or you could multiclass a cleric and a fighter. Or pick celestial blade pact warlock. Or maybe multiclass a divine soul sorcerer and a fighter. And then there is sun soul monk, or circle or stars druid mixed with fighter.

There are so many ways to play the same concept, and every single one will act completely differently in mechanics and gameplay. If you don't enjoy the mechanics of one of them, but really like the theme, you can just choose another. And yet people see this as a bad thing for some reason.

 

[bedir than]

The D&D cleric was born to counter a vampire character and all of its stuff came from justification of countering said vampire character

And then it was built using so many tropes from the European Middle Ages it's practically an advertisement for the Crusades.