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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8522229" data-attributes="member: 6790260">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.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."</blockquote>

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