New rule of 3 . Feb 21.

[mkill]

[MENTION=6182]Incenjucar[/MENTION]: While I like your suggestion, it's also adding a lot of complexity to the class. Just your rules text for all weapons is 283 words, and they all need to be on the character sheet. And that's just level 1. Possible? Yes. Appealing to a certain type of player? Sure. Practical? No.

Remember that the Fighter has to appeal both to butt-kickers who just want to have an effective melee guy that can, well, kick butt, and tacticians, who like to control the battlefield from the center and trip push pull disarm monsters until they surrender by themselves.

One way to solve this issue would be to split the Fighter in two classes, along the simple / complex line, as I just suggested on rpg.net. You'll get:

The Fighter: Straightforward and simple, beginner friendly, flavor as you like you are not going to suck. Melee basic attacks. Fixed class features. Mainly gains static attack and damage bonuses, armor bonuses, mobility, toughness, agility. High-level features concentrate on survival, countering monster abilities, generally being badass, and killing things no matter what. Can kill with everything, dagger, giant axe, bow, even a fork. Effective in heavy armor, light armor, or bare chested. Strength and Constitution primary.

The Weaponmaster: Knock yourself out complex. 4E Fighter. Lots of combat maneuvers. Optional class features galore. Defender mechanics. Can dabble as Warlord-style leader, Slayer-style Striker or tactical battlefield control machine. Can specialize on different weapon styles. Rewards system mastery. Supports any kind of stat build - strong, smart, agile, dashing...

The important part is that each of them has to be clearly labeled as what it is, so that players will pick the one that suits their style from the get-go. To avoid issues from the split, most feats etc. should be Fighter/Weaponmaster similar to most spells in 3E being Wizard/Sorcerer.

 

[Primal]

Different weapons are like different schools of magic. We need just a class for those. Sub-classes are the answer. Or feat-trees. Or chains of powers. Rules system don't matter, but I like to play a not specialized fighter, and specialized ones.

They're talking of "archetypes", and it might very well be the same kind of template system PF RPG uses; you gain some new abilities that replace your "base" fighter class features (e.g. a sword-and-board fighter might get a defender aura and AC boost but lose some attack and damage bonuses). I think it would work really well for specialist wizards as well.

 

[Li Shenron]

I am getting progressively more and more against splitting the classes. On the contrary, I would be more in favor of merging them back to a smaller number.

Eventually it is the mechanics that should cause a class to split in two. For instance, the 3ed Wizard and Sorcerers would be a tough job (tho definitely not impossible) to merge into a single class which partly casts spontaneously and partly vancian. Paladins and Rangers have a problem with their spells IMHO, because by how 3ed spellcasting works, being "half-casters" doesn't really work well, at least with spells that are meant to affect other creatures (but is mostly fine with utility non-combat spells).

I do not feel the need to have different classes to cover different flavors, for example to separate a hard-gained knowledge based arcane caster (Wizard) from an inner-talent arcane caster (Sorcerer) from a pact-enabled arcance caster (Warlock), unless I do want to represent these flavor differences with different mechanics. But for instance in 3.0 we've had several Sorcerers in our games whose flavor was really that of a Warlock (or a Witch), and nobody felt like a different class was truly needed.

Besides mechanics and flavor, the third main point is flexibility in what you can do, maybe we can call it the "tactical spread". I think here people want to split a class because they feel like it has too wide tactical spread: a single class who can learn sword-and-board, two-weapon fighting, archery, tanking, swashbuckling... is this too much? Let's not forget that the wizard has always had a much wider tactical spread, and so has the cleric (healing, melee secondary fighter, buffer, curser of enemies, save-or-die'r, protection caster...) but also the rogue (striker/backstabber, searcher/explorer, trap & locks dealer, sneaker/scout/eavesdropper...), so this should be also considered when talking about splitting up the fighter class (which as an extra note... it already is! see barbarians, paladins and rangers!).

Now the problem I have with this, is that if you have classes with wide tactical spread, you can both cater to players who want a specialist and players who want a mixed-role character or "generalist".

If instead you split up the classes too much, getting narrow tactical spread, you cater only to specialist players, while to support everybody who wants the versatile character you then need additional mechanics (multiclassing, cross-class dipping etc.) that unfortunately will have problems of their own, so it is more probable to end up with faults such as valid character concepts that get the shaft.

Hence my preference for not splitting the classes. I would even go as far as making barbarians and monks "themes" or subclasses so that they are essentially pushed back into the fighter class (I might like it also for paladins and rangers although these two character concepts have additional problems).

 

[avin]

While I love Fighters the major thing here isn't about the class... it's about how monsters will be handled.

As I predicted, there will be different rules for monster creation.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Fighters in 3e worked fine flexibility-wise (although the dead levels and weak high-level options didn't work too well.). Just go that route, but make other details of the class flexible. In 3e parlance, fighters need flexible saves and proficiencies based on their style.

There is plenty of room for more nonmagic classes, but I don't see splitting the fighter as the way to get there.

 

[Kingreaper]

See, that's why I thought the Fighter as "master of feats' in 3e worked.

By giving the fighter a very basic set of abilities, and a huge amount of customization room, you could take the character whichever way you wanted.

Now, there may have been problem with the execution of feats, or the execution of AC, or attack bonuses, or full attacks, but the basic concept was sound.

If you want an archetype that covers enormous ground, you need to build it the same way - simple core, lots of flexibility.

I think the error was in giving fighters FEATS rather than Martial Techniques

Because the fighter got feats, the feats had to be balanced for general consumption, not just for the fighter. They were balanced against other feats.

Meanwhile, spells could have been done as feats, but were instead on a seperate list, so they got balanced against each other.
If they'd put spells in with the feats, and tried to balance them that way, A) the disparity between wizard and fighter would have been far clearer (your wizard gets how many spell-feats per level? And I only get one combat-feat every two levels?) and B) spells would have gotten toned down quite a lot, because there's no way they could justify to themselvs saying a level 9 spell was the same as a feat.

 

[Mattachine]

In 3e, fighters finally got some love with PHB2, with alternate class features and a sequence of "Fighter Only" feats right up to level 18 or 20. Unfortunately, that came just before 4e came out.

That series of feats could be folded in as class features (I think PF did something along those lines.), and the fighter would be a solid class.

 

[pauljathome]

Well, I think for one, it was very common for a fighter to be good at fighting at several different feats of arms, not just one.

Look at Robin Hood - while he was a master archer, he was also a very good swordsman and with the quarterstaff.

Or the Samurai - they were expert in the use of swords, bows, pole-arms as well as unarmed fighting.

A straight fighter (pretty much any edition) IS good at everything.

I can trivially make Robin Hood. Lets assume for the moment that he is a L10 fighter (3rd edition) in a moderately low powered world. He'd have various archery feats and better dex than Strength. That would plausibly make him the best archer in the kingdom. But at L10 he'd STILL be a kick ass swordsman and quite proficient with the quarterstaff.

What is actually hard in D&D is to make a fighter who is a pure specialist. Somebody who is insanely good with one weapon but sucks at everything else.

 

[Aeolius]

As I predicted, there will be different rules for monster creation.

While support for more detailed beasties will remain:

"While many DMs want to build monsters using the target numbers-based system that 4th edition uses, some DMs may want to build their monsters like PCs, adding levels of cleric onto orcs to create enemies that also have many class features. Some DMs may want to use templates to create everything from a fiendish hobgoblin to a vampiric half-celestial animated chair. So we'll need to find ways to support those needs, without mandating them."

 

[jshaft37]

If there's something that 4E got really right, I think it's the organization and simplicity of the monster stat blocks. Is that something you'd like to continue in the next iteration of D&D?

This is a great question because it allows me to touch on a bigger picture concept as well. Certainly the 4th edition presentation for monsters has a lot of advantages, and makes the game pretty straightforward to run. Whatever twists and turns the game's development takes, one of our goals is going to continue to be making the game easy for the DM to prep for and run, and the 4E monster stat block goes a long way to making that possible. That's not to say that I think it can't be improved upon; one of the things we will continue to do going forward is make sure that everything, from mechanics to formats, are serving our goals.

This is the most key for me. Post MM3 materials especially are excellent from a DM's standpoint (and from a player's too, imo).

My hope that that 5E builds on the Essentials design philosophy, but does things to speed up combat (no tactical map requirement, reducing conditions, reducing immediate reactions, increase combat lethality), and incorporates more social feats/themes/backgrounds to be used for the exploration and role play "pillars".