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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6725046" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Don't want to touch the "terrible" thing with a ten-foot pole (that way lies madness and/or infractions, guys), but the "hundreds of classes" thing is...pretty much completely bogus. If you lump subclasses together with their "base" class, 4e had 25 distinct classes by the end of its run. It had a further 20 forked-off subclasses that were different from, but still fundamentally related to, one or another of those base classes. (Most classes had no subclasses at all, and of those that did, each only got 1 or 2 new variations, with the exception of the Wizard, who got four for no adequately explained reason.)You could technically assert that "hybrid" as a whole counts as another class type, but that feels a bit rhetorically dodgy to me (we don't consider "multiclass" to be a starkly distinct class in other editions, and "hybrid" characters are very nearly equivalent to the old 2e multiclass rules, so...)25 classes with a total of 45 subclasses (many classes having only one option, "itself," as a subclass) doesn't seem that bad. Particularly when 5e launched with half as many classes and 2/3 as many subclasses as it is, and will be gaining more with time (at the very least the "psion"/Mystic/whatever, several subclasses from SCAG and/or UA, and potentially PrCs as well). Since people have frequently argued that we shouldn't judge 5e harshly for not being as complete as 4e was at the end of its official run, it seems to me that things should swing both ways and we shouldn't blame 4e for being more bloated than 5e since the latter hasn't had the time to bloat up. Accounting for the slower release cycle of 5e, at a comparable time in 4e's history there were something like 16-18 classes (none of which even had a concept of a "subclass" yet), depending on what the timing was for the Eberron and FR books (which gave us the artificer and swordmage, respectively, IIRC).</blockquote>

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