Tony Vargas
Legend
At the tail end of the playtest it was becoming clear how sub-classes & such would work, and it honestly seemed like starting at 3rd should've been the default - that levels 1 & 2 would've been there only for multi-classing purposes, so you could have an old-school Fighter/Cleric/MU or Fighter/MU/Thief at the start of play, while still using 3.x/5e style MCing.Have you tried starting a campaign at 3rd level?
It's a testament to the power of ordinal numbers (and organized play) that anyone starts a 5e campaign at 1st.
True, but it's not like PF2 is positioned to offer an alternative, their core fanbase is even more deeply committed to uneven class structures than 5e's.One of the core problems, IMHO, is that 5E failed on delivering on the degree of modularity it promised in its initial pitch. And the uneven class structures has been one of the greatest impediments to modularity, customization, and balance in the game, despite the improvements that it did make.
You probably wouldn't even need sub-classes, in that hypothetical case. Sub-classes the way Essentials used them (which was closer the way 5e uses them than 5e is to older versions of the concept) are sort of a kludge to allow you to play a selection of narrow concepts instead of just fitting yourself to the one class straight-jacket - a kludge, really. If 4e & 5e had continued to build upon and refine 3.x-style modular MCing there'd've been no need for such pre-fab options.Which is a shame, if the 5e class progression was more unified you could actually port subclass features between classes with a minimum of fuss.
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