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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6623028" data-attributes="member: 2067">I feel like this is part of the breakdown in communication here. I think that any character concept that becomes a class essentially does so arbitrarily - that is, you decide what you want to be a class before you design the class. We decide we want fighters and druid and paladins and clerics, and then we design these things as different classes because we've already decided that these are the classes we want to make. We can decide that about artificers, psions, warlords, and assassins, too. That's fine. We could decide this about pig-farmers and cobblers and janitors and valkyries and stage magicians and truffle-sniffers or whatever, too. The character types we decide this about are essentially arbitrary. Anything you want to, do it. So yeah, PHB1 rule / Wizard Just Wanted to, these are fine reasons to make a class, and they'd be fine for artificers, too. There's no reason you need any higher criteria. But when we design fighters and paladins and druids and clerics as different classes, we give them meaningfully distinct mechanics (as I illustrated with the difference between pillar-support in wild shape vs. channel divinity, for instance, or the difference in play psychology and narrative between how action surge lets you nova with multiple attacks at no real cost and how divine smite lets you nova with a single attack by spending healing/buffing resources and how sorcery points leads to a different play experience than spellbooks) so that they earn this distinction, so that playing these classes is a significantly different experience from playing any other class. This isn't just proficiencies and a spell list. An artificer, warlord, psion, assassin, that lacks this mechanical division - that is only different because it has different proficiencies and a slightly custom spell list and maybe a reskin for spellcasting - is a class that sucks as a class. It's cruft and clutter, distinction without difference, little more than a reskin and some ribbons. It's shades of 4e same-ness and 3e system-bloat all in the same bucket.  You could make an artificer that has this division. It's not trivial, but the basic idea-seed isn't exactly a high bar, either. As ambivalent as I am about an artifcer class, I tossed off a half-baked idea that could be turned into something worthwhile maybe ("infusion dice": get some dice you can trade for magical effects like healing or energy resistance or whatever). But we don't have a lot of those. 3e/4e didn't really have those. This entire convo could be people talking about what makes or breaks a good artificer class ability, one that's big and different and interesting and defining.If the artificer needs to be its own class, it also needs to have at a defining mechanic. It needs to fire on all pillars. It needs to have a reason to be in an active party rather than left at home, to have interesting decisions to make in play (not just during down time), to do something other than making items in the DMG. This also means that it's not enough to just reskin warlocks or whatever. That's not distinct or defining, it's "I'm a warlock with a different coat of paint." These are all struggles. Not insurmountable by any means, but certainly things that the most ardent fans of artificers-as-a-class have not been able to show me are clear things that the artificer concept has. It's certainly not something inherent to the 3e/4e versions of the artificer class. It might be something WotC can overcome - they've got something like 5 game designers, yeah? They can probably do better than a half-baked looting of fighter mechanics. I'd be at least interested to see what they might come up with. But it's kind of disappointing to see all this clamor for classes without any real sense of the cost and work that a 5e class really needs to not suck. It looks like repeating the mistakes of history that we haven't really learned from - that a class isn't just a thing you toss off because someone wears different armor and uses different weapons and has different skills and occupies a different party role. A class can be anything, but in play, it needs to be meaningfully distinct, and the idea that we can have an artificer or warlord or a psion or an assassin without that distinction is a little frustrating. Like we've decided on one immutable vision and word choice and it doesn't matter if it's good, as long as it's aesthetically pleasing, or fits some pre-concieved view of how things should work.I suppose that's reality though. Anyway, as long as WotC's next stab at artificer, if it is a class, has that distinction (and given that they've made that distinction for fighters and sorcerers, I'd imagine they would keep making it for artificers), I'll be appeased. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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