NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hautamaki" data-source="post: 6039358" data-attributes="member: 42219">I sort of agree with this; but then I question if there's really a lot of desire to play this character?  It's sort of like the cleric--every party needs someone to search rooms, open locked doors and chests, disarm traps, etc; just as every party needs their portable healing potion vending machine.  But not so many people, IME, want to BE those guys--they want to be the awesome fighter dropping bad guys left and right, or the awesome wizard blasting things to kingdom come.Which is why Clerics and Rogues gradually came to have more and more combat ability (particularly as the game became more and more combat focused).Which leads to some very difficult conundrums.  If you make the rogue as good at fighting as the fighter, what good is a fighter?  Likewise with clerics/wizards.  4e tackled this problem with roles--fighters were tanks, rogues were strikers, wizards were controllers, clerics were leaders, etc.  All classes were equally useful in a fight, just in completely different ways.  An elegant solution imo.  The downside was that all classes wound up using basically the same mechanics, the AEDU system, which had certain drawbacks that bothered certain people.Another solution, would be to give classes completely different mechanics but give ways for players to fulfill any role they want with any class they want, just that the different mechanics lend these choices a completely different flavor and wind up with subtle but important differences in how events play out during the game.  In this solution, a fighter can be like a striker, leader, controller, or tank, depending upon his choices of equipment, skills, and feats.  A cleric likewise could fill any role depending again upon his choice of equipment, skills, deity, and prayers.  And a mage also could fill any of the roles depending again upon equipment, skills, and choice of spells.  (in this theoretical system prayers and spells would have completely different mechanics yet hopefully still be overall balanced).And rogues?  Well I haven't figured out where rogues fit in to be honest.  To me, I think that 3 different mechanics (feats, prayers, spells) are enough.  What makes a rogue different from a fighter?  Simply that the feats the rogue chooses gives him bonuses to his adventuring skills instead of fighting.  I don't think any more distinction than that is necessary.And what of other classes?  To me the other classes are actually combinations of the base 4 (or even 3): a paladin is a fighter/cleric of a lawful good deity.  A ranger is a fighter/cleric of a nature deity.  An assassin could be a fighter with levels of mage and/or cleric that takes spells/prayers to do with sneaking around and killing blows and so on.  A barbarian is a fighter that takes rage and toughness type feats.  And so on.These iconic classes could even be named and fully fleshed out--as prestige classes available early in the game, perhaps even third level (eg fighter 1 cleric 1 can now become a paladin, and so on).  But maybe this is too far outside the box for what people want from D&D.  It's just 1 possible answer to a series of dilemmas that all comes back to 'What's the real difference between a fighter and rogue and what roles should these classes play that are both balanced and appealing to a large number of players?'</blockquote>

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