D&D 5E Should 5e have more classes (Poll and Discussion)?

[Cadence]

Well, that is merely a difference in character's internal motivation. This indeed will make character's feel rather different, but it is a rather bizarre justification for a massive mechanical difference. It is not like we have completely separate class with different mechanics to represent a selfish thief who only steals to enrich themselves and one who does so to give it to the poor.

The Cleric gets a wide range of powers and spells that come from opening themselves and cooperating with the divine. That feels like Wisdom based to me.They get to directly channel positive energy as a conduit for their (much more senior) partner.

The Warlock is exploring the arcane (or would maybe take anything that came their way), and stumbles across the otherworldly bargain to gain that power. I can almost imagine any of Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma here, but the latter two and needing either willpower or sense of self to not just become a puppet seems to fit for me. If I were going to merge the warlock with something I think I'd go Sorcerer before Cleric (instead of your blood, you get the power from the bargain).

 

[Cadence]

It is not like we have completely separate class with different mechanics to represent a selfish thief who only steals to enrich themselves and one who does so to give it to the poor.

But we do have different classes for the fighters who power themselves by rage and the ones who power themselves by ki...

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I've said it before: Basing a class around the Battlemaster/Mastermind tactical options and making that the class's main point. EK is a fighter with a dash of wizard, Arcane Trickster is a rogue with a dash of wizard, BM and MM should be fighter/rogue with a dash of warlord. You could squish it into fighter, I guess, but that's just going to lead to the exact same discussion we're having with psionics of "Psionics/Warlords have more design space available for sub-classes and shouldn't just be relegated to such themselves"

I just, point at Kibble's Warlord for how its done super well in a 5E framework

I feel that Warlord should have decent basic combat capability and are in effect a type of a professional warrior, albeit an officer rather than a line trooper. Thus building them on the fighter chassis makes perfect sense to me. Subclasses actually get quite a lot of stuff, so having a battlemaster-style subclass whose features solely focus on aiding and boosting allies would seem perfectly sufficient to me.

Nature of their agreement.

Clerics worship the Raven Queen and respect her. They seek to further her goals. They have that whole 'actually worshipping' thing keeping them in line. They get spells and abilities based around specific domains represented by that deity
Warlocks do not necessarily worship the Raven Queen. They're basically a freelancer.

As noted, that's just attitude and internal motivation and shouldn't really affect metaphysics or mechanisc.

Once enpowered, they are under no obligation to serve whoever they got power from and could just as well work against them.

This however can be valid and is the differnce I have tried to emphaise on my interpretations of these classes. Cleric doesn't have power on their own, they're merely channelling the power of their deity. If for some reason the deity would vanish or decide to shun the cleric, the cleric wouldn't have magic (of course actually doing this to a PC in a game has issues, but in theory.)

Warlock gets imbued with power in one chunk. From thereon it is theirs, and they're in that sense independent from their patron. This however makes them more similar to sorcerers, Both are imbued with the power of a magical being, in one instance it merely happens via ancestry and in another later. But this is why I want to fold sorcerers in into warlock. Both are just casters imbued with magic that now is part of them. The exact details how the imbuing occurred can vary from setting to setting and from character to character.

 

[Umbran]

There's only one way to make a ranger, and that is the actual ranger class.

This is not for Gladius, specifically, but for everyone to ask of themselves. Imagine, for a moment, that your friend is losing an argument with ragweed pollen. They are about to sneeze, noisily and messily, all over themselves. They reach out a hand and quickly stammer, "Gimme a Kleenex!"

Are you the kind of person who will turn to them and say, "I'm sorry, friend, but that's a box of Puffs^tm Brand facial tissues. I cannot hand them to you when you ask for Kleenex^tm." Do you succumb to the tyranny of names? Or, do you recognize that, unless you are in the legal/marketing department, names are really a matter of convenience, and that their strict definitions are far, far less important than the function of the the item they are attached to?

Perhaps it would be really far, far more constructive to recognize that words have multiple definitions - for us, they are often both the name of a class, and the name of a fairly broad fictional role. And while the classes are designed in the hopes of directly filling a fictional role, the class with that name is not the only way to accomplish that goal.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

As for psions, if I actually believed that there was some sensible difference between psionics and magic I wouldn't mind them being a separate class. But as to me it seems that 'psionics' is a merely a pseudo-scientific name for magic I really don't see the point.

 

[Cadence]

As for psions, if I actually believed that there was some sensible difference between psionics and magic I wouldn't mind them being a separate class. But as to me it seems that 'psionics' is a merely a pseudo-scientific name for magic I really don't see the point.

Arcane and Divine get to be different... ::::

 

[jmartkdr2]

I wonder if having a separate Gish spell list would be more elegant than having a flood of different Gish classes though.

It would have been better to make a single gish class in the first place, and I hope they do so when they make a new edition. (Call it Eldritch Knight and have things like bladesinger and hexblade be subclasses of such.) The downside of doing it now is it would inevitably invalidate a bunch of existing subclasses, because those subclasses were attempts to do the concept as a not-class. The fact that almost all of them* failed to give gish players what they wanted (due mostly to not giving them a new spell list) notwithstanding, the team doesn't want to do that.

*I would say hexblade actually hits the target on being a blend of magic and weapon-use, and fairly balanced played single-class (if you don't cheese it by playing an armored blastlock). But it's a single subclass with a lot of dark-magic flavor attached, where the basic playstyle could support nearly any kind of magic as well as any weapon style.

Plus the gish story concept needs to have a lot of mechanics around your relationship with your weapon - for a gish the weapon is not a tool, it's a key part of their identity: it's both how you do magic and what you use magic for. It needs to be as special to them as a jedi's lightsaber at least. Pact of the Blade is a start but you should be able to lean into it a lot more, and of course it doesn't have to come form a shadowy entity you made a deal with.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Arcane and Divine get to be different... ::::

At this point that difference exists solely in one fluff sidebar applying to Forgotten Realms and nothing more. And there the difference seems to be whether to power is channelled from some other entity (divine) or not (arcane) and If that is not the difference then I don't know what it is. I'm not sure how psionics wouldn't just be arcane magic under this definition.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

If I were going to merge the warlock with something I think I'd go Sorcerer before Cleric (instead of your blood, you get the power from the bargain).

Well, I'd combine the warlock with the sorcerers too. And that kinda was my original point: depending how you interpret the patron granting power the warlocks can be different from clerics or they can be different from sorcerers, but they cannot be different from both!

 

[Cadence]

Well, I'd combine the warlock with the sorcerers too. And that kinda was my original point: depending how you interpret the patron granting power the warlocks can be different from clerics or they can be different from sorcerers, but they cannot be different from both!

In a world with Paladins distinct from Clerics and Fighters, and Rangers distinct from Fighters and Barbarians, and Wizards distinct from Sorcerers...the status quo doesn't seem horribly out of place though (as a courtesy to those who love them separate, if nothing else).