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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9658899" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Beyond "being more general than a well-trained warrior", what is the class fantasy you want to capture? In less technical terms: what does the generic "everyman class" do? What is it supposed to feel like to be a Generic Everyman Class? (Hereafter, GEC.) What is its raison d'être?Unless and until you articulate that, it's going to be impossible to talk about designing a new class, of any sort, generic or otherwise. The class fantasy sets the parameters for what kinds of design goals are potentially worth pursuit. Your chosen design goals can then guide you to possible mechanical elements to fulfill them (and away from those you're confident wouldn't). That's the iterative loop of game design in a class-based system: choose a class fantasy, define design goals which are in keeping with that fantasy, build and test (and test and test and test and...) mechanics. If the mechanics hit a dead end, go back a step and review your design goals. If the design goals repeatedly fail to work, review the class fantasy--and possibly reject it if it just isn't working out. (Lamentably, that sometimes happens, but I don't think it's a major risk in most cases.)Thus far, you've articulated a lot of unorganized design goals, mostly centered on possible subclasses and growth potential, with the extremely nebulous and largely non-informative class fantasy of "being maximally generic", supplemented by the slightly less nebulous but still not very informative "being pushed into adventure when unready" and "learning from others around them".So: Give me the elevator pitch. 3-6 sentences (preferably more sentences only if there are rather short ones). Succinctly summarize. Things like what it's supposed to feel like to play, or what priorities it gives the player while playing it, or how the thematics are meant to draw the player into a particular experience. If possible, keep it light on mechanics, this is much higher-level than mechanics.Giving two examples from existing 5e (one which I think was done quite well, the other which I think was done quite poorly):A Warlock gains magical power through some kind of transaction or agreement with a powerful being, a Patron--often dangerous or manipulative, but not necessarily evil. As their power is defined by what their Patron agrees to give, the Warlock has many different possible powers, but each individual Warlock must carefully choose what power they wish to wield. Due to their unique magical source, the Warlock tends toward consistent, reliable effects augmented with a few punchy, powerful things--but they must regularly commune to remain at peak effectiveness.The Warlock in 5e is among the best-designed of all its classes, particularly because (the whole "resting isn't well-handled" thing aside) it actually forces some genuine, serious choices. It may not be precisely where I would want it to be, but it is genuinely a smart concept executed relatively well within the limits of the system it's manifested in.And now for...the other one.A Wizard is a master of erudition and scholasticism, whose understanding of the machinery of the universe permits her to pull the levers thereof--that is, hermetic magic. Magic is in everything the Wizard does, and the Wizard accesses it through copious study and analysis, developing esoteric formulae, arcane geometries, or precisely-constructed phrases to bend reality to her will. Though she has sacrificed much of her ability to do any other task, choosing to specialize in "the power to reshape reality itself" means she can still do a great many things...with adequate preparation time.This is, quite clearly, from both the class descriptions and the ways WotC talk about the class, what they intend for the Wizard to be. Unfortunately, in practice, most of this just isn't true--other than "specializing in rewriting reality makes you stupidly powerful" since that's barely even a specialty. The "scholastic" element of Wizards is almost totally absent, and 5.5e has put only the barest effort into correcting this problem. Most Wizards don't "research" their spells at all, they plagiarize them. (That barest effort, BTW, is that...Wizards now get Expertise with one skill from a fixed list of skills that more or less looks like what 3.x would have called the various specializations of the Knowledge skill: K(Arcana), K(History), etc.) And, to be clear, I don't think the Wizard is a bad class fantasy. I'm simply saying that 5e has almost totally failed to do anything whatever about the Wizard class to make it a researcher or academic, despite the fact that being a researcher AND academic is quite literally the core class fantasy!Aim for something that is like one of the descriptions above. Then we can talk about design goals that can bring that description to life.</blockquote>

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