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="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 8520419" data-attributes="member: 7006">I don't care either way.  Because quite frankly, if I have an idea for a character it comes out of its narrative and story, and not its game mechanic.  If I want to play a Drunken Master Monk... I can play that Drunken Master Monk at 1st level even if I don't get Drunken Master-specific game mechanics until 3rd level.  And this is true across the board.Because guess what?  Here's a little secret... most game mechanics do not IN ANY WAY actually represent the narrative they are supposed to symbolize.  You can look at most of the game mechanics given through subclasses and come up with countless different narratives for what those mechanics represent.I mean look at the Drunken Master.  At 3rd level you get four mechanics:1) Performance skill2) Brewer's Supplies3) Take Disengage action as part of another action4) Gain 10 feet of movementWhen you look at these four mechanics, devoid of any indication of what class and subclass they go to... no one would look at these and say "Oh, well, of course these represent a Monk and a Drunken Master one at that!  That's the only possible thing they could be for!"  No... in fact I'd be willing to bet that seeing the Brewer's Supplies tool proficiency would probably make most people think this was some sort of Dwarven subclass before anything else.  Probably like a Dwarven Skald to take into account the Performance skill and being able to move away from being attacked.  That's just as viable and quite frankly even probably more likely a guess than a "Drunken Master", because those Jackie Chan films are not nearly as ubiquitous as the stereotypes surrounding dwarves are.Let's take another one.  If we didn't already know, what would we guess these four mechanics represent for a Class and Sub-class when all the flavor is removed?1) +1d8 damage on an attack if the target is below its hit point maximum2) +4 AC against a creature that has hit you for one turn3) use one action to attack each creature adjacent to you4) use a reaction to halve the damage of an attack against youNow what do these represent?  Probably a good amount of us might know this is one of the paths of the Hunter Ranger... but there is nothing in those four abilities that tell us the Ranger is the only weapon-using class that could possibly have those abilities.  After all, they are really all just generic combat bonuses.  Any class could have them.  We could easily come up with fluff and narrative as to why a Fighter would have those sub-class features.  Or a Rogue.  Or a Barbarian, or a Paladin, or a Monk etc.And this is exactly why I don't need any sub-class game mechanics to come in at 1st level across the board... because the mechanic we'd get is never so specialized that it's ONLY possible representation is the sub-class that is giving it.  So the mechanic is actually not giving us what we want.  What we WANT is the story that the mechanics represent.  But we can get that faster, better, and easier by how we play the character.  And that does more to symbolize my sub-class than any mechanic.  I will play a drunken master long before any game mechanic need come in to "assist" in my portrayal.  I will play a hunter long before any game mechanic need come in.  My Oath of Vengeance will be blatantly obvious by how I play my PC, and I don't need "Target is Frightened" and "Gain Advantage on attack rolls against target for 1 minute" to do it.Are the additional mechanics nice?  Sure!  New mechanics to use are always fun.  But they don't supercede how I visualize how my character acts.  I can have my character act however I want with or without them, so my "sub-class" will be evident from the very beginning of my PC's career.</blockquote>

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