D&D 5E (2014) Should martial characters be mundane or supernatural?

[Minigiant]

What are you basing this on? Have you done any broad based polls or surveys like WOTC has?

You, and a handful of posters are not a majority.

WOTC

WOTC wanted to make a psion class, but could not make it work as one class. Because the community wanted 2 different concepts. The community wanted 2 classes. We got 0.

 

[Pedantic]

What are you basing this on? Have you done any broad based polls or surveys like WOTC has?

You, and a handful of posters are not a majority.

You get no more claim than the other side does here. Additional classes make up the bulk of 3PP player facing offerings, precisely because there's huge demand.

More fundamentally, the design question of "few classes with lots of options" vs. "lots of classes with fewer options" vs. "multiclassing as chunky point buy" is very much not settled definitively.

Personally, I'd prefer the game go crazy with new class creation and ditch multiclassing, which makes the internal balance problem significantly easier. 4e's sin was thinking resource system was not an important part of class identity, and avoiding the hard design problem multiple resource systems creates. That should be faced head on.

 

[Oofta]

You get no more claim than the other side does here. Additional classes make up the bulk of 3PP player facing offerings, precisely because there's huge demand.

More fundamentally, the design question of "few classes with lots of options" vs. "lots of classes with fewer options" vs. "multiclassing as chunky point buy" is very much not settled definitively.

Personally, I'd prefer the game go crazy with new class creation and ditch multiclassing, which makes the internal balance problem significantly easier. 4e's sin was thinking resource system was not an important part of class identity, and avoiding the hard design problem multiple resource systems creates. That should be faced head on.

I'm not the one saying they should add another class. It's not going to happen and people that want more classes have tons of 3PP to choose from. If it wasn't for that I might have a bit more sympathy.

Pushing out a ton of content just ends up with an overloaded system that doesn't work for a lot of people.

 

[Pedantic]

I'm not the one saying they should add another class. It's not going to happen and people that want more classes have tons of 3PP to choose from. If it wasn't for that I might have a bit more sympathy.

Pushing out a ton of content just ends up with an overloaded system that doesn't work for a lot of people.

The "if they published more books 5e would be worse" theory is unfalsifiable in the current market, and too full of confounding factors to be validated by comparison to any previous edition. It is neither obvious, nor a given; they may well be leaving lots of money on the table.

 

[Oofta]

The "if they published more books 5e would be worse" theory is unfalsifiable in the current market, and too full of confounding factors to be validated by comparison to any previous edition. It is neither obvious, nor a given; they may well be leaving lots of money on the table.

Maybe. I happen to disagree.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The "if they published more books 5e would be worse" theory is unfalsifiable in the current market, and too full of confounding factors to be validated by comparison to any previous edition. It is neither obvious, nor a given; they may well be leaving lots of money on the table.

D&D has always been a list-based system. That is you add to D&D by adding to existing lists of mechanics & sub-systems. You add new spells, new magic items, new weapons, new races, new classes, skills (eventually), etc - and, each time you do, that new rules element may interact in an intended or unexpected way with any other rules element. Complexity and opportunities for system mastery thus balloon as you add material.

5e is definitely no exception, especially as it leans heavily towards shared rather than class-specific spells. Though, it's tendency to add sub-classes, which can't cross-pollinate within the same class, instead of classes also mitigates against it a little.
So yeah, the more books - with actual game elements, publish all the adventures or lore you want, so long as it doesn't include spells or items - the bulkier and more prone to imbalances and exploitation it's going to get.

 

[Micah Sweet]

There's "don't want, won't use" and there's "don't want, can't let anyone else have it either"

It's sad that the latter has somehow become such an important consideration in designing for D&D

Modern D&D isn't generally designed as the toolkit I feel it should be. You change the rules and assumptions in the PH and you de facto change them for the bulk of all gamers, potentially including the ones you might want to play with, while contracting the potential base for ideas that have been shoved into the "optional" box in the latter chapters of the DMG with a sign saying "Beware of the Leopard" (if they're even still in the book at all).

That might have something to do with the attitude you're referencing.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Modern D&D isn't generally designed as the toolkit I feel it should be. You change the rules and assumptions in the PH and you de facto change them for the bulk of all gamers, potentially including the ones you might want to play with, while contracting the potential base for ideas that have been shoved into the "optional" box in the latter chapters of the DMG with a sign saying "Beware of the Leopard" (if they're even still in the book at all).
That might have something to do with the attitude you're referencing.

Good point. Especially under the 3.x RaW-uber-alles zietgiest. (And 4e 3pp was virtually non-existent due to the GSL, and homebrew was hard, so if your fave didn't get in, you were out of luck.)
5e tho, while not a toolkit at all (I don't know if D&D ever was a toolkit... FUDGE is a build-a-game toolkit, for instance, very different), is open to the DM just doing whatever - adding, changing, ruling, overruling, banning, folding, spindling, mutilating (the rules, too, not just the PCs).

 

[Minigiant]

Maybe. I happen to disagree.

You are allowed to.
I just don't see how adding just 2 additional classes to refine the class that is "3 concepts mashed together" is bloat. Especially since neither one would be a full caster and the result of not adding a new class or two is the bloating of subclasses.

I suspect in an alternate universe where the Fighter and Battlemaster are separate classes, this thread doesn't exist. And many of the martial topics, threads, and videos and a dozen other places down exist.

I mean why couldn't the base fighter be the Champion and have the choice of the Cavalier or Banneret atop that?

The whole thing 300% feels like a strategy to prop up the PHB more that to give the community what they want,

 

[Scribe]

I suspect in an alternate universe where the Fighter and Battlemaster are separate classes, this thread doesn't exist. And many of the martial topics, threads, and videos and a dozen other places down exist.

I dont see how thats even a universe that exists. Battlemaster absolutely is a Fighter.