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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7035937" data-attributes="member: 996">There's no need to purge it (there are folks who like having a more or less choiceless build choice - no irony intended - though I think pregens are the better solution for such players, if only because they might not all always want to play the exact same thing). You go too far, sir!  ;P As long as you're the DM, you can make that happen.But, you do have a point (OK, I have a point, and I'm using you to make it, sorry 'bout that):  If a 5e player doesn't want a complicated-to-build character, and doesn't want it to be complicated in play, the Champion is about his only option.  If a player /does/ want a more option-rich build choice or a more interesting-in-play option, the Fighter (and Barbarian, and even Rogue to an only slightly lesser extent) is off the table.  Similarly, if a player wants a character with some sort of magical power, he has to grok the neo-vancian slot system, and hunt through a hundred odd spells deciding what he needs access to.On the one hand, that's been a feature in the past.  Everyone knew to point the newb at the fighter for his first class (when they weren't hazing him by making him play the band-aid Cleric, that is), and casters were the 'advanced classes' part of the perks of developing 'skilled play' on your way to becoming a DM.  Starting in 3e, though, it wasn't quite so clear.  The 3e fighter was hard to build well, and didn't work quite like any other class - the Barbarian was a better training-wheels class for new players.  Similarly, though 4e was easier to just pick up & play with no prior knowledge of the game, the 4e fighter was a defender, which required a little more thought in play than a striker to use effectively, and while you could play a fighter more or less as a striker, it took a teeny bit of system mastery to set it up - an Archer Ranger was the easiest PC to build/play.  Essentials re-set the teething class to Fighter(Slayer) and 5e kept that in the form of the Champion.  In the meantime, though Essentials had also introduced some less traditional, comparatively easy classes - the Thief was a very easy-to-use striker, though it had a little more to do than the Striker, and, most dramatically, the Elemental Sorcerer was a straightforward/streamlined, simple to build/play (to the point of deadly-dull) blasting Striker that was actually tossing around magic.  So in post-E, you could actually give even the most complexity-adverse player an easy choice of 3 general types of characters - the melee badass, the stealthy killer, and the blazing caster.  For everything Essentials did 'wrong,' that was a bright spot.5e could do with some more interesting non-magic-using classes, and at least one simplistic supernatural-powers/casting class, for those who'd like to dive in with such a concept.</blockquote>

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