VHawkwinter
Explorer
I wanted to preserve enough AD&D flavour for Forgotten Realms campaigns and such, as opposed to the switching to late 3e classes and dropping everything in the PHB as others kept suggesting (one here others on Facebook) (which misses the point of D&D entirely, for me). So that meant having classes reminiscent of the ones from AD&D thematically, and keeping familiar spells and spellcasting, not discarding all of the content in the PHB to exclusively grab stuff from late 3e splats. Ideally I would make priests more specialty-priest like, with very different spell lists per deity, but that's a much bigger overhaul.
The original post was actually in response to someone calling out my 'Just run 3.5 core with this list of books' saying 'you should fix 3.5's balance by banning the classes and spells in the PHB and only allowing later splat classes' - so I was addressing their suggestion to rebalance 3e in a way that doesn't feel like its no longer D&D at all. So I was thinking about trying to address that complaint and somewhat narrow the gap in versatility between classes at the same time. Personally I am actually alright with the "over the course of a campaign" balance approach, but several of the 3.5 Martials are really not so great outside combat, so I wanted to make them have a bit more to contribute to a party when not fighting, while preserving their basic class concept and such.
It does appear I should have been more specific that I want to keep the ability to capture the characters and vibes of AD&D FR Novels and Comics, and the ability to grab 2e Setting Sourcebooks and have suitable 3e mechanics onhand for the characters, rather than trying to replicate AD&D's Gameplay super closely. (For that there's already 3.Y which would be better for the job).
So PF1 takes on those same classes were picked out to try to meet those goals simultaneously as best as possible without a ton of rewriting, and only picking specific elements from PF1 rather than everything (but there's a ton of PF1 content to contemplate).
I will say though that you're right AD&AD novel characters do tend to have fewer spellcasters. I like the 3e FR novels as well and would want to be able to replicate that feel also, but I don't want to lose the ability to build the sorts of characters from the 2e novels.
Anyways. I could have been more clear that I meant more keeping the possibility of replicating the vibe of the 2e novels & comics rather than the AD&D game rules, and you've made some good points, this does make Ranger and Paladin more spellcasty. In my mind I was thinking they're already spellcasters, so making them a bit better at it to make them a bit more versatile is not a big departure. I dunno. Maybe I need to include a spell-less Ranger option.
Magus / Eldritch Archer are Eldritch Knight / Arcane Archer types that just let you start at level 1. Suitable for Githyanki Gishes or some of the Thayans warriors or Elven Bladesingers or what have you, but less convoluted to set up than a PrC setup. That's what I was thinking there. Maybe they're a bit too far and I should just rework the PrCs or make ACFs. Inquisitor - that one was admittedly me just thinking it fit decently well into various FR churches and liking the classes.
And then the cleric / druid split was because they're just overtuned in 3e, trying to make players specialise which type of cleric or druid they're going to be rather than all of them, if that makes sense. (And again in an ideal world I would try to make clerics vary much more by deity, possibly bringing back specialty priests and spheres, or some other approach that makes a priest of mask feel very different than a priest of gond and both very different than a priest of gruumsh).
It does sound like there's room for improvement from my outline and I should more clearly communicate the goal I had in mind. So thanks for that feedback.
P. S. Context:
I'm actually a bit too young to have a lot of AD&D experience from back in the day, I was born in '87. I played much more of my dad's SSI AD&D DOS games than I played hours of AD&D tabletop sessions. I started on Tabletop RPGs proper with VtM. But I grew up with the AD&D DC comics and in 2000 when I started collecting 3.0 books I also started collecting and reading D&D novels - and not just the new releases. Used book stores also had a bunch. I liked the Netheril Trilogy quite a bit. Also collecting AD&D FR setting boxed sets and such on eBay and in the discount and used bins, which I used with 3.0. And I've reread those many times since, and also bought more or rebought a bunch of them on Audible after their big Audible D&D novel recording project in 2012. The Novels have consistently been my biggest engagement/interest in the D&D brand for the last 25 years.
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