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<blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5951586" data-attributes="member: 2067">To me, it's pretty clear that what makes one class a &quot;class&quot; and what makes one class a &quot;theme&quot; (or &quot;background&quot;) is pretty arbitrary.I mean, look at the playtest rogue. Most D&amp;D players would probably say, yeah! The rogue IS a unique class! But the playtest rogue certainly has no abilities that couldn't be in themes and backgrounds for other classes. The same is essentially true of the fighter, or the cleric, or the wizard, too. If the goal was to &quot;preserve page count,&quot; we could get 1 class, or even NO classes. But that's not very &quot;D&amp;D.&quot;So what takes precedence over the page count is the (somewhat subjective) idea of &quot;What feels like D&amp;D?&quot;Paladins. Rangers. Barbarians. Definitely. Warlords. Warlocks. Assassins. Sorcerers. Eh...maybe. Most of those are mechanical tricks (more frequent magic, special healing, special attacks) first and archetypes second. Some classes are worth spending the additional page count and design specs to make them distinct. This is kind of subjective. And I love the promise of modularity that might allow someone to play a functionally classless 5e. But the idea that we should reduce to some arbitrary number of &quot;needed&quot; classes and get rid of everything else isn't very appealing to me. You don't NEED any classes. You might WANT more than just 2-4, though. You might WANT 100,000. Especially if your game doesn't use themes or backgrounds.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="I'm A Banana, post: 5951586, member: 2067"] To me, it's pretty clear that what makes one class a "class" and what makes one class a "theme" (or "background") is pretty arbitrary. I mean, look at the playtest rogue. Most D&D players would probably say, yeah! The rogue IS a unique class! But the playtest rogue certainly has no abilities that couldn't be in themes and backgrounds for other classes. The same is essentially true of the fighter, or the cleric, or the wizard, too. If the goal was to "preserve page count," we could get 1 class, or even NO classes. But that's not very "D&D." So what takes precedence over the page count is the (somewhat subjective) idea of "What feels like D&D?" Paladins. Rangers. Barbarians. Definitely. Warlords. Warlocks. Assassins. Sorcerers. Eh...maybe. Most of those are mechanical tricks (more frequent magic, special healing, special attacks) first and archetypes second. Some classes are worth spending the additional page count and design specs to [I]make them distinct[/I]. This is kind of subjective. And I love the promise of modularity that might allow someone to play a functionally classless 5e. But the idea that we should reduce to some arbitrary number of "needed" classes and get rid of everything else isn't very appealing to me. You don't NEED any classes. You might WANT more than just 2-4, though. You might WANT 100,000. Especially if your game doesn't use themes or backgrounds. [/QUOTE]

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