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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 8457184" data-attributes="member: 20564">A couple of issues with this.First, before you even have any of the questions, you have the more general "what do we need to tell the stories" - the archetypes of the heroes and villians.  How you sort them, into the same or different hats, will make a large impact on your first questions.  For example D&D separated arcane and divine back in the earliest edition. What if that was just magic, but things like ranged vs. melee in combat were separated out.  5e fighter, ranger, rogue would look very different.And this is just one way.  A single edition back we broke up by a list of combat roles and by power source - martial, arcane, divine, primal, etc.You need to have a design philosophy before you can make meaningful choices to the first question.The second question has a few warts.  First, based off it's wargaming roots, D&D has always had that every character can contribute roughly equally in combat.  So you need to be able to balance a number of different points from this list, plus the ones that have gotten left off it like action denial, crowd control, and the like.  And to balance you need to be able to pick not some static number, but fractions of many of them.  How those fractions have are represented can change mechanically - this one has some control by having limited usage or targeting, this one also has some control but it does it by making it soft control instead of hard.But it's also been a team game, where characters can't do everything themselves.  So trying to pick these out in a vacuum is not D&D.And then, all classes are supposed to have features in various other pillars of play.  That needs to come from a separate pool than from combat - that's a failing design pattern we've learned from games like Mechwarrior.  The quick of that is that your starting mech, your skills pilotting a mech, and everything else that you do in an RPG come from the same pool.  You can and will end up with a party where half of them are gods on the hexes and the DM can't challenge them without killing the rest of the party, and the same half are likely to kill themselves the first time they try to drive or do anything else remotely dangerous out of their mechs.  Protecting people from shooting themselves in the foot is an important aspect of character creation, especially in a game that wants to attract new roleplayers like D&D always has.Which brings us back to new player friendliness.  Roll some states, pick background, race, and class, is already a challenge at time.  Especially for people who aren't joining existing groups but trying to pull themselves up just by reading.  Having to juggle the value of a large amount of options, and how the interact with other options, isn't really on the table.  It's why feats and multiclassing are optional - to reduce starting complexity.What you have may work for a more crunchy RPG, but it doesn't meet that simplicity test for new players, even with a couple of pre-built archetypes.</blockquote>

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