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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5857744" data-attributes="member: 54877">It need not be all or nothing to navigate the issues. What it does need is to have the niches identified clearly enough for the mechanics to make sense, and then build each class with strength and weaknesses geared towards those niches. Let's look at the historical problem classes and why they had those problems:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Fighter - smacks things, and that's it.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Wizards - vast power until the spells run out.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Bard - not excellent at anything.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Thief - early skills didn't quite make up for frailness.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Cleric - pretty well-rounded, but spells focused on party.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Druid - lots of picky restrictions because of power, later power got unhinged.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Paladin - special abilities a bit weak sauce.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Ranger - overpowered, later spread to thin and thus weak.</li> </ul>The problems in all the classes start with the definitions of the fighter and wizard, and get worse as we jump through hoops trying to not face up to how narrow those are.  IMHO, ideally classes should be good at A, decent at B, poor but supportive at C, and lousy at everything else--where everything else is defined as no more than two or three niches. (If more niches, spread out "good" to "lousy" fairly evenly.) In the worst cases of this problem, you get something like WoW, where there aren't enough applicable niches to spread out amongst the classes. Of course, the nasty details of making that work are determining exactly what the niches are--and then following through with mechanical heft to make those niches matter. If you want to make the wizard good at arcane power, decent at obscure lore--better make "obscure lore" something more than a fluff-only sop. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> Make the party members need each other by having rules that require backup in most of the niches, to really perform well, but not absolutely critical to perform at all. That is, two decent healer are about equal to one good healer, and a good healer, decent healer combo is about optimum. (Assuming "healer" is a niche, which it might not be.) Then the possible combinations of classes in the party to get there is much more flexible.</blockquote>

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