Has Mike said anything on whether they're going to consolidate non-arcane classes as well?
Well, there are certainly benefits to consolidating classes. For one, it reduces the amount of space you have to devote to redundant abilities. For another, it makes it easier to provide useful content for large swaths of PCs. Say you're releasing the Complete Necromancer's Handbook and you want to give arcane casters the ability to create weird flying heads with bat wings for ears and tentacles for hair; you only need to create a mage spell called "Create Vargouille," instead of a wizard spell and a sorceror spell and a warlock invocation and a psionic talent. It also simplifies balance to have a common framework to build on, and makes it easier for players to learn.
Against that, however, you have to put the chief drawback of consolidation: Loss of mechanical and conceptual diversity. For some folks this isn't an issue, but for a lot of us, the mechanics of a class have a big effect on how it feels to play that class, and if everything is using the same mechanics, playing a warlock feels much like playing a wizard. That contributes mightily to player burnout. Likewise, to whatever extent you feel the mechanics describe the game world, using the same mechanics implies a sameness within the game as well. This is why people are having such visceral reactions to the news that psions will be mages. The mage might provide a decent mechanical framework for the psion, but to put them under the same class heading implies that psions use the same kind of magic wizards do, which is completely counter to the concept of psionics in D&D.
I think some of the reasoning might be a desire to avoid class bloat, which was a significant problem in late 3E and 4E. But I don't really see this as a solution. Instead of class bloat, we just get subclass bloat.
Well, there are certainly benefits to consolidating classes. For one, it reduces the amount of space you have to devote to redundant abilities. For another, it makes it easier to provide useful content for large swaths of PCs. Say you're releasing the Complete Necromancer's Handbook and you want to give arcane casters the ability to create weird flying heads with bat wings for ears and tentacles for hair; you only need to create a mage spell called "Create Vargouille," instead of a wizard spell and a sorceror spell and a warlock invocation and a psionic talent. It also simplifies balance to have a common framework to build on, and makes it easier for players to learn.
Against that, however, you have to put the chief drawback of consolidation: Loss of mechanical and conceptual diversity. For some folks this isn't an issue, but for a lot of us, the mechanics of a class have a big effect on how it feels to play that class, and if everything is using the same mechanics, playing a warlock feels much like playing a wizard. That contributes mightily to player burnout. Likewise, to whatever extent you feel the mechanics describe the game world, using the same mechanics implies a sameness within the game as well. This is why people are having such visceral reactions to the news that psions will be mages. The mage might provide a decent mechanical framework for the psion, but to put them under the same class heading implies that psions use the same kind of magic wizards do, which is completely counter to the concept of psionics in D&D.
I think some of the reasoning might be a desire to avoid class bloat, which was a significant problem in late 3E and 4E. But I don't really see this as a solution. Instead of class bloat, we just get subclass bloat.
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