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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6105381" data-attributes="member: 4937">I've seen it attempted in D20 with as few as 3 classes.  I'm not a really big fan.  I have serious reservations with the base class design in 3e D&D even in core, but not with the notion of classes itself.   The fewer classes you use the more problems you pick up with achieving balance, the more difficult you make chargen, and the more convuluted your description of a class is.  I'm happy with say 8-15 classes as about ideal.  By contrast, 3.X ended up with hundreds.  And while some of that was just rules bloat for the sake of publishing splatbooks, some of those were legitimate attempts to fix the broken core base classes without having to retcon them.My big problems in core 3.0e where:a) Sorcerer improperly tied to 'dragon blooded' in flavor, rather than genericly tied to some sort of magical empowerment.  Additionally, no flavor distinguishing (or limiting) sorcerers on the basis of the origin of their magical gifts.  Or to put it another way, a sorcerer that gained their power because they were a minor-demigod by a Death deity, a sorcerer that was the scion of dragons, a sorcerer exposed to intense magical radition as an infant, and another that was bitten by magical spider should feel more different to play in ways that reinforced the powerful mechanic of customizable spell list selection.b) Paladin improperly tied to 'good', rather than to the more generic notion of championing a cause or belief, forcing each sort of champion to be different subclass.  No provision to differentiate champions on the basis of their beliefs.  The crappy 'Blackguard' was an immediate attempt to fix this obvious problem.  Everyone was stuck with the same LG list of powers.c) Barbarian improperly tied to 'chaotic', implying all tribal or primitive societies were chaotic rather than lawful.  Barbarian given a rage mechanic improperly limited to chaotic primitive, rather than more generically to fanaticism, frenzy, or empowerment by emotional state in general.  (Think about a Dervish or Templar fanatic of a lawful religion, or of a fanatical body gaurd of a ruler).  Fanaticism improperly tied to a wilderness background.  There just wasn't enough flexibility here, resulting in too many PrCs existing solely to port minor variants of 'rage' over to different cultural backgrounds.d) The concept of 'hunting' tied improperly not only to a wilderness background (think bounty hunter as a counter example), but tied to animistic mysticism.  The whole 'ranger' concept was just too flavorful to be a base class, and too tied to setting assumptions to be generic.  What if you wanted to be a 'hunter' that didn't rely on magic (for example, in a non-magical setting).   Why was it so hard to build something like an 'Undead Hunter' or 'Construct Smasher' effectively from low levels?e) No provision for a generic skillful martial class suitable for a generic adventurer, generic leader, or generic hero.  The only way to get there was multiclassing between for example fighter and rogue.f) The druid concept was tightly tied in flavor to western european animism.  There was no provision for animists from similar magical traditions the world over like witches, shamans, tribal magicans, vodoo doctors or animist tradtion priests except for the NPC adept class, which was merely a 'legacy' class like warrior to support backwards compatibility and existing expectations.  There needed to be some base class that would provide for all those flavors without needing a separate class for each sort.  Worse yet, Druid was an uber-class, not merely jack of all trades, but master of all trades, and likely to steal spotlight regardless of the scene - something that became really problimatic with the buffs in 3.5.g) The monk.  In just about every respect.h) The classes became increasingly imbalanced at high levels as spellcasters increased exponentially in power (more spells, scalable spells, more powerful spells all at the same time) while martial classes continued to increase linearly (feats or class abilities gained at regular increments with small even boosts to power).   Significant buffing of Fighter and Rogue was needed beginning around 10th level.   Conversely, significant spell features needed to be reduced in power for spellcasters.I know why these mistakes happened.  The 3e designers were anxious to win back hearts and minds and wanted to make a game that looked as much like 1e D&D as possible, and bringing back classes in an iconic fashion was an obvious attempt to do that.  But, by 3.5 at least they should have been fixing these problems better, instead of just heaping a bunch of ill thought out errata on the system and making things worse.For me, the cleric - with the exception of being broken by the general poor design of some spells - was the best designed class in 3e.  It picked up two minor customizable features - domains - that could be fairly easily described but still altered how the class felt and to some extent played.  It served for everything that was in its concept.  I wanted to replicate that across classes that were too generic, boost feats, reduce the tier spread, and generally get rid of the need for PrCs.</blockquote>

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