D&D General What is the right amount of Classes for Dungeons and Dragons?

[Maxperson]

I will say this forever: we vastly underestimate the ability of new players to grok gameplay.

I've watched a ten year old master the dozen or so buttons on a modern console controller in an impossible number of combinations all while juggling a stream of consumable and recharging abilities and honing the situational awareness and reflexes to keep up with a maddeningly ubiquitous 'perfect parry' combat system.

And yet I come on here and get told that same ten your old is too incompetent to operate Barbarian Rage and a feat that asks them to use basic addition.

My 10 year old has beaten Cuphead on hard mode, and not just beaten it, but replayed all the bosses until he gets a perfect A+ rating. Currently he's going through the game in pacifist mode(no using weapons) and has beaten at least one boss already. Me? I have trouble beating bosses on easy mode and there are some I haven't beaten yet.

 

[Minigiant]

Simple classes are for people who need simple classes.

Sometimes because they are new and need to be eased in. Sometimes they are vets and don't want to complexity.

The mistake D&D makes is attaching the simple style to the one of the most important and and the broadest class in their roster.

This is objectively bad game design.

You silo out easy mode into its own thing. All other types of gaming figured this out.

You know how people say there are 4 categories of classes. There should be 5.

Adventurers
Experts
Priests
Mages
Warriors

Adventurer classes should be the Simple classes. The Brute. The Healer. The Blaster.

I mean it makes more sense in lore. The farmer's son who picks up a maul and uses their hayhauling muscles isn't a fighter. They are a brute. The wizard school dropout or failed apprentice who doesn't delve into eldritch patrons aint a wizard nor warlock but they still know basic magic.

 

[Aldarc]

Will this be the future of Dungeons & Dragons for its next fifty years I wonder: players will continue to be discussing how classes or some other aspect of the game system can be improved or redesigned in the year 2074 and beyond that?

I find the discussion fascinating...but at what point do people simply make their own new role-playing game or homebrew their version of D&D -- for example Neon Chameleon has a bunch of cool ideas for a different version of the game that it sounds like he is running with...I bet it is fun to play at his table.

Nice to see the Do It Yourself ethic remains strong in the role-playing community after five decades.

Some of us fairly self-aware that our proposals would never happen, and if they were, they would likely not be popular with the wider audience of D&D. (Killing the wizard? That's preposterous!) We are on the fringes. The discussion is an entertaining diversion.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

Simple classes are for people who need simple classes.

Sometimes because they are new and need to be eased in. Sometimes they are vets and don't want to complexity.

The mistake D&D makes is attaching the simple style to the one of the most important and and the broadest class in their roster.

This is objectively bad game design.

You silo out easy mode into its own thing. All other types of gaming figured this out.

You know how people say there are 4 categories of classes. There should be 5.

Adventurers
Experts
Priests
Mages
Warriors

Adventurer classes should be the Simple classes. The Brute. The Healer. The Blaster.

I mean it makes more sense in lore. The farmer's son who picks up a maul and uses their hayhauling muscles isn't a fighter. They are a brute. The wizard school dropout or failed apprentice who doesn't delve into eldritch patrons aint a wizard nor warlock but they still know basic magic.

I might make a thread about this later.

The problem is that there are two ways to interact, with explicit mechanical support, with the world. Either skills or explicit abilities (these being class abilities or spells).

Skills in D&D are both weak and they do not scale properly. Sure you (slowly) improve the probability of success, but your skills never improve in impact. You don't get to do cooler things as you level up unless you get support from elsewhere.

So the D&D team is effectively saying, by making skills pathetically useless, that you can either do things well (class abilities) or do things badly (skills) and class abilities are inherently more complicated than the skill system.

Imagine if the skill system instead was tied to a coherent system designed around what characters can do, rather than being focused on how likely they are to succeed. At that point you could have a character who is both competent AND simple.

This does not even require mechanical things like Skill Feats from Pathfinder 2E. It can be done easily without adding any mechanical complexity. Look at systems that have solved this, like Icon. In Icon all skills have the same underlying mechanics and as you level up not only do you improve in your skill modifiers, you also get actively better at using them.

D&D only gives this type of explicit power to abilities, and new abilities imply new rules. Therefore in the world of D&D: Power = Complexity.

 

[Minigiant]

I might make a thread about this later.

The problem is that there are two ways to interact, with explicit mechanical support, with the world. Either skills or explicit abilities (these being class abilities or spells).

Skills in D&D are both weak and they do not scale properly. Sure you (slowly) improve the probability of success, but your skills never improve in impact. You don't get to do cooler things as you level up unless you get support from elsewhere.

So the D&D team is effectively saying, by making skills pathetically useless, that you can either do things well (class abilities) or do things badly (skills) and class abilities are inherently more complicated than the skill system.

Imagine if the skill system instead was tied to a coherent system designed around what characters can do, rather than being focused on how likely they are to succeed. At that point you could have a character who is both competent AND simple.

This does not even require mechanical things like Skill Feats from Pathfinder 2E. It can be done easily without adding any mechanical complexity. Look at systems that have solved this, like Icon. In Icon all skills have the same underlying mechanics and as you level up not only do you improve in your skill modifiers, you also get actively better at using them.

D&D only gives this type of explicit power to abilities, and new abilities imply new rules. Therefore in the world of D&D: Power = Complexity.

The D&D designers assumed that DMs would adjudicate the gap.

What they failed to remember is the same reason why some editions had skill charts and a million classes.

People don't imagine the same things anymore. This cause conflict that pushes people to harder rules.

 

[Celebrim]

I might make a thread about this later.

The problem is that there are two ways to interact, with explicit mechanical support, with the world. Either skills or explicit abilities (these being class abilities or spells).

Skills in D&D are both weak and they do not scale properly. Sure you (slowly) improve the probability of success, but your skills never improve in impact. You don't get to do cooler things as you level up unless you get support from elsewhere.

So the D&D team is effectively saying, by making skills pathetically useless, that you can either do things well (class abilities) or do things badly (skills) and class abilities are inherently more complicated than the skill system.

Imagine if the skill system instead was tied to a coherent system designed around what characters can do, rather than being focused on how likely they are to succeed. At that point you could have a character who is both competent AND simple.

This does not even require mechanical things like Skill Feats from Pathfinder 2E. It can be done easily without adding any mechanical complexity. Look at systems that have solved this, like Icon. In Icon all skills have the same underlying mechanics and as you level up not only do you improve in your skill modifiers, you also get actively better at using them.

D&D only gives this type of explicit power to abilities, and new abilities imply new rules. Therefore in the world of D&D: Power = Complexity.

applause

Preach it brother.

 

[Maxperson]

Simple classes are for people who need simple classes.

Sometimes because they are new and need to be eased in. Sometimes they are vets and don't want to complexity.

The mistake D&D makes is attaching the simple style to the one of the most important and and the broadest class in their roster.

This is objectively bad game design.

You silo out easy mode into its own thing. All other types of gaming figured this out.

You know how people say there are 4 categories of classes. There should be 5.

Adventurers
Experts
Priests
Mages
Warriors

Adventurer classes should be the Simple classes. The Brute. The Healer. The Blaster.

I mean it makes more sense in lore. The farmer's son who picks up a maul and uses their hayhauling muscles isn't a fighter. They are a brute. The wizard school dropout or failed apprentice who doesn't delve into eldritch patrons aint a wizard nor warlock but they still know basic magic.

First, there's nothing wrong with the fighter being the simple class. That's the role it has always had. If you want an unsimplified fighter, pick a subclass to do it. Battle Masters and Eldritch Knights are two fighters that are not simple.

Second, why would you replace a broad class with an even broader adventurer class? Especially when a class named adventurer would cause confusion since every PC is an adventurer.

Innkeeper: "Welcome to my inn. What is it that you fellows do?"

Adventurer: "I'm an adventurer!"

Cleric: "Me, too."

Wizard: "Same."

Rogue: "I'm a cleric."

 

[Mecheon]

Second, why would you replace a broad class with an even broader adventurer class? Especially when a class named adventurer would cause confusion since every PC is an adventurer.

I mean, every class is a fighter. Every class fights

 

[Maxperson]

I mean, every class is a fighter. Every class fights

Sure, but fighting and fighter are two different things. I've been in plenty of fist fights over the years, but I'm not going to be called a fighter. Professional boxers, MMA fighters, etc. get called fighters.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Innkeeper: "Welcome to my inn. What is it that you fellows do?"

Adventurer: "I'm an adventurer!"

Cleric: "Me, too."

Wizard: "Same."

Rogue: "I'm a cleric."

We have a rogue who did that in our PF1 game and convinced the party he was one too.

Caedin Kaylin throught it was funny as hell.

So he's a demigod now.