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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
What is the right amount of Classes for Dungeons and Dragons?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9359449" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Definitely a lot of truth to this. The division between the rogue and fighter is as I indicated before, completely arbitrary, as you could think of a rogue as just a smart dexterous fighter and you'd probably avoid incoherence in doing so. Likewise, you could separate cleric from wizard solely based on the sort of 'pick' system I discussed earlier where the only difference is what spells you chose to be good at. </p><p></p><p>You'll note that I didn't list exactly what classes you should have, just that I thought you'd probably need about 10 but no more than about 15. And the reason for that is if you get classes too broad then design gets harder and balance gets harder. Someone earlier talked about the problem of putting too much into a class instead of siloing it away into other classes, and while I didn't agree with his particular example, I do agree with him that this is a problem. The closer you get to a point buy build your own class model; the harder balance gets. So there is definitely a tradeoff.</p><p></p><p>While I can't list the specific classes that you should end up with, I do have what I feel are objective markers that you did it wrong. Ironically though, because the traditional classes were done wrong, you are right that people will strongly resist correcting past mistakes. </p><p></p><p>One approach that sounds attractive but turns out to be problematic is imagining a pure magic class, a pure fighting class, and a pure skill monkey class and then thinking you can then build any character by multiclassing between those classes. And the big problem there is that the whole thing about the D&D class system is that unlike point buy it forces breadth on the character's abilities, and because D&D is so combat focused in its story telling (most problems can be solved by fighting) for a variety of legitimate reasons the pure skill monkey class has a huge problem. "Sherlock Holmes" and similar characters work just fine as classes through tier 1, but by tier 3 at the latest you start having big problems with inventing sufficient combat schtick for a pure skill monkey through skill alone because fighting is not defined in D&D as a skill but silo'd off on its own. And heck, in D&D, if fighting was a skill, then as a skill alone it wouldn't be broad enough to actually create sufficient combat schtick.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 9359449, member: 4937"] Definitely a lot of truth to this. The division between the rogue and fighter is as I indicated before, completely arbitrary, as you could think of a rogue as just a smart dexterous fighter and you'd probably avoid incoherence in doing so. Likewise, you could separate cleric from wizard solely based on the sort of 'pick' system I discussed earlier where the only difference is what spells you chose to be good at. You'll note that I didn't list exactly what classes you should have, just that I thought you'd probably need about 10 but no more than about 15. And the reason for that is if you get classes too broad then design gets harder and balance gets harder. Someone earlier talked about the problem of putting too much into a class instead of siloing it away into other classes, and while I didn't agree with his particular example, I do agree with him that this is a problem. The closer you get to a point buy build your own class model; the harder balance gets. So there is definitely a tradeoff. While I can't list the specific classes that you should end up with, I do have what I feel are objective markers that you did it wrong. Ironically though, because the traditional classes were done wrong, you are right that people will strongly resist correcting past mistakes. One approach that sounds attractive but turns out to be problematic is imagining a pure magic class, a pure fighting class, and a pure skill monkey class and then thinking you can then build any character by multiclassing between those classes. And the big problem there is that the whole thing about the D&D class system is that unlike point buy it forces breadth on the character's abilities, and because D&D is so combat focused in its story telling (most problems can be solved by fighting) for a variety of legitimate reasons the pure skill monkey class has a huge problem. "Sherlock Holmes" and similar characters work just fine as classes through tier 1, but by tier 3 at the latest you start having big problems with inventing sufficient combat schtick for a pure skill monkey through skill alone because fighting is not defined in D&D as a skill but silo'd off on its own. And heck, in D&D, if fighting was a skill, then as a skill alone it wouldn't be broad enough to actually create sufficient combat schtick. [/QUOTE]
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What is the right amount of Classes for Dungeons and Dragons?
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