el-remmen
Moderator Emeritus
This is why the "only need 3 classes" or "only need 4 classes" ideas for D&D come out looking silly and just wishes. Because many D&D archetypes are so different that even pondering putting them together destroys the concept of the whole.
How can you combine the Fighter, Barbarian, Ranger, and Paladin if 3 of the classes have different prime attributes, spell lists, maneuver lists, and ribbon features? Your grandparent class becomes either meaningless or overly important. Youll either fail to broaden the class or just create new classes anyway as 2 members of a class would have nothing in common.
Personally, I'd prefer for character classes to potentially benefit from multiple ability scores - sure, a high-ish score in their prime requisite, but moderate scores in other abilities being just as important or filling the gap if you just have a moderately high score in the prime. This would also push some specialty classes like paladin back to requiring multiple high scores to be played "optimally" - but then again, I hate optimizations and builds as an end goal.
My #1 design philosophy is that PCs should mostly have to choose between multiple "sub-optimal" choices when taking actions then mostly relying on one or two optimal choice all the time.