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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5705104" data-attributes="member: 996">Yeah, I get the impression Messrs Mearls & Cook are working on 5e as an evolution of 3e, not 4e.  Like 'oops, we actually made a good game there for a couple of years, silly us, we were trying to do D&D...'Anyway, a fundamental improvement that 4e could use would be in the underlying way classes, sources, and roles interact as classes are designed. In 4e, classes were each tightly coupled to a role and source, which is fine.  The expression of the role and source were /both/ represented in the powers and features of the class.  This required each class to have unique features - which, again, is OK, most classes have 3 or so - and to have unique powers (which means 100+ for a basic class).  Those powers became a huge design burden.The Essentials solution to that problem was to give up on classes as strong expressions of role and source, and go back to the paleo-D&D aproach of just giving classes abilities to fit their concept, without much regard for role or balance or how coherent the concept is.  Poor solution.A better solution, I think, would be to reduce the number of powers needed by using powers to express Source, only.  Thus, all classes of a given source would share a common pool of powers - much like classes sharing spell lists in 3e.  Role, then, would be expressed by features.  This also cleans up the problem with controllers - that their role support is too much in their powers, making controller powers potentially over-powered in the hands of other classes (and there's a lot of features being limitted only to class powers to avoid that - which also causes a lot of reasonable multi-classing to fall flat).  Taken to extremes, you wouldn't even need specific classes.  You could just have 4 sets of features, one to express each role, and a list of powers for each source.  Choose a Source, choose a Role, and you have a 'Class.'  Anyway, even if not taken that far, it'd cut the burden of power design by a factor of about 4, and make developing a new class many times easier, since only features need be provided to define a class - the class would simply draw powers from it's Source.  Class-specific powers, like Paragon Path powers, might still be an option, of course, but they could be much fewer in number.tl;dr:  5e needs to focus the support for Roles in class features instead of powers, and consolidate powers by Source instead of giving each class an often-repetative power list of it's own.</blockquote>

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