D&D General Which standard classes have you never (or very rarely) seen played? (Edited)
dave2008
Legend
I think that is the nature of this forum. All surveys suggest fighters and human figthers are the most popular. The posters on this forum are really the fringes of D&D / RPG players, we just have to admit that to ourselves and move on.
Hussar
Legend
I think what's really going to skew results too is the length of campaigns. If you tend to play the same campaign for several years, and the same PC's, well, you're not going to see too many classes.
OTOH, we alternate DM's every other week, running two different campaigns, with 4 players currently (was as high as 6 for a long time), and the campaigns tend to last about a year, year and a half. Just in 5e, we've played/run a Dragonlance, Primeval Thule, Tyranny of Dragons, Ravenloft, Dragon Heist, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, and a Dungeon of the Mad Mage campaign. That's 7 campaigns in 5 years, and about 35-40 different PC's. So, yeah, we've seen pretty much everything.
OTOH, we alternate DM's every other week, running two different campaigns, with 4 players currently (was as high as 6 for a long time), and the campaigns tend to last about a year, year and a half. Just in 5e, we've played/run a Dragonlance, Primeval Thule, Tyranny of Dragons, Ravenloft, Dragon Heist, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, and a Dungeon of the Mad Mage campaign. That's 7 campaigns in 5 years, and about 35-40 different PC's. So, yeah, we've seen pretty much everything.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Yeah I never saw a 4e game without a warlord. It was, IME, just as popular as the core 4.
Arnwolf666
Adventurer
The more I read and study the 4E warlord the more I I want a good fighter archetype that mimics it. It was much more flexible and diverse class than I would have believed. I think that it could be the perfect archetype for a intelligence based fighter that is a leader or tactical genius. Or charisma based. It would be interesting to see a fighter with his 2 highest abilities scores being intelligence and charisma.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Yeah the Battle Master gets about halfway there, especially if the new maneuvers from UA end up getting published, but it has nothing to support Int or Cha, which is unfortunate.
Tony Vargas
Legend
As interesting as the class was to read, playing it and getting into the support role it's actually functional at was something of a revelation.
The BM is on the same chassis as the EK, a '1/3rd caster,' so you'd expect it to be, to a hypothetical Warlord, as EK is to the actual wizard. (I mean, if the EK only ever got 1st level spells, and recharged them on a short rest.)
I suppose you could throw down a simple feat:
Tactical Battlemaster: +1 INT, and you add your INT mod to the result of CS dice that you roll.
Inspiring BM: +1 CHA, and you add your CHA mod to your CS dice.
?
Arnwolf666
Adventurer
I Like it
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
A few things to note:
Given as all this arose out of a discussion of how many psyonic characters (either wild talent or class) have been seen, I'm surprised there's not more classes included from earlier editons where psyonics were a thing, for comparison purposes.
@Ashrym - good chart but note Barbarian was not in the original 1e PH; it was introduced in Unearthed Arcana some years later along with Cavalier and a couple of (ignored then and since) others.
Personally, in our crew's combination of mostly 1e with a bit of 3e/PF, I've never seen a Warlord or Warlock (and thus voted those) and otherwise the class that leaps out as being under-represented across the board is Paladin; and so I voted that too. We've had more Assassins, Monks and Bards than Paladins.
The only other very-much-underrepresented class is Necromancer, a homebrew class (on par with Illusionist) that hasn't been around very long yet.
It'd be a real PITA but there might be some merit into doing a poll like this for each edition, including only classes core to that editions but also including a space for "homebrew" so voters could indicate (in reverse
) whether homebrew or non-standard classes were common in their games or not.
Given as all this arose out of a discussion of how many psyonic characters (either wild talent or class) have been seen, I'm surprised there's not more classes included from earlier editons where psyonics were a thing, for comparison purposes.
@Ashrym - good chart but note Barbarian was not in the original 1e PH; it was introduced in Unearthed Arcana some years later along with Cavalier and a couple of (ignored then and since) others.
Personally, in our crew's combination of mostly 1e with a bit of 3e/PF, I've never seen a Warlord or Warlock (and thus voted those) and otherwise the class that leaps out as being under-represented across the board is Paladin; and so I voted that too. We've had more Assassins, Monks and Bards than Paladins.
The only other very-much-underrepresented class is Necromancer, a homebrew class (on par with Illusionist) that hasn't been around very long yet.
It'd be a real PITA but there might be some merit into doing a poll like this for each edition, including only classes core to that editions but also including a space for "homebrew" so voters could indicate (in reverse
) whether homebrew or non-standard classes were common in their games or not.The way I've previously described Essentials that makes more akin to a half edition in its own right is that it is self-contained. That is, one doesn't need the core (PHB, MM, DMG) to play the game using the Essentials books, they are sufficient on their own. Even the 4e PHB 2&3, MM 2&3, etc can't make that claim; those are actually accessories. The Essentials books are substitutes, albeit ones that are mostly backwards-compatible (save for the errata, but errata was nothing new to 4e).
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