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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Westwind" data-source="post: 4213220" data-attributes="member: 3241">It's tough to get more traditional than the fighter, cleric, mage, and rogue.  The bard was introduced to DnD as a prestige class of sorts back in 1e, so the historical argument isn't entirely applicable.  I suspect WotC's thinking was (at least) twofold.  First, printing books is expensive.  If you include Bards, Druids, and Barbarians (and all their associated animal shapes, spells, totems, etc.) the PH gets a lot bigger, which makes it a lot more expensive.  Asking $60 for a sourcebook is a good way to kill your initial sales.  Printing a book with the number of color plates and stock quality of the PH, in that volume, costs a fortune.  Making it bigger also adds a lot of time on to your editing process, which means you either push back the release date (which cannot be after GenCon) or quality suffers.  Second, WotC needs to plan releases in a way that they have a steady income stream from quarter to quarter.  Since 5e isn't going to come out next year, it makes a certain amount of marketing sense to clump your nature and psionic power sources (or whatever power sources you didn't include in PH1) in the next wave of products.  But one of the key ideas behind 4e is that there are four roles a party should cover, and various classes to fill each of those rolls.  Even if there's only one controller in the PH1, a party can be designed to fully meet the expectations of the game's design.  On a totally subjective level, I'm not a huge fan of the classes being offered in PH2, so I probably won't buy it, unless they make them really attractive.One of the criticisms of 3/3.5 was that there were a lot of classes that lacked a role.  Aside from killing Mages, why bring a Monk?  Aside from fodder for Order of the Stick, what role did the Bard play? (pun intended) You could "break" Druids and Barbarians with various prestige classes, but that isn't really much fun past a one-shot.  I'd much rather have fewer choices if it means I know whatever choice I make will have a chance to contribute.</blockquote>

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