I think the Wizard presented so far given our current information seems like a great base to create all sorts of interesting characters. (There are concerns mentioned farther down the post.)
Let's say I want to make a archetypal Wizard. He is the old man with a floppy hat that casts fireball. Obviously we are going to pick the CLASS to be Wizard. Next up, we are going to give him the THEME of Bookworm since he spent much of his time studying in some tower. We put his biggest ATTRIBUTES be intelligence, wisdom and charisma to make him book-ish as possible. Lastly our wizard is going to pick up some FEATS so he can cast magic missle and create illusions as an encounter power.
This 4 part process is what the 5e character creation process is described to be. Let's me do this four step process again to make a Swordmage.
Again, we pick the CLASS to be Wizard.
Since our Wizard is going to be fighting up close, we will give him the Soldier THEME to improve his combat prowess.
Speaking of combat prowess, the character will need to be survive in close quarters combat. We make strength, constitution and intelligence the main ATTRIBUTES. The reason why I think we can get away with doing something like this and still having a viable character is that the designers heavily hinted that all attributes will be important for any given character and that there will be less ascending bonuses in the math. There should be a smaller gap in combat ability between a fighter and a "swordmage". A fighter will of course be better at hitting things and hitting them harder, but the swordmage will have the benefit of (probably combat oriented) spells.
Instead of picking up FEATS to gain at-will magical attacks, we can take feats to improve our melee combat ability and gain stabby stab as a weapon attack.
Now... I think it would be neat if the 5th edition's math and systems allow for this, and I was very optimistic about how everything was implemented when I described the above. Do you think the classes will be open ended enough to allow this to work or will a wizard-turned-swordmage will be doomed to be a subpar wizard and subpar swordmage?
Also, I am really curious about how they would implement summoning and necromancers in this new edition. The 3.5 edition implementation made the wizard too powerful and the 4th edition felt boring (especially the essentials necromancers). I felt like it was a mistake to try to figure out how to implement summoning/player monster management so much past the release date of 4th edition.
Let's say I want to make a archetypal Wizard. He is the old man with a floppy hat that casts fireball. Obviously we are going to pick the CLASS to be Wizard. Next up, we are going to give him the THEME of Bookworm since he spent much of his time studying in some tower. We put his biggest ATTRIBUTES be intelligence, wisdom and charisma to make him book-ish as possible. Lastly our wizard is going to pick up some FEATS so he can cast magic missle and create illusions as an encounter power.
This 4 part process is what the 5e character creation process is described to be. Let's me do this four step process again to make a Swordmage.
Again, we pick the CLASS to be Wizard.
Since our Wizard is going to be fighting up close, we will give him the Soldier THEME to improve his combat prowess.
Speaking of combat prowess, the character will need to be survive in close quarters combat. We make strength, constitution and intelligence the main ATTRIBUTES. The reason why I think we can get away with doing something like this and still having a viable character is that the designers heavily hinted that all attributes will be important for any given character and that there will be less ascending bonuses in the math. There should be a smaller gap in combat ability between a fighter and a "swordmage". A fighter will of course be better at hitting things and hitting them harder, but the swordmage will have the benefit of (probably combat oriented) spells.
Instead of picking up FEATS to gain at-will magical attacks, we can take feats to improve our melee combat ability and gain stabby stab as a weapon attack.
Now... I think it would be neat if the 5th edition's math and systems allow for this, and I was very optimistic about how everything was implemented when I described the above. Do you think the classes will be open ended enough to allow this to work or will a wizard-turned-swordmage will be doomed to be a subpar wizard and subpar swordmage?
Also, I am really curious about how they would implement summoning and necromancers in this new edition. The 3.5 edition implementation made the wizard too powerful and the 4th edition felt boring (especially the essentials necromancers). I felt like it was a mistake to try to figure out how to implement summoning/player monster management so much past the release date of 4th edition.
