mlund said:
They actually are a core fictional archetype very early in literature. Most of the characters that shine in the Iliad are Warlords. They aren't handling logistics. They are giving speeches, leading battle lines from the front, and basically functioning as squad leaders and living army banners. Patroklos, Agememnon, Menelaus, Hector, and Odysseus come to mind. Yes, they were excellent in personal combat, but their huge impact was on the troops around them as leaders - as opposed to Diomedes, the frenzied killer or Ajax, the giant tank of the Greeks, or even Achilles, the ultimate warrior.
There's a blurry line between "incidentally inspiring due to being a badass," and "amazing leader who happens to also be a badass." They probably both fall under or near the Fighter, though.
It's sort of a question of how big each Big Four class is.
Like I noted with the rogue, the rogue today encompasses a bigger catchment than the AD&D thief. There are spies and fast-talking swindlers, merchants and stabby death ninjae, acrobats and "light fighters," scouts and trapsmisths, dungeoneers and guttersnipes, even swashbucklers and nobles. That's fine, those are all things that people today
expect out of the rogue, and so when we trot out the idea of making the Assassin a bundle of rogue options...well, it makes some sense, rogues aren't just thieves, they're a big swath of things.
The fighter has undergone a different shift, from being "the everything that fights" guy to being more specifically the "heavy armor melee combat" guy; they've narrowed over time. But to be the fighter that everyone expects them to be, they need to be broad, too, as broad as the rogue. They need (IMO) to encompass sword-and-board, two-weapon, two-handed, mobile dervish, light armor, bow-and-arrow, spears or axes, agile or plodding, leader or follower, champion or knight, tactician or brute. That has some overlap with the rogue territory, but ALSO overlaps almost entirely with a warlord.
All those characters you mentioned in the
Illiad? I don't see any reason why they shouldn't all be covered with the "fighter" class focusing on different options. Clever fighters, inspiring fighters, brutal fighters, all of them, each one, a different sort of fighter. A whole CAMPAIGN made of a single, very flexible, class.
If you're going to separate out the Fighter and the Warlord as distinct classes, then I don't think you can legit combine the Assassin and the Rogue. On the other hoof, if you combine the Assassin and the Rogue, you should be able to do the same thing with the Fighter and the Warlord. If your Core Four are big tents under which a lot of archetypes can play (which IMO they should probably be, since they've been that in various D&D e's), then it makes more sense to combine them. If your Core Four are narrow archetypes with more specific niches, then you might need to bust out extra classes.
GreyICE said:
If it's Wizard only then a Wizard in the party becomes practically mandatory.
Not unless certain spells become mandatory. Which, I think we'd all agree,
they really shouldn't be.