Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 8308834" data-attributes="member: 5142">Sadly, yes. I would probably prefer a "white mage" or a unarmored/lightly armored priest class. There are obviously ways to do that in 5e (e.g., Divine Soul Sorcerer, Celestial Warlock, etc.), but they are not entirely satisfying ones for the archetype. I am glad that 4e began to walk back the heavily armor cleric a little bit. I don't think this is an entirely accurate reading. It's a bit revisionist, and I suspect that it's because Monte Cook was simply one of the most prominent designers who talked about the game. But Monte Cook was not the lead designer of 3e. Jonathan Tweet was the lead designer. I believe there is even an article or forum thread here on ENWorld within the past year or so where Tweet talks about the design decisions behind the 3e Cleric. I don't think that's something that can just be pinned on Cook as if he were the scapegoat of 3e's questionable design choices. Even if video game RPGs are designed mostly about combat, I think that video game designers understand that people are drawn to play certain class archetypes/playstyles and design their classes accordingly. I have been playing TTRPGs for 20 years, which is admittedly not long in the grand scheme of things, and in that time nothing has changed. There is nothing new under the sun. I have time and time again seen players - even those who have years of experience playing pen 'n' paper TTRPGs - say they "want to play a class like X___" where X is a class or archetype from a video game: e.g., "How can I play a Diablo 2/3 style Necromancer in D&D?" or "How can I play a super heavily armored warrior?" Class playstyle and fantasy is important to a lot of players. The WoW specs are more akin to subclasses. You still get a lot of core class abilities and mechanics. FWIW, I don't think it's that far removed, for example, of the Eldritch Knight and Champion Fighter subclasses playing quite differently or likewise the Swashbuckler and the Arcane Trickster Rogues playing quite differently. Not every class has good subclass distinctions in D&D 5e. (I'm looking at you Wizards). However, one of the reasons why Warcraft has the design it currently does with its specializations was because people wanted their specializations to be equally viable and the team wanted each specialization to embrace different class fantasies and layered mechanics. IMHO, even if the different specializations of druid, for example, play differently, they still very much feel like playing the Druid, though in the early days of WoW (Classic & BC) there was more form shifting than present. Again, see the Starfinder Mystic, which is part priest, shaman, druid, and psion.If there was a start-from-scratch approach that didn't need to follow the game's legacy, I would consider adopting something like this that distinguished between the heavily-armored Paladin/Arcana Evolved Champion and the lightly-armored, wisdom-based Mystic that you could layer a Priest, Shaman, Healer, Psion, etc. on top of.</blockquote>

Verification