FrankTrollman wrote:
Assassin
Warm up is the name of the game here. You have various abilities, but they require time to activate. You can do your basic super crossbow shot by giving up movement for the turn, but if you want to do your death strike, you have to give up an entire turn.
Berserker
Someone gets to have a Rage Bar, and the Berserker is a good obvious fit for that. Power up your super moves by hitting people and taking damage. You could institute a limit on sacrificing chickens to the Berserker by having fatigue set in a certain amount of time after the ragebar starts up.
Druid
Druids have always been way overcrowded conceptually, being everything from spirit shamans to nature priests to lycanthropic fighting machines. Here, we're going for the more "deals with nature spirits" end of things and less with the "bear warrior". You have a number of spirits that can aid you and at any given moment one of them is available. This is like a Green Arrow WoF setup, where you randomly determine which spirit you get to use each round and that spirit comes with a fixed set of options. So if you get Thunder Spirit this round you can use any of the Thunder Spirit powers, and if you get the Oak Spirit or Wave Spirit instead, you get a different set of powers to choose from.
Hero
Someone is going to want a "simple" character where they can spam the same attacks over and over again if that is what they want to do. There does need to be an "everything at will" class, and I think the Hero is it.
Monk
Magical martial arts are based on the linking of stances and maneuvers. That is, you can spend an action to change to a new stance, which will give you a new list of maneuvers you can use. Kind of like a warblade, but the maneuvers you get each time you refresh are fixed to short lists, in order to make the mid-battle resculpts take less table-time.
Necromancer
Incarnum was terrible, but many of the underlying concepts were not bad. Necromancers get a certain amount of Life Essence that they can route to various things. Basically this means that the army you can have gets bigger (and if you go for a big Diablo 2 style golem instead,
that can be bigger) as you go up in level, and also that as your army (or bodyguard) gets more powerful you drain off your own ability to shoot black beams that kill people. Most importantly of all, it gives a solid in-character reason why your personal attacks are less level appropriate than those of the other characters when you have a skeleton army going.
Paladin
The new improved Paladin is basically a Crusader with more healing and protection wards. So you get a small deck-based WoF. Divine inspiration gives you a couple of choices each turn and you do whatever seems most useful at the time.
Psion
I am not a fan of spell point systems, but many people are. The Psion would get power points and use them to power their abilities. In essence, everything is available all the time, but there's a pretty short battery per encounter. Power Points would come back quickly with meditation. To balance this with the Wizard (see below), you'd give them less powers known and also give them few enough power points (and a steep enough cost curve) that they want to use their smaller powers sometimes.
Rogue
The Rogue is
also nominally an "everything at will" class, except that all their tricks have trigger conditions (like Sneak Attacks requiring enemies to be flanked or denied their dex bonus). This means that while all of your tricks are theoretically unlimited, the actual class is fairly complex to play because you have to set up special conditions to use your stuff.
Warlock
You have big powers and small powers. The big powers all have Drain of various kinds, which makes you want to use them as close to the end of battles as possible. But you still have your eldritch blasts.
Wizard
The idea here is to do spell preparation, but to do so in a way that is less annoying than 3e's "prepare 30 spells and tough it out all day" version. With this you get a small pile of spell slots to prepare into, but you can prepare new spells between encounters. So it's like 4e in that you have what are essentially encounter powers, but unlike 4e in that that is all you have and that you can trade those out in a few minutes. When you run out of prepared spells, you can fallback on your cantrips and reserve spells.
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So off the top of my head, that's 11 resource systems and no one tells you that the adventure has to be over for the day because they've cast
color spray twice. Note that such systems
don't handle a lot of the "adventure mode" abilities that people want and need. You're going to need to wait longer than a round or two before you seduce the princess or make a suit of chain mail. So you're still going to need "rituals" or "skills" or some shit that takes significant time and possibly other resources to do various stuff.
But you're also going to have to profoundly limit the way these things interact. I really don't see anything more than "subclassing" or "split classing" to be even
possible in such a scenario. Open multiclassing is right the fuck out.
-Username17
