Why no Classplosion in 5e?

[MGuy]

Cognitive dissonance? Not really. I mean you'd have a point if I didn't clear that up before you actually commented on it (right after Frank's input). You just ignored that part and decided to push on with it anyway.

[Aryxbez]

I'm a "race matters" player and it wouldn't be satisfying to me.

Could you or others, explain to me why ye want "Race to matter", and what's so bad of it being a one-off choice? As characters get higher and higher level, minor traits like that shouldn't really matter, nor defining your character. Sure your race can/will likely still come up in the story, especially if much different from the stereotype (like how Superman/Wonderwoman and even Hal Jordan have stories which their race is being regarded in some way), but thats backstory and doesn't need to get in the way of the ruleset.

[MGuy]

I don't think it is inherently bad if race doesn't matter. There are games where everyone is just "human" and that doesn't particularly make the game worse. I also don't think that there is anything inherently wrong with it being more of a backstory thing. I would just personally like it if it did a little more mechanically, maybe enough that the character feels different. One of my favorite racial abilities, for instance, is the Changeling's ability to change their appearance. Yes, you can do the same with a spell, but just having that inborn ability changes how a player approaches a number of problems. I think that kind of thing is what all races should do for the player.

[maglag]

(like how Superman/Wonderwoman ), but thats backstory and doesn't need to get in the way of the ruleset.

Superman/Wonderwoman are cases where their race and class are the same.

Superman is a kryptonian. Like every other single kryptonian, he gets super strong and virtually invulnerable under a yellow sun along the power to shoot eye lazors and fly. That's what happened when the population of the city of Kandor ended up restored to normal size. A whole population's worth of flying bricks.

Similarly Wonderwoman is an amazon with super physics that really likes to fight, and all of her amazon mates are also super strong/fast and like to fight.

There's no physically frail kryptonian magicians that hang on the backline flinging spells or amazon engineers that ride mechas to combat. Their race automatically defines their full set of abilities and party role.

[OgreBattle]

It was mentioned in an After Sundown thread that when you want to create a new faction of cool dudes, instead of writing up new powers that only they have you should give them all an existing power for consistency.

I could see a similar approach for choosing what race/species your character is where that choice uses up feat/trait/background slots but it doesn't mean "only Elves get low-light vision" or "Only dwarves get anti-giant training", those are things a human could pick up as they are available as traits/feats.

Then again I'm more used to drawing from manga and video games as inspiration, where a series like One Piece can have 10ft tall gigantic humans and 3ft tall sneaky humans and still call them humans.

Svelt speedy guys and armor crushing huge dudes can both be humans

Though I feel like this is kind of turning into a discussion on "the weakness of a class based system vs point buy".

[TarkisFlux]

I don't think it is inherently bad if race doesn't matter. There are games where everyone is just "human" and that doesn't particularly make the game worse. I also don't think that there is anything inherently wrong with it being more of a backstory thing. I would just personally like it if it did a little more mechanically, maybe enough that the character feels different. One of my favorite racial abilities, for instance, is the Changeling's ability to change their appearance. Yes, you can do the same with a spell, but just having that inborn ability changes how a player approaches a number of problems. I think that kind of thing is what all races should do for the player.

So... you want races to grant super powers and maybe have that obviate a particular power selection you could make, but maybe not?

Sure. Every PC is human as their base. Every PC gets a random bonus feat-like special thing. Sometimes that thing is "Is an Elf, and gets Elf abilities" and sometimes that thing is "Was born under a trickster moon, and gets Changeling abilities", and sometimes that thing is "Is blind, but echo-locates or whatever", and sometimes that thing is "Was given to the service of the fire lord, and so has fire power", and so on. Write up as many of those as you feel like, make them each as scaling or static as you like such that they are all balanced to whatever standard you care about. Problem solved.

[Koumei]

So I take it that the purpose of this thread was either to remind everyone what could have been and cocktease everyone some more, or to remind everyone that WotC can't learn from mistakes and that 5E is shite.

But some of these class ideas could in fact be made to slot into Tome fairly easily. The Cleric would be a colossal effort, because you can't just slap a cooldown on the existing spells and call it a day. The Druid would probably involve looking at the Spirit Shaman and (Tome) Totemist, looting them for ideas and sort of building up from there - a big job. The Necromancer involves either making a "Build your Pet Undead" system that doesn't bog the game down or assembling undead into suitable lists of what you can create, so that's kind of large but making the Essentia system isn't a big deal.

Things like the Berserker and Assassin, on the other hand, could largely be done by taking the existing classes, then deciding on the exact mechanics and scaling of the Rage/Focus, and then giving a bunch of ability choices that let you spend those resources on level-appropriate things (in lieu of the standard Rage Dice and Death Attack). If Weeaboo Fightan Magic actually had decent manoeuvres in it, then Paladins would be easy as all shit to work into it. Bards sound basically like Reyvateils from Ar Tonelico, one of the best "musical computer tower" themed RPGs from Japan. You could just about keep the "Spells Known" table, then populate it with Power Words (which could do current Bardic Performance things, short term buff spells or actual Power Word: _____ things) and Crescendo effects (based on the "Bard Spells that would be awesome if they had normal Save DCs and all that").

Given I'll be floating the idea of running a game to the group when I see them this Friday, it might be worth playing with a few of those. Possibly "creating the necessary ones after people decide what they want to play". Yes I will use a little CYOA thing, but tailored to "existing Tome + the stuff that's easy to make for Tome".

Thoughts on which ones would work easily enough this way? I know they'd do better in a new thing that isn't held down by the drawbacks of 3.X D&D, but still, no need to let ideas go to waste.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I don't know which ones are easy, but I'd love to see a Tome Warlord – like the current Marshall, but with the healing schtick traded out for more personal buttkickery.

[Username17]

Thoughts on which ones would work easily enough this way? I know they'd do better in a new thing that isn't held down by the drawbacks of 3.X D&D, but still, no need to let ideas go to waste.

The Paladin as I envisage it is basically a retread of the ToB Crusader. Now the problems with the Crusader are well known. It was clumsily compiled from Gutschera code for Orcus by Mike Fucking Mearls into a 3.5 paradigm after he convinced all the other idiots in the room to scrap it and let him resell it for money on the side (like he's doing now for the entire company). It... doesn't actually have abilities at levels where it gets abilities and the number scaling is all bullshit. Also the card shuffling mechanic is poorly explained and there are at least two ways you can interpret it that are wildly different in how good they are.

But yeah, a Tome Crusader wouldn't be hard to write, and if you want one, you can have one in a few days.

-Username17

[Red_Rob]

I thought you already wrote up a Tome Crusader?

[Eikre]

It is conceivable that the Crusader's schedule for maneuver level/maneuvers known is built to encourage multiclassing, such that a two-level dip into Paladin or Fighter or something (which would add half an initiator level per) ends up getting him a calculable benefit when he returns to his main class later and actually gets a better set of powers to choose from.

It's kind of obtuse.

[OgreBattle]

The Cleric would be a colossal effort, because you can't just slap a cooldown on the existing spells and call it a day.

I'm thinking Cleric and Warlock should use similar mechanics as both are empowered by godly forces to do good/evil in their name. So aligning yourself with a god of light gives you a shining aura that scares the undead and aligning yourself with a bad god gives you a spooky aura that scares the living.

There's also a handy list of different class power scedules written up on the den that's often referenced:

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.

----

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.

----

Subclassing

The issue where all Paladin/Warriors play exactly the same (in Final Fantasy XI) is a big issue. You would not want it to work like that. But the way to add in character differences is to put choices into the main class, not choices into the sub class. Because you're already committing yourself to choosing a subclass off a list of classes that is 10 or more options long. If you have even two or three choices per subclass, that's a huge increase in dumpster diving for what is essentially a minor part of your character.

Let's say you're a Paladin. If you have three choices to pick from for your class, that's 3 choices. And now you pick a subclass. Let's say that we're dealing with the PHB classes and there are "only" 11 classes to choose from. That means you have ten choices for subclass. But if you had three choices per subclass, that would actually be thirty options to dumpster dive through. Variations in subclass ability options are a very much worse rate of return on actual character effect for the amount of options you have to read.

Different power schedules can also grow to be 'setting defining' for a game. Wizards are vancian because they are book smart, Sorcerers have a short list of spells to cast from spontaneously because they're wild and crazy guys.

[Koumei]

But yeah, a Tome Crusader wouldn't be hard to write, and if you want one, you can have one in a few days.

Yes please.

[Lago PARANOIA]

It is conceivable that the Crusader's schedule for maneuver level/maneuvers known is built to encourage multiclassing, such that a two-level dip into Paladin or Fighter or something (which would add half an initiator level per) ends up getting him a calculable benefit when he returns to his main class later and actually gets a better set of powers to choose from.

It's kind of obtuse.

All ToB classes work like that. It's without exception better to take ToB classes as late as possible. A Warblade 1 that takes a level of Swordsage at level 2 and then four more levels of Warblade is weaker than a Warblade 1 that took four more levels of Warblade than a level of Swordsage.

The only way to get rid of this would be to make initiator levels completely non-stacking (including prestige classes) or allow people to completely reconfigure and re-select their powers at any time according to their latest initiator level.

[Username17]

I thought you already wrote up a Tome Crusader?

I... did. Yeah. I forgot about that.

A Paladin would want to be a lot like that, but less of a "martial adept" in the sense that about half the cards would be magic effects and prayers and shit.

-Username17

[Koumei]

Huh, neat. Well that is pretty handy.

Looking at the Rogue write-up, would you suggest going 100% for prepared devices, or a mix of "techniques that use IF/THEN logic gate requirements" and "prepared devices"?

[Eikre]

All ToB classes work like that.

I mean, okay, what you're saying is that if you're going to multiclass, you should do that first, but that doesn't mean you absolutely should multiclass per se.

The Crusader specifically isn't getting a stance when his third level stances come on line, he misses getting a fifth level stance when they come online by one level, and then he does the same thing again with eighth level stances and will never get one of those eight level stances ever unless he multi-classes or takes a feat. It's not just that a Fighter 2/Crusader X is better than a Crusader X/Fighter 2, it's that Fighter 2/Crusader X is better than a pure-class Crusader due to a rule, endemic to the class any nothing else, which seems to push you out for a little while.

If the "other classes are worth half initiator" rule was merely an ancillary rule to try and keep martial adepts from falling into the "NEVER LOSE A CASTER LEVEL" charop paradigm, then stances would always be maneuver levels 1, 3, 5, and 8, and every ToB class would get a new stance at class levels 1, 5, 9, and 15. But the existence of level 6 and 7 stances, and the Crusader stances that hang tenuously just out of reach really suggest that the designers are pointedly and explicitly urging you to play with dips.

What I'm getting at is that this isn't an emergent "problem," it's a feature. The reason things are the way they are is due to malice of forethought, not a mere typesetting error.

[AndreiChekov]

Cool chargen and it shows some gaps in the game so far.

There is no military leader or noble leader like a 3.5 Marshal or 4E Warlord apart from Bards with College of Valor.

There is no class that is a non-magical mounted combatant, like a worg/dire wolf outrider or a knight/cavalier.

There is nothing like a gladiator. I mean a real one, not b.s. options for Fighters and Barbarians but a real 1-20 Gladiator where you get to write "Gladiator" on your sheet.

There is no class like a Rogue but does things beyond sneak attacking, things like Scout or Cat Burglar or Acrobat.

There is no Psion yet.

No dedicated Gish class, just the Fighter Eldritch Knight option or College of Valor Bards.

There is no Charisma-based or Intelligence-based divine caster.

There is nothing like an Artificer or Magical Blacksmith or something like that.

There is not explicit support for Wizards apart from their traditions. More focused casters like Elementalists, Transmutationists, things that 3.5 provided with classes like Beguiler, Dread Necromancer and Warmage or Pathfinder did with more specialized caster classes like Summoner and Witch are not online yet.

Apart from Combat Maneuver Fighters and Monks there is nothing like classes from Tome of Battle.

There are no psionics options yet.

There is nothing like Blackguard, Hexblade, Antipaladin or non-Good aligned Paladins or things like Favored Soul yet.

There is nothing like a duelist or swashbuckler yet, apart from Fighter options. No dedicated class for that concept exists.

You're just trolling right? Let me try too.

There is no classes about the use of magic apart from all the magic using classes.

There is no class that is a non-magical table wielder, like a knight of the dinner table.

There is nothing like a lawyer, I mean a real one, not b.s. options for <insert any class here>, but a real 1-20 lawyer, where you get to write "lawyer" on your sheet.

There is no class like a fighter, but does things beyond fighting, things like a commoner or aristocrat.

There is no truenamer yet.

No dedicated trident users, just options for classes to pick up a trident.

There is no hit point-based arcane caster.

There is nothing like a magical farmer or something like that.

There is not explicit support for <insert any class here> apart from their <insert all explicitly supported options here>. More focused classes like the 3.5 Witch are not online yet.

Apart from the Monsters there is nothing like the monsters in the 3.5 Monster Manual II.

There are no truenaming options yet.

There is nothing like Gender specific versions off existing classes yet.

There is nothing like a wizard with a beard yet apart from making a wizard with a beard. No dedicated class for that concept exists

There is no tap-dancing, shotgun wielding, miniskirt wearing European zombie hunter, baker, ex-RAF soldier with an imp familiar class yet.

Ishy, I laughed. If you write a book, I will pay $10 for it.

[Aryxbez]

So I take it that the purpose of this thread was either to remind everyone what could have been and cocktease everyone some more, or to remind everyone that WotC can't learn from mistakes and that 5E is shite.

Last bits sounds about right, though for me at this point, I'm more interested in the discussion validating that "Race should matter", opposed to a cool flavorful choice that like backgrounds, becomes minor the higher the levels you go.

I also found it strange that the [Tome] Crusader was forgotten..considering Koumei even responded in that thread (albeit a very limited capacity correcting my error at the time).

[Koumei]

Without searching, name every single thread in which you've ever posted. Go on, I'll wait. If you miss even a single one, you have to admit you're a tool.

Anyway, as someone who feels it's better if not every single Wizard is a Sun Elf and if not every single Cleric is an Assmart and not every Orc is limited to being a Berserker, I'm wondering if, for the tabletop game with people who are kind of lacking preconceptions, I should knock ability score modifiers out of the races and then just put some other stuff in so they all have a handful of minor abilities. On the other hand, I could just avoid the effort involved.

[RelentlessImp]

Anyway, as someone who feels it's better if not every single Wizard is a Sun Elf and if not every single Cleric is an Assmart and not every Orc is limited to being a Berserker, I'm wondering if, for the tabletop game with people who are kind of lacking preconceptions, I should knock ability score modifiers out of the races and then just put some other stuff in so they all have a handful of minor abilities. On the other hand, I could just avoid the effort involved.

I do something like this a lot when I run games to avoid the headache of "race" as a concept. Everyone starts as a Human with a Bonus Feat and Bonus Skill Point. They can trade in their bonus skill point for something asinine like a size change or choose their type and minor abilities like a racial collection of SLAs (except I make them at-will instead of the more useless 1/day). They can trade the Bonus Feat for something that actually matters - like flight (30ft good maneuverability) or at-will greater teleport (self plus 50 pounds only), and they can write whatever the fuck they want on their sheet for race.

For that matter, Final Fantasy d6 is a silly system but it does something similar in which you trade in one of your very few Talent selections to be an "Unusual Race" that gives you a +2 to one of your attributes and lets you count as a different Type, and I am completely unable to remember if I started doing my thing before I saw that, so I can't tell if it inspired the choice or if it's just a natural progression to a certain sort of person.

[Hicks]

I don't think the After Sundown Golem worked... I'll cop to the Golem, Troglodyte, and Fallen not really panning out the way they were supposed to.

Speaking for myself here, the golem and fallen are my most favorite archetypes in After Sundown.

[radthemad4]

https://radthemad4.github.io./Why%20no% ... %205e.html

[JonSetanta]

How about "lineage" traits for humanoids like Linguist or Eat Anything rather than stat boosts or combat abilities?

[Dogbert]