Me said:
Sawyer said:
It's not particularly hard to make a wide range of class concepts viable if you don't include build options that will make a terrible character. I've posted a lot about how the classes work (or don't work) and can be built (or can't be built). Rather than hunt around and guess at what leads people to believe that "all classes can be all things", I'd like to hear what the basis for that claim is.
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I think most people don't know enough about the mechanics to make any accurate predictions but each person sees one part of the elephant and they extrapolate from that.
I think a big part of the claim falls on the assumption that all the class mechanics allow the exact same options for talents and abilities (or effectively the same options, when you come down to brass-tacks and calculate each one out) across the board so that it really does play like a class-less system and that classes are just a hollow title to pacify those masses.
The other part of the claim lies on the fact that we've heard a lot about how classes aren't distinguished like they were in IE games (rogues are skill-buffed characters, mages are OP nuke throwers, fighters are good low-level fighters and meat shields, etc), but we don't really understand much about how they are currently distinguished in game-play and when you take away what distinguished them, but don't replace the descriptions with new ways that they are distinguished, it's hard for posters to understand what's what.
Edit: And then, of course, there are people who say things like this, but don't really mean it: "It should absolutely be possible to build a character who is bad at his class."
Of course, this isn't for lack of trying. You've tried to answer these concerns in the past. But so many words is hard for the new generation to sit through.
Ultimately I propose a video of the vertical slice to help players get a better idea of the way classes play, so that these silly claims can be put to rest once and for all.
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Classes don't currently share any Abilities at all. If you're not a fighter, you're never going to be able to take Defender. If you're not a monk, you're never going to be able to take Transcendent Suffering. Some Talents can be taken by any class (e.g. the weapon style Talents), but many of them are class-specific (e.g. Grimoire Slam).
I disagree with your description of what we've said about the classes. We've repeatedly stated that fighters are extremely durable, reliable, and excel at holding positions, that rogues are the best single-target, single-hit damage dealers of any class (yes, significantly better than fighters), that monks are high-mobility melee status-infliction machines that use Wounds as an expendable resource, that wizards have high flexibility and, in addition to their traditional area-nuking abilities, have a variety of personal and single-target buffs.
We've also said that if you try to play a class completely against role, you
can run into trouble. There's an important distinction between what you can build and how you play. We don't allow characters to take Talents that are effectively dead-ends for their class. You also gain Talents at about 1/3 the rate that you gain Abilities, so they comprise much less of your character's makeup. In 3E/3.5, a fighter is practically made of feats and you can really botch a character even playing in the pool of combat feats.
For comparison, in PE you can buy light magic Talents for your fighter that give the character some neat flexibility, but you can't completely redefine what the fighter fundamentally is. And if you buy a set of Talents, we aren't setting up long Talent chains like the feat chains that exist in 3/3.5 -- e.g. taking Whirwind Attack requires Combat Mobility, Dodge, Spring Attack, Dex 13, Int 13, and a +4 BAB. Our Talents have a flat layout with simple prereqs and are designed to be valuable on their own for any class that is allowed to take them. In 3E/3.5, it's really easy to build a low-efficiency fighter who isn't good at, well, fighting. A PE fighter can diversify a bit, but at his or her heart, he or she will still be great at doing the job that all fighters' Abilities prepare them to do: absorbing damage, hitting reliably, and holding ground.
Similarly, if you want to gish it up with a wizard, there are spells and Talents that can lean you in that direction, but you can't outlast a fighter or hold ground like they can and you can't reliably spike damage in melee round after round like a rogue can. Now, there are things that you, the melee wizard, can do in melee that the fighter and rogue can't. You can surround yourself with a big fiery shield and make illusory duplicates of yourself. Those differences are cool and why you would want to play a gish wizard over a fighter or rogue even though you ultimately can't do their "jobs". But because grimoires are designed for flexibility (because wizards are designed for flexibility), if you get tired of being the glowing Daffy Duck gish hopping all over the place or if you're in a situation where you can't even stand next to the melee big kids, you can switch to an AoE damage grimoire and be a "traditional" wizard. There's no dead end in playing as a gish (even though you will be challenged in other ways) and more importantly, your gish-emphasizing build options don't dramatically impact your ability to do regular wizardly things. You shouldn't reach a point in the game where you go, "Wow, I regret taking these Talents because this character can't do anything well."
In 3E/3.5, class roles are less well-defined and it's easy to build a character that is bad at any job -- whether it's their class' job or otherwise. In 4E, class roles are very well-defined almost to the point of being straight-jacketed. In building PE's classes, I found that trying to draw strictly within the lines of a class' role was limiting in a way that wasn't enjoyable -- and I didn't believe that players would find it enjoyable either. That's why I've tried to use the approach of making classes "role-ready" instead of "role-constrained". PE's characters of any class are
always ready to fill their class role regardless of the Talents you've taken because their per-level class Abilities have a much more dominant influence on their overall capabilities. There are always efficiency gains to be made in how you build, but compared to 3E/3.5, the number of viable builds should be much higher.
Play-wise, if you want to put a monk in a tanking position or run a wizard around in melee, the rules aren't structured around building restrictions to discourage you from doing that. In many fights, it will be totally viable even if it's inefficient. In some circumstances or at higher difficulty levels, it will be more difficult to play in this way, but if you find that you need to "fall back" to standard roles, you should be able to do so because your character can't be fundamentally built contrary to his or her class.
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