[3.5] Building the Trine trio - help please! :(

[Thieves]

I came up with the idea to try and play a game, me as the DM, with the types of characters being pretty much what you could see in the game Trine (it's awesome multi-player, highly recommended!).

For those of you unfamiliar with it:it's a side-scrolling 2,5D game akin to Lost Vikings (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k7Zkp_4ro4), where you yourself or you + two buddies control the Rogue, the Knight and the Wizard in their misadventures. Fighting and solving puzzles is complimentary, with the focus on dexterity; basically jumping from one place to another, but the game does that DAMN gracefully.

So, the agile, bow-shooting, ninja-roping Rogue, the big, perceptually-challenged, head-on-crashing Knight, and the clumsy, fragile, completely anti-Batman Wizard.

Which classes, do you think, would reflect these best?

Now, I know this sounds like an inane question; but there are some conditions I thought it would be balance- and fun-wise to meet.

1) Similar tier. A Fighter, a rogue and a wizard would give you the whole span, and that's not what would be cool - even though my group's skills at...
2) Optimization, are nonexistent. I'm looking for characters that would be cool working out-of-the-box, and yet not utterly breakable. Were thinking along the lines of raising the Knight from Fighter to Warblade / Crusader and diminishing Wizard to Warlock / Sorcerer. No idea for Rogue, though.
3) D&D play, so actually more puzzling and fighting than jumping around (that's not really fun in D&D, is it?), and a dose of talking and interaction. This would also imply having 3 characters able to deal with all areas of play (as a team, of course).
4) Because it will be legendary heroes doing deeds that will become stuff of legend, I'm going to give them 18-16-14-12-10-8 in stats. Partly as a result of my players simply liking high stats. Yet, I was thinking of
5) Possibly E6. I do not want them to go interstellar, and keeping them at E6 or 7, or maybe 8, I feel, could perhaps keep some of the flavor of the adventure (and so on and so on about the usual E6 pros). What would speak against E6?

Bestow upon me thine wisdom, O Playground!

tl;dr Making up the Trine party. Optimization skills none with my players, so I'll be building the characters. RuleOfCool shenanigans and generally sticking to the flavour and handwaving some mechanics for The Greater Awesome accepted.

[herrhauptmann]

If you want your players to be the stuff of legend, they probably shouldn't have any dump stats. So at the very least, their worst ability should only be human average, 10 or 11.
Now a flaw (story term, not game term that gets you a feat), that's different from a dump stat.

I'd suggest a good deal of feats which require teamwork. You know, adjacent to an ally, who also has 'item X' or 'feat Z'.
Since it seems like you're going for rule of awesome, you might want to homebrew a few feats, or create rules to allow the players to make combo attacks. ex: Rogue hamstrings an ogre, the wizard casts a fire spell on the knights sword, who then jumps up and cleaves the ogre in half with a sword of righteous fire.
(no I haven't checked your link, just trying to remember Chrono Trigger combo attacks)

[Thieves]

Good idea, but homebrewing is kinda frowned upon in this group when it comes to content rather than rules, and devising a set of teamwork feats, while I think them cool personally, would be received as railroading them into a style of play. What gave me the whole idea of doing Trine was the fact they are a bunch of individuals completely unadjusted to each other, with completely different styles of play / RP (although heavy metagamers all of them), but they in general are not enough genre savvy to grasp that railroading sometimes is needed... Well, I'm the only to have played jRPGs rather than Baldur's Gate in his youth.

Then again, should I get to it, do you think I should keep a big sign above my head saying "TEAMWORK = SUCCESS" painted with big friendly letters? That is, to what extent should I nudge them? Anyone had such experiences in the past when you try to cope-in a LG, N and CE together to fight for the greater good? Of course, all of them act quite alignmentally (though it's their personalities, too), and this invariably results in complete havoc and TPKs on the second session.

[Grumman]

Definitely use Warblade or Crusader for the knight. They're stronger than a Fighter, and it's nearly impossible for the player to screw up their build.

I don't know what kind of spells the wizard is supposed to have, but you could consider using Warlock or Dragonfire Adept to represent the spellcaster, if you want something lower tier and with no risk of running out of spell slots.

[Thieves]

, if you want something lower tier and with no risk of running out of spell slots.

Exactly that! Less universe-bending aptitude and versatility, more zapping stuff in the face. Thanks.

As for the caster, I also thought: the Trine Wizard actually has two spells. The first is creating a plank, a box or a small levitating platform out of thin air. The second is moving these around... Yeah, that's too little for a D&D game (or is it?), but I was thinking of possibly having him use the Unearthed Arcana recharge magic system. Or at least spellpoint system. What do you think?

Edit: Now that I've looked at the warlock, I think all of it could work real fine if instead of actually giving him lesser->dark invocations (least ok) I gave him much more eldritch essences and blast shapes (probably giving him all of them by level 9-10 and ruling only a given amount of uses per day). Because, I get it, they count as normal invocations, in regards of the amount of them you can learn?