For 5.5/6.0 Edition, what Missing Class would you like to see in the Core?

[ezekielraiden]

But, if it's not going this route, the one thing I'd REALLY want would be a game that starts at the sweet spot of 5th level and only progresses to 11th. You can call it levels 1 to 6 if you want, that's fine - but I want the capabilities of a 5th level character right away. Fireball? two attacks? a feat or 2? Yes please. Grinding through unheroic levels 1-4, even as quickly as 5E made the XP experience, still sucks. And generating a 5th level character from scratch isn't particularly easy... but if the rules were built in that you had all the glory of a 5th level character at 1st level? That'd be the game I want to play - even if it had 100 classes to mull over.

Ironically, that was an explicit design goal of 4e: make as much of the game "sweet spot" as possible. 4e characters got a lot of HP at first level, but gained them slowly thereafter (not getting Con mod to HP). A big part of keeping things steady in that range is doing something like what 4e did with Rituals--forking out a lot of the powerful, game-altering utility into its own subsystem that can be both more broadly accessed for those willing to spend resources on it, and more easily restricted by a DM not wanting some or all of it readily accessible.

Personally, I completely agree with you, and still advocate for building in optional but completely non-deprecated "zero levels" or "novice levels" or the like. That way, people who enjoy spooling out that early weakness, zero-to-hero experience can have it (and, indeed, should ideally be able to spool it out as long as they like), while those who don't aren't forced to. It's especially valuable for newbies, so they don't get discouraged by the incredible lethality of the current early game.

[Waazraath]

For one thing, magic items are a thing. One can fill in the fly feature with a magic item, for example. (Broom of Flying for the win). For another, in Tier 3 somewhat and in Tier 4 for sure, both teleporting and interplanar travel seem to become necessary for the kind of adventure that being at that level stipulates. What I think is wrong is that the limitation on sorcerer spells went a bit too far, not that every class looks the same.

But as for items: those are optional. And I still fail to see the point I think: how does the existence of items redeem the situation where many level 7 versions of sorcerer, wizard, druid and warlock have significant overlap in spells known/prepapred for the day cause each wants to be able to do 'everything'?

And every cleric has some healing spells. So?

Because that's a narrow subtheme! Even taking into account that the clerics also can cure poison, disease, blindness, remove exhaustion, has several ways to raise the dead: those are all variatons on a narrow theme, which is perfect! Just like I'd love to have a caster that has loads of variety with "fire" (wall of fire, burning hands, fire shield). But the difference with every arcane caster getting (short range) teleportation, area of effect damage, invisibility, fly and counterspell is that those are wildly different abilities.

I am not sure if you are looking at how people play and what you see in optimized build ideas. This discussion takes me to where wizards are, to me, the arcane caster without peer. Their objective is to get as many different spells into the book as they can so that, for a given adventure, they can help that party. Over their career they'l be faced with different demands. Not all adventures need the same approach.

And that's the thing. Helping the party is the whole point, since this game isn't built conceptually as a solo adventure.

I agree that helping the party is the point, and wouldn't argue for solo adventures. What I would like is if that, if you look at wizards as 'problem solvers', that different wizard would effectively solve problems in a different way. Take "archers shooting party from across the chasm". I would like the conjurer to summon demons among them, the evoker to shoot a fireball, the illusionst to cast an illusionary wall, etc. I don't want the illusionist, necromancer, but also every sorcerer light cleric and fiend warlock cast the same old fireball.

Your party, if there are three total PCs, pays a price in mission capability if you over specialize, whereas if the party has 6 PCs, a PC's decision to specialize may not have the same impact since there are five, not two, other PCs' to take up the slack/fill the gaps thanks to someone specializing. That's what was behind that point.

But a party with 3 (or 4, or 6) fighters should also be playable. (I think it is, mostly, btw). But theoretically, no party should need a class that is uber versatile and can solve all different kind of problems with spells. And from there, I don't think that uber versatile class needs to exists.

The game wasn't built for optimizers, I don't think, and for whatever reasons they staggered the "you are a full up round" decision point for the classes - cleric and sorcerer at 1, wizard and druid at 2, Rogue and Fighter and Warlock at 3, but Warlock at 1 with patron ... with an idea that beginning players needed fewer choices in the beginning, not more (while we veterans are happy with more choices earlier ... )

I fail to see how optimizing is related to this? Having all subclasses start at the same level would have made sense.

As to restricting schools: I never liked that. Glad it's not in this edition. A matter of taste, to be sure.

Definitely taste. I think you earlier said you wens on a DnD sabbatical at the beginning of 3rd? If so: I wonder how you would have looked at it if you would have stayed in the edition longer. For me, the point where I deceided focus was absolutly the way to go for DnD was with the release of the splats that contained the specialist mages. Beguiler as a skillfull charm / illusion caster, Warmage as evoker/abjurer with a few extra hp and light armor, Dread necromancer as a, well, mostly necromancer with some extra undead abilities. All of them were useful in a lot of situations, but didn't had an obvious solution for every situation, leading on the one hand to more creativity, and on the other hand to reliance on other party members (hurra for the team game).

If you ever go back to that edition, I'd say: give them a try!

I do like Binder, I do want it in current+future editions, but I'm not sure it should be core.

The reason being that it operates on an entirely separate pretty extensive subsystem. Only warlock with its invocations really breaks the mold for subsystems and invocations are generally pretty simple and straightforward. A full set of vestiges with all its binding rules may be too much to put in the PHB, if only because of pages required. Most classes in the PHB average around ~5 pages, some more, some less, but a lot of their details can be shunted off to the Spell List section in the back, which works fine because it crosses over for a bunch of classes. Binder's standalone, and could take potentially dozens of pages all on its own for fully detailed vestiges.

Put another way, I fear that if they made Binder core they'd end up having to water it down to not bloat page length on a single class, and I'd rather have a non-core fully realised binder than a watered down core version.

Mhh... this is a good point. Then again, I could live with shorter spell lists and shorter descriptions (kicking out things like phantasmal force, symbol and simulacrum); reduce the spell section to 1/3rd, replace the remaining 2/3rd with 1/3rd vestiges and 1/3rd either psionic powers or martial abilities as in Book of Nine Swords. I'd be happy.

[Waazraath]

apologies, double post, plz delete.

[Morty]

Personally, I completely agree with you, and still advocate for building in optional but completely non-deprecated "zero levels" or "novice levels" or the like. That way, people who enjoy spooling out that early weakness, zero-to-hero experience can have it (and, indeed, should ideally be able to spool it out as long as they like), while those who don't aren't forced to. It's especially valuable for newbies, so they don't get discouraged by the incredible lethality of the current early game.

I feel like D&D would generally make things a lot easier if it provided more explicit alternate progression paths, so people can adjust the "power gain" to their taste. But the 1-20 progression is just one of those things that it can't quite get rid of.

[noob]

I feel like D&D would generally make things a lot easier if it provided more explicit alternate progression paths, so people can adjust the "power gain" to their taste. But the 1-20 progression is just one of those things that it can't quite get rid of.

The problem is level gating.
Unlike in older editions (basic, advanced 1e,advanced 2e) of dnd where you could be excepted to try to fight the lords of hell(or simply a dragon that is not as small as a kitten) at level 9 when cornered (by the way hp progression flattened for adventurers at that level: they barely gained hp after that level).
5e excepts you to be really high level before fighting the cool stuff and does so through varied means such as badly designed hp inflation spirals giving 500 too much hp to big monster for no reason other than level gating or giving 1 or more action per turn of their opponents to monsters and automatically resisting to a bunch of things to make the fight literally impossible to win for low level adventurers.
If 5e did not do level gating then it could be adapted to a level 1 to 10 progression and have some super hard but not technically impossible fights with the end monsters when at level 10: stop with the idiotic hp and power inflation so that the power gap between the lord of hell and a party of adventurers is more reasonable.
dnd did not have that mandatory level 1-20 design mistake in earlier editions heck in one of them you even had a level cap depending on race and class and a high level cap such as magic user for elf could be around 14.(humans did not have a cap)