Quote from: noisms;525252D&D has only ever needed a handful of archetypes for its classes. If you want to be an assassin or a burglar or a samurai or an amazon or a desert druid, then fine, but all of those things are just facets of one of the core classes that don't need to have any mechanical benefit associated with them.

You could say the same thing about all the sub-classes, except the min/maxing and special abilities you get out of the sub-classes is way beyond anything in the kits.

QuoteOnce you start associating mechanical benefits with them you start to get optimization creeping in, and ultimately the Book of Nine Swords, Pun-Pun, and all the rest.

In this area I think the Skills & Powers books really do add to the game -certainly more than all the Complete [Whatever] Handbooks. Each ability has a certain cost and if (for example) you want a thief who can be a bow specialist, fine: just pick out the standard thief abilities you're willing to forfeit. It codified something that was already going on with 1E -especially the clerics from Greyhawk.

Quote from: Cole;453577Frankly for much of the 2e era I played with hodgepodge of 1e, 2e, and Basic rules depending on what seemed to work at the moment. I do not think this was a rare situation.

That's how probably >90% of gamers did it. Before 2E, almost everyone (whether they admit it or not) ran some mixture of 1E, Moldvay, Holmes, OD&D and whatever they found interesting in Dragon or White Dwarf.

Quote from: Marleycat;525195The idea of prestige classes was great but the implementation gave less than desired results, especially for spellcasting classes IMO.

To expand on that, prestige classes for spellcasters generally either:

(a) Gave "+1 level of existing spellcasting class" every other level

(b) Gave "+1 level of existing spellcasting class" every single level.

The former broke for the same reason that multiclassing into spellcasting classes broke: Low level spells simply aren't useful enough to higher level spellcasters. These characters were far too weak compared to straight spellcasters.

The latter was broken in the opposite direction, giving rise to prestige classes that were "just like a sorcerer, but better in every way". Theoretically these were supposed to be "balanced" by the punitive requirements for entering the class, but these requirements were rarely punitive.

This might have been marginally acceptable if prestige classes were universally "just like a base class, but better in every way" (although, personally, I think that would be a really bad idea even before the inevitable power creep/race began). But the martial classes were rarely or never like that: You never saw a prestige class that was "get everything the fighter has, plus a bunch of extra cool stuff".

Prestige classes were, IMO, a huge mistake: They added little of true utility to the system and they became a form of cheap confetti that WotC could use to bloat up their splatbooks.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;525256i think there is a big gulf between kits and 3e multiclassing/prestige classes. Kits were very light on the mechanics. They gave you enough to create a cool (but not bizarre or hodgepodge) character with some vague mechanical support (again usually a small proficiency bonus under the right conditions), but mostly just offered interesting character concepts.

There actually was an early effort in 3rd Edition to provide some kit-like functionality, but the Herobuilder's Guidebook crashed and burned so hard on arrival that pretty much everything inside of it was immediately abandoned by WotC.

Quote from: noisms;525258I think kits led the way to all the egregiousness that came after. They were pretty harmless on their own right, and could be fun, but they were unnecessary and once they'd got their foot in the door, it didn't take much for 2.5 and 3rd edition to come and kick it down.

The idea that kits gave rise to a proliferation of non-core classes is nothing more than revisionist history. If anything, kits temporarily suppressed something that had been part of D&D's culture since 1974.

OD&D? 75% of the supplements contained new classes. Dragon Magazine featured new classes on a regular basis. And so forth.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;525311The idea that kits gave rise to a proliferation of non-core classes is nothing more than revisionist history. If anything, kits temporarily suppressed something that had been part of D&D's culture since 1974.

OD&D? 75% of the supplements contained new classes. Dragon Magazine featured new classes on a regular basis. And so forth.

Saying that 75% of the supplements contained new classes is a little bit of a disingenuous use of statistics, don't you think, given that there are only four of them!?

I take your point, but I think there's a qualitative distinction between the new classes introduced in OD&D supplements and Dragon Magazine and the kits. I'm no fan of all those new classes either, but they didn't take the same mix-and-match approach that the kits did. When you bought one of the Completes you immediately got a dozen or more options for your character, often with more sub-options and new special abilities. It's not difficult to draw a conceptual arc between that and the character generation horrors of the 3rd edition era.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;525311The idea that kits gave rise to a proliferation of non-core classes is nothing more than revisionist history. If anything, kits temporarily suppressed something that had been part of D&D's culture since 1974.

This for the win.
Kits actually reduced the number of classes and mechanical variation. They eliminated the thief acrobat, the assasin (you might debate that one), the illusionist, the druid, the cavalier and the barbarian.
They did this by pointing out the very obvious point that a barbarian is just what you call a fighter you haven't met yet. A druid is just a cleric of a Neutral nature god etc ...

Now eventually the same driver that had been in the game from the beginning, that gave us rangers, paladins, monks, the min/max class building mechanical desire, the same thing that gave us classes in The Beholder and White Dwarf and Dragon for black priests, archers, and just about everything else you could think of. that driver took over.
2e actually put a halt on that, stopped the express train that had hit 3rd gear with Unearthed Arcana and realised that you didn't need separate mechanics for every single different variant on the 4 core classes.
Skills and powers was the obvious extension of that mode of thinking. It said from these templates you can build anything you like. Now the problem with Skills and powers is it was horribly horribly broken and ill conceived.

Quote from: jibbajibba;525329This for the win.
Kits actually reduced the number of classes and mechanical variation. They eliminated the thief acrobat, the assasin (you might debate that one), the illusionist, the druid, the cavalier and the barbarian.

Druid and illusionist were both in the 2e PHB.  They were not replaced by kits.

To be honest I liked the 3e era it was quite the opposite of horrific to me.

Now you did have to have an iron grip on your game and say "no" alot.  But at least it was nowhere near the horror of 4e with its "everything is core" nonsense.

@Justin,  at least you could solve the magic user dilemma with prestige classes by saying no matter how you multiclass or prestige class, your magic level raises via your character level not class level.  It allows for more prestige classes built as having +1 magic at staggered levels and having other abilities more like paragon paths.  To remove the 3e stupidity of class and prestige class dipping quit front loading classes and just allow 1 prestige class per character.  In otherwords take a cue from Pathfinder and Fantasy Craft for God sake.

Quote from: noisms;525318Saying that 75% of the supplements contained new classes is a little bit of a disingenuous use of statistics, don't you think, given that there are only four of them!?

Okay, fine: Except for a single supplement that contained exclusively DM-oriented content, every single OD&D supplement included new classes.

Quote from: noisms;525318When you bought one of the Completes you immediately got a dozen or more options for your character, often with more sub-options and new special abilities.

And this was different from OD&D or Unearthed Arcana... how, exactly?

Roleplaying games (and D&D specifically) have been using new special abilities and sub-options for character creation to sell supplements since 1975 when TSR released Supplement I: Greyhawk.

The only thing that arguably changed in 1989 was that more of this material was being developed specifically for immediate publication in supplements, instead of being debuted in the pages of Dragon.

It should also be noted that this was not some sort of corporate-driven mindset: It was a fundamental part of the fan culture around D&D. People have been homebrewing since Day 1, and homebrewing classes has always been a big part of that. I've still got hundreds of fan-brewed classes and races from the 1st Edition and 2nd Edition era on my hard drive.

Quote from: misterguignol;525331Druid and illusionist were both in the 2e PHB.  They were not replaced by kits.

Apologies ... you are 1/2 right the Illusionist is just an example of a speciallst mage like an abjurer or an alterationist.

the Druid however does have granted powers so you are right. They should have pulled it.
They should also have puled the ranger and the paladin.

Trouble as always I guess is a lack of cahones. They don;t want to piss off the player base.

anyway you are correct they both appear in the 2e PHB. The logic is still sound though

Quote from: jibbajibba;525343Apologies ... you are 1/2 right the Illusionist is just an example of a speciallst mage like an abjurer or an alterationist.

...and is therefore mechanically different than a standard magic-user.  So I'm not sure what your point is.

QuoteTrouble as always I guess is a lack of cahones. They don;t want to piss off the player base.

I hate to break it to you, but a lot of people *like* having a bunch of classes to choose from.  Designing for them is just good business.

Also, kits were no different from this because kits have mechanics specific to them.  They weren't just flavor add-ons like you've claimed.

Quoteanyway you are correct they both appear in the 2e PHB. The logic is still sound though

You keep using the word "logic," but I'm not yet convinced you understand what it means.

The Druid and Illusionist were 'kits' of the core 4 archetypes. Just as the fighter was a kit of the Warrior, the Cleric a kit of the Priest, the Mage of the Wizard, and the Thief of the Rogue.

I think the big confusion is AD&D 2e issue with consistency. The core 4 archetypes were called groups: warrior, priest, wizard, rogue. The original 4 classes available for every campaign (because they had the lowest attribute pre-requisite for each group) -- fighter, cleric, mage, thief -- are essentially baseline 'kits.'

The illusionist, druid, ranger, paladin, bard, were optional core classes within the prime 4 groups. And all those spheres and schools were provided to give structure to future priest or wizard specialists. They were there to get the ball rolling for tables to invent their own classes within groups.

But sometimes people were cautious or reluctant to build their own. Hence an intermediate step was created: pre-created classes by TSR itself as kits (also read as: suggestions). All of those released kits were really additional classes within the 4 groups. They required GM table approval and the books wholly encouraged GM kit editing for setting. This was for people who didn't want to DIY new classes.

But sadly there was no disambiguation used. Or more precisely, their use of disambiguation (that kits are merely TSR suggested classes) ended up creating more ambiguity. So even though classes and kits are mechanically the same, they conceptually seemed different to some tables because they consistently used different terms.

Granted the book titles didn't help much either. Case in point, Complete Fighter's handbook suggest class fighter fixation. Thus any kits therein must be about kits within the fighter class, right? However when new kits are introduced they talk about kits (as new classes) under the warrior group designation. A thorough reading disambiguates; a cursory one confuses.

A kit is a TSR suggested interpretation of a newly invented class within a broad archetypal group. Nothing more, nothing less.

Quote from: Opaopajr;525346The Druid and Illusionist were 'kits' of the core 4 archetypes. Just as the fighter was a kit of the Warrior, the Cleric a kit of the Priest, the Mage of the Wizard, and the Thief of the Rogue.

I think the big confusion is AD&D 2e issue with consistency. The core 4 archetypes were called groups: warrior, priest, wizard, rogue. The original 4 classes available for every campaign (because they had the lowest attribute pre-requisite for each group) -- fighter, cleric, mage, thief -- are essentially baseline 'kits.'

Have you guys actually read 2e?  

Kit =/= class.  You know how you can tell?  YOU CAN HAVE BOTH A KIT AND A CLASS.  Ever notice that each Complete Book of X Class had kits specifically for that class?  It's pretty easy to figure out why.

Seriously, show me a page reference in the 2e PHB where kits are referenced.

@Opaopajr, huh?!? what 2e do you have? It's certainly not the same one I had.

Quote from: misterguignol;525344...and is therefore mechanically different than a standard magic-user.  So I'm not sure what your point is.

I hate to break it to you, but a lot of people *like* having a bunch of classes to choose from.  Designing for them is just good business.

Also, kits were no different from this because kits have mechanics specific to them.  They weren't just flavor add-ons like you've claimed.

You keep using the word "logic," but I'm not yet convinced you understand what it means.

Illusionists used to have their own spell lists, own pre-requs etc. The Specialist Mages are as different from mages as specialist 'burglars' are from standard thieves.
But you are fully aware.

Likewise the earliest kits had no mechanical variation. the Myrmidion got a free firebuilding non-weapon proff, the Peasant Hero got a Bonus to reactions to peasants and somewhere to hide if they needed it.
Compare these to the mechanical variations you see in the Barbarian or the Cavalier from UA or even the mechanical variations between the Ranger and the Fighter.

And lots of people like having lots of classes just like lots of people like optimisation and min/maxing.  I never said they didn't I just said that 2e actually tried to cap that rather than feed into a process that had started much earlier.

And Yeah I am actually pretty good at logic and I know what it means and everything, weird huh.....
but if you look at my posts I very rarely attack people or focus on semantics I really do try to dig into the issue under discussion and examine it in as a complete manner as possible. So I am not goign to accuse you of not understanding of being a bit of a thicky or anything, merely of having a point of view I disagree with.

Quote from: jibbajibba;525356Illusionists used to have their own spell lists, own pre-requs etc. The Specialist Mages are as different from mages as specialist 'burglars' are from standard thieves.

What page are specialist burglars on again?  

Specialist mages have prohibited schools of spells that they can't use, as well as benefits with the school they specialize in.  That is literally mechanical differentiation.

QuoteLikewise the earliest kits had no mechanical variation. the Myrmidion got a free firebuilding non-weapon proff, the Peasant Hero got a Bonus to reactions to peasants and somewhere to hide if they needed it.

Translation: there is no mechanical variation, except for these mechanical variations that I am about to list.

Quote from: misterguignol;525359Translation: there is no mechanical variation, except for these mechanical variations that I am about to list.

Mechanics can support roleplaying (I think that was jibba jibb'a original point); kit mechanics usually do so. Apart from the more broken ones (Fucking Rick Swan and his 3-armed tree rangers).
 
"You're character can't choose the Reading/Writing NWP/does not start out able to read Common" is a mechanical thing, but leads to in-game roleplaying around not being literate, when your fighter can't read things in game, or needs to find a literacy tutor.
 
Your Witch having groups of peasants form wherever they're staying to oust them from the town likewise is or at least leads to roleplaying, even though this lives under the "Special Hindrances" line and has mechanics associated with it.