Reply To: D&D officially turning Forgotten Realms sights away from Euro inspired campaigns

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Personally I don’t like class restrictions in any setting, regardless of the moral compass it is based on.  They serve a purpose in that they kind of make it easier to build your character by giving you a template to build on and not overwhelming you with options which is great for noobs.  D&D 5E has gone way too far for my liking in its restrictions because almost everything about your character is decided by the class you select and in order to increase variety they have created hundreds of sub-classes.  Shadowrun is kind of the opposite and character creation can be really hard because it’s so open but that’s nothing a few easy build templates can’t fix.  Again I am back to 2D20 but I think the way it masks some of the more complex elements of character creation is actually really good.  You design your characters’ lives, see what comes out and that’s what you start with.  I haven’t played it yet, I am still reading the rules and planning a game later this year but I haven’t been this excited about an RPG system for quite a long time.  I was hoping that the Kings of War RPG was going to use 2D20 but it doesn’t appear to be the case.

I suspect, as much as I dislike it, the new Forgotten Realms source books will continue to be full of new sub-classes for different character archetypes suitable for those settings.  The cynic in me might even suggest thwt 5E was written this way precisely to ensure that people would constantly clamour for such books because it’s the only way you can break out of the classes presented to you in the basic rulebook.  But a massive multi-national corporation like Wizards of the Coast would never do something like that, no sir