First off, let's talk for a bit about the two things that made the Classplosion obvious: it would have been very easy to do, and it was totally necessary. Seriously, when 4e dropped there were a lot of people who said "I'm going to wait until the X is released before jumping into the new system" and I think we can pretty much lay the fact that in its firs year of release, 4e did not gradually take over the D&D Hobby to the fact that the Classplosion never happened.
Why They Needed a Classplosion
A 4e class is just... really limited. They have some powers and stuff, and generally speaking most of them have a bit more depth than an AD&D Fighter (at least, until the AD&D Fighter starts getting magic items or an army and can pull off all kinds of crazy shit). But that's an individual character. The class is extremely limited. Paladins an't use bows, Rogues can't use maces, and so on and so forth. The range of characters that any class can manage is extremely limited - in many ways more limited than the AD&D Fighting Men.
Let's consider an incredibly simple set of units, like say those in Wesnoth.There are basically four unit types in the Rogue list: Footpad, Thug, Thief, and Poacher. Of those, only one can be properly represented in the 4e game rules as a "Rogue" (the Thief). The others use a blunt weapon or a bow and therefore cannot be using Sneak Attack. That's kind of silly, but that would totally be OK if, like in Wesnoth, the Thug, Footpad, and Poacher were all given their own classes. And while the Poacher can kind of be run as a Bow Ranger, the Thug and Footpad are simply unsupported. So what would the answer be? Make more classes. Obviously.
If you're going to have a Rogue Class that covers the Wesnoth Thief (and only the Thief off the Rogue Army list), that's actually kind of fine. There is no limit to how many classes you can have. Wesnoth, for example, has a different unit for a horseman with a lance (horseman) and a horseman with a sword (cavalryman). Doing that sort of thing is fine, if you cover all the options people want.
And yet, instead the designers kept turning to build options as if that covered ground. And first of all, it doesn't. Because many of the build options aren't real. The 4e design setup claimed that there were three builds for each class. Now, I know what you're thinking: "No. No there were not." And you're right. But here was the thinking they were using:
- If you make two builds:
- Stat A + Stat C
and - Stat B + Stat C
then you've already automatically created a third build. A hybrid that looks like this: - Stat A + Stat B
And so even before we get to the fact that Artful Dodger Rogues suck monkey ass and Tron Paladins don't even get a Level 9 power - we get to the fact that the number of builds that they thought they were making was just a lot less than the actual number. And when they produce a new build for Your Mom's Power, they may no be covering any new ground at all. And that's because first of all, a lot of those new builds aren't real either (like Virtue's Touch, what the hell is that supposed to accomplish?), but secondly, Ardent Vow and Virtue's Touch aren't any different from the normal build options. You take Ardent Vow as a Grind Paladin if you want to spend slightly more time doing damage and slightly less time healing people. Aside from the fact that the descriptive text inexplicably mis-identifies the characters who care as Tron Paladins, the fact is that your character isn't visibly different when they take Ardent Vow, they are still just a Grind Paladin. They are still armed with a sword and shield, they are still dressed in platemail, they still charge into melee and grind away from the relative safety of Turtle World. You haven't added any of the Wesnoth units to the list of characters that can be played.
So even before we get into the infinity billion magical character concepts that are not covered by the basic rules and call for and allow hundreds upon hundreds of new classes on the Magic side of things, let's just bring up the basic "Sims" view of warrior archetypes that are not covered by the basic rules and really need full classes to fill:
- Small Character with a Reach Weapon and Heavy Armor
- Small Character with a Reach Weapon and Light Armor
- Whip User
- Armored Archer
- Crossbow Sniper
- Armored Crossbow Sniper
- Lancer
- Wolf Rider
- Whip User
- Wrestler
- Spear Skirmisher
- Naked Heavy Weapon Wielder
- Quarterstaff Fighter
- Double Knife Fighter
- Net and Club Fighter
- Net and Trident Fighter
- Fill in any exotic or fantastic weapon layout you can imagine (War Fans, Battle Spindles, Kuo-Toan Nutcrackers, whatever).
Why a Classplosion would have been easy
Making a class that supports 3 different builds is kind of hard. You're making 3 Dailies at each level, so you have to make sure that each level has exactly one AB, one AC, and one BC power option. And it ends up making classes that generate pretty stale characters. Heck, look through the Bane Guard I put up on the D&D Wiki - it has a Cha/Dex build, a Con/Dex build and a Con/Cha build. So pretty much you get locked into just an option or two at every level once you start down the path. But of course, 4e didn't even do that with its original classes, so there's no reason to pretend that expansion classes should have to either. And when you're just making 2 viable builds, it's not even a problem.
So you make a Gladiator Class. You give it two options, one is Strength/Charisma and will be played by Dragonborn Bullysauruses. The other is Strength/Constitution and will be played by Orcs. And this is fine. You give a Charisma focused class feature package option that triggers off of fighting with a gladius and a shield. And you also give out a Constitution focused class feature package that triggers off of fighting with a trident and a net. And then you write at least one power at each level that each of those characters can use, and then then you write in some other powers, and two days later you are ready to send it to the editor. And you've just caulked two of the basic martial build cracks.
Literally, you could put an eight man dev team on this and get it all waxed out in about two weeks.
Now, that doesn't absolve them from the stupid inexcusable shit that was Paragon Classes. What the fuck, man? They did the Epic Destinies in a properly extensible and basically functional fashion (if woefully unbalanced and kind of boring). Paragon Classes just aren't interesting enough to bother writing four to eight of them for every damn class. It's a waste of time. They should just decouple the Paragons from Classes entirely. They don't give new weapon proficiencies in most instances, so really, who gives a shit? If your Razor Clerics end up wanting to take Pit Fighter, they should just do that. Which means of course that as you write up a half dozen or so Paragons in every book (one that uses each stat in the game as a primary), you have titanic Classplosion in available Paragoning as well. A few books down the line and you could actually look down your nose at the 3e crowd for having a system that limits player options.
So... why didn't that happen?
-Username17
