So for today's 3 classes, we have the (mostly) martial bunch:
If we look at 5th Edition D&D, these classes are sort of grouped together, with "fighting styles" being their common mechanic; the fighter gets access to all, ranger leans towards two-weapon fighting or archery, and paladin can basically get any of the others.
It seems clear that there was a deliberate attempt to make Fighters in 5e that could be built for more than just melee, and I felt that was valuable to keep in TNP. However, I didn't want the fighting styles to be something you were pigeon-holed into, so I added the mechanic of each additional style giving you extra damage. The TNP version of the Fighter is actually an outgrowth of the original "Warrior" class, which was a much more barbarian-ish, d12 class; as the Fighter-y bits got added more and more into the Warrior, the d12 made less and less sense. When I started working on the 3rd slate of classes, I decided to make the Fighter as a separate, d6 class, and later with the two-dice revision, d6/d12 seemed the obvious choice.
The Paladin in TNP, on the other hand, was one of the original 5 character classes... sort of -- having evolved out of the d10 "Fighter" class to include some more holy/healing abilities, which the slate was otherwise completely lacking. There are some subtle influences from Diablo 2, as the Paladin in that game was probably my favourite class. I liked the idea of either taking a Cleric domain or a Fighter role (or possibly fighting style) with the Paladin, so I sort of massaged that into the class specialization options; the Fighter and Paladin sharing the d6 class die made role the easier fighter option to share. In much the same way as in 5e, the Paladin isn't mean to be a "pure" healer or "main" healer, but they're a frontliner who can dish out some healing as they fight. I can honestly say I had fun playing a Blackguard in 4e, and so including a dark Paladin with some of the thievery-type skills had always been on my radar.
The Ranger has always been a d8 class, but honestly, stapling an "extra damage die" such as the d10 onto the class just worked flawlessly. The scout subclass bounced around between Ranger and Rogue for a bit, before finally settling in as part of the Adventurer class; I wanted to keep classes to only 2 subclasses, and that sort of necessitated this. Probably the two-weapon fighting and the archery Rangers are the most iconic, particularly coming out of 4th Edition; TNP's Ranger is more akin to the Essentials' Hunter ranger, stapled onto the beastmaster archetype of the Martial Power book. I feel the latter playstyle became popularized for a lot of people (myself included) with the World of Warcraft hunter class, and I think using the beast for 4e's iconic "twin strike" manages to work out ok.
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So, the remaining "completed" class is the Rogue, with 5 others still needing to be polished up and finalized; I might squeeze in a post on another topic, rather than continue with the class showcases, for the next one.
Check back on October 20th!
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