Class 14

 Eberron: Rising From the Last War introduced the Artificer after years of tinkering (so to speak). It's my favorite class in 5th edition, and it's the only full class to be added to the game since the editon's 2014 launch.

One of my big hopes for the 2024 "5.5" Player's Handbook is to see the Artificer added as one of the game's core classes, which would enable Wizards of the Coast to publish new content for Artificers like subclasses, new infusions, and new spells without having to republish the entire class once more (at least on the spells front, Fizban's Treasury of Dragons does have one new spell for them, which they share with a few other classes.)

But with rules-expansion books and campaign setting books and now, apparently, also monster books, new subclasses are a common feature of new publications, and letting Artificers get in on the action would be a lot of fun.

But this post isn't going to focus on Artificers.

Instead, I want to think about whether D&D is due for another full class.

Here's what makes adding new classes tricky - each one permanently adds to the complexity of the game. Now, D&D doesn't have to be as balanced as a game like World of Warcraft does. The broad "utility" of some classes might contribute to a party's power in ways that aren't really quantifiable - your Bard might never be able to pump out as much damage as your Fighter, but the Bard is so versatile that you'll still want them around to, for example, talk that Beholder into letting you use the ancient magical artifact he has stashed away in his lair.

More importantly, I think that you need to figure out a niche that can't be covered by an existing class.

Consider, for example, something like a Witcher. In the novels, games, and show (actually, I think there was a film adaptation around 2000 in Poland as well,) Geralt is a member of a highly specialized and trained group of monster-hunters. Alchemy and an anachronistically sophisticated understanding of genetics and mutation alter the boys recruited/abducted to become Witchers, and the fraction of them that survive the treatments develop heightened physical abilities and the ability to drink magical potions and elixirs that would kill a normal human to empower them further, all while being trained as peerless fighters.

Witchers are pretty specific to the story and setting, and for a class that is meant to be usable across all of D&D, you'd need to broaden things out.

But you can do that - there are plenty of stories about monster-hunters. You can look to the old Solomon Kane stories (or Abraham Van Helsing, whose movie starring Hugh Jackman is something I don't think any of us actually saw (well, ok, I didn't) but we all sort of remembered, in which they turned the older dutch professor into... Solomon Kane.

Now, some kind of gritty, monster-hunting class could be cool... but it sort of already exists. The Ranger is, arguably, designed to be this kind of thing, and you can get that spooky hunter of the supernatural vibe by taking the Monster Slayer subclass. In fact, lots of classes can fit this archetype, depending mostly just on the tone with which you play it. Paladins dedicated to a monster-hunting oath, or Rogues who specialize in stalking monsters, or even just Fighters dedicated to taking down foul beasts.

In other words, I think a class needs to be more about methodology than tone. What made the Artificer work as a new class was that there was no other class that focused on craftsmanship and creation as a means of fighting and casting magic. And while the stereotypical portrayal of an Artificer leans toward a kind of industrial/steampunk aesthetic, there are a lot of other tones and flavors you can use - I came up with an Armorer Artificer who inscribes elemental runes on stone armor, or you can be an Alchemist who plays much more of a medieval plague-doctor vibe.

So, if we're going to focus more on methods, what's new?

First off, I think we can acknowledge here that perhaps there is already some overlap with existing classes. If you have a high-strength cleric who fights with divine power granted through devotion to a god, your methods aren't really all that far off from a paladin who fights with divine power granted through devotion to a god. Here, the specifics of the mechanics are what make the clearer difference, and perhaps also a general notion that the paladin starts off with a focus on martial skill and ability that they then supplement with divine magic whereas the cleric starts off with the divine and then adds in some martial abilities.

Before the Artificer came out, one class that WotC had been experimenting with was the Mystic. Here, there was a clear difference in methodology - the Mystic used psionics as their fundamental source of power.

The Mystic was deeply flawed - it worked so completely differently from existing classes and, on top of that, frontloaded low-level characters with a plethora of abilities that made them very complex to play and also very overpowered.

Since those experiments, WotC has treated psionics more like a variation on spellcasting, and rather than building whole other classes around it, they've made a handful of subclasses that have a psionic theme.

Which does kind of close it off as an avenue for a full class.

Is there something else, though?

One class I've often thought about homebrewing would be the Shaman. I always loved the Shaman in World of Warcraft as a representative of a different kind of "nature magic" than the Druid. In WoW, Druids are focused on plants and animals and life magic. Shamans, meanwhile, are more about the primal elements, channeling fire, earth, air, and water.

But I think that the truth might just be that Shamans as seen in WoW simply fall under D&D's Druid umbrella, or perhaps even Clerics (with nature or tempest domain).

So, honestly, the conclusion I might draw here is that the Artificer is an anomaly. Rather than build out class option along the axis of total number of classes, it's far easier to let these thirteen options represent a kind of pantheon of character archetypes, and within those archetypes, there's plenty of room to expand and grow.

I know that if I play D&D for the rest of my life (and live to be very old, I hope) I'll never be able to seriously try out ever single subclass in 5th edition. Indeed, the very concept of a subclass (though it has plenty of precedent - in WoW, for example, with its specializations) was, I think, a new concept to D&D with the introduction of 5th Edition. By letting the base class remain the same, subclasses allow for flavorful and mechanically interesting twists on structures we can trust to be sound (ok, except maybe Rangers).

So maybe we don't actually need class 14. Maybe the game's better off if we stick with the existing 13 and just build them out further.

We'll see.