What do people think of these character types for an encounter-based game:

1. Archer - looses arrows

2. Slinger - slings stones

3. Bunter - throws darts

4. Combat Magician - starts off frying things

5. Research Magician - starts off being able to understand anything spoken or written

6. Physical Sneak - starts off with ability to go around undetected

7. Magical Sneak - same as Physical, but does it magically

8. Bruiser - starts off with barehanded meelee combat

9. Smasher - starts off with blunt weapons

10. Cutter - starts off with edged weapons

11. Healer - starts off healing injuries

12. Curist - starts off curing ailments and diseases

13. Purifier - starts off remediating contaminants such as poison and possession

14. Handler - starts off able to recruit and direct any of the other 13 who become available

Mickey

What do you mean by encounter-based?

Generically, though, Handler sounds overpowered since he can delegate multiple roles. Healer/curist/purifier sounds underpowered since each can only resolve 1/3 of the ailments so in the majority of cases won't be able to help an individual in need. If you're operating in large parties of 30+ characters it could work, but in smaller groups it probably makes sense to combine them.

Moving undetected or understanding languages as a power can be interesting but are tough to balance and make fun.

The names are generic (cutter, physical sneak), they work for describing the roles but you want more flavorful names in the actual game.

You might also consider hybrid roles, like someone who doesn't sneak as well as the dedicated class but fights better.

From your descriptions, it's not clear what the gameplay/strategy difference would be between the different ranged characters would be, or the different melee characters, ect. Strategically, what am I going to want to do different with a ranged arrow, stone, dart, or spell? What difference is it going to make to me whether my characters attack is barehanded, blunt, or edged?

Having multiple classes within a broader role can be fun, but it's important to distinguish those classes from eachother in an interesting way. Personally, I don't feel like a damage type is enough to separate a class, compared to other gameplay mechanics like range, area of effect, or resource types (like magic or stamina).

Darkest Dungeon comes to mind. I imagine they may have defined a few roles, like Tank, Damage, Healer, Buffer, Debuffer, but then mixed and matched these to give each character their own unique abilities and feel. While each class has a few damage types that affect the gameplay, the damage types they have don't define their play style as much as the unique combination of abilities.

That sounds like quite the list... why do you need so many different ones? For variety?

Maybe start by defining general classes:

- Melee

- Ranged

- Support

Broken down into finer subclasses:

- Melee: DPS, Tank

- Ranged: Missile, Magician

- Support: Magician, Tactical

Broken down into the actual Job classes

- Meele DPS: Warrior, Assassin

- Meele Tank: Knight, Paladin

- Ranged Missile: Archer, Gunner (Slinger, whatever)

- Ranged Magician: Fire Mage, Ice Mage, ...

- Support Magician: Healer, Shaman

- Support Tactical: Commander, Scout/Ranger

This way a) you can define Class and Subclass rules that transfer automatically to your Job classes and make sure the different Jobs WILL serve different purposes (for example by giving all meele classes meeled specific bonuses, or the making only the ranged classes able to handle ranged weapons/magic), and b) makes it easier for your player to understand what is the purpose your dozens of Job classes...

If they know Knights and Paladins are Meele fighters and Tanks, and they need someone that can fight in meele combat and tank in their party, they can narrow down the selection quickly to those two (with the Paladin maybe bringing basic healing, while the Knight having slightly higher damage output as differentiation between the two).

And it will help you seeing how your list is filling your games needs, and what characters are actually redundant (in which case one of them should be tweaked to gain a new purpose, or cut from the game (which will neatly bring down cost as you have one less character class to produce))