[Homebrew] Archetype, talent tree or talent pool? Comments and opinions please

[Mordo]

For my homebrew E5 campaing, I'm considering having only 4 base classes (Fighter, Cleric, Thief and Mage) from which all other stereotype could be built. In order to do such a such a thing I'm either considering applying an archetype on top of the base class (Paladin, Ranger, Druid, etc.) which would give a set of new abilities to the base class, or creating talent tree for related abilities from which the character can choose from, or finaly putting all the abilities into a talent pool where the player can cherry pick the ones he'd like for his character.

I'd like to have your comments and opinions on the different options presented here. If you ever seen this in play, or what could be the advantage and disadvantage for each.

Thanks

[Ciaran Barnes]

With only five levels, an archetype isn't much different in size from a base class. Depending on how much optimization your group does, cherry picking class features can either be OK, or bad.

[Fetz]

Making talent trees almost from scratch sounds really complicated. Pathfinder has so much already and many of it's own archetypes that I don't see why would need to do the extra work.

However, if you really wanna do things the hard way, maybe you could look into D20 Future for guidance? They have a talent tree system that works very well and then a small group of base classes with about 5-8 levels and everything after that is prestige classes. It is mostly set in the future with no magic, but they do have a book that incorporates magic into their game.

[Cyrad]

For talents, I highly recommend looking at how Radiance RPG does it. Each class has a list of talents broken up into three tiers. The talents do not have complicated requirements and there's no trees involved. A talent only requires another talent if it's a natural evolution of a talent from a lower tier. You could easily do the same but with 5 levels of abilities.