A wizard or a sorcerer could be a Spellblade but that would require some customization for 5e.

The Bladesinger "school" from The Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide comes the closest to that concept, but they're still very vulnerable when they don't have Bladesong active. Neither of these people really want to go that route. Not only are they not communicating with me, they're not communicating with each other, either.

We'll see what happens. I'm starting them at third, so they're over-leveled for the start of the campaign. Hopefully they'll have figured out how to work around their weaknesses by the time the threat level starts increasing. (There's also a potential turncoat NPC they have a chance to recruit right around the time things start getting serious who could fill the tank role. Provided they don't just stab him in the face when they meet him.)

Or they'll become monster chow, which can be entertaining in its own right.

If I were DMing for those guys right about now I'd be thinking about fun ways to kill them.

Laga is me. Masses of kobolds are fun.

We're playing a published adventure and I try not to change too much other than to patch over plot holes or possibly tweak things to work with character backstories. So no kobold hordes.

One of my friends says she might play if they're still lacking a meat shield after the character submission deadline, just so I don't end up killing them all horribly.

Cool!

When I'm a player I try to wait until everyone else had decided what they're playing so that I can make a character who will fit in well with the rest. I play a lot of clerics.

Sometimes I offer to round out the party, other times I have a character concept I really want to play. I generally end up gravitating to paladins and rogues, depending on what meshes better with the party.

I like fighters and rogues. I could never get my head around magic well enough to be a cleric et al. I think that stems from a DM who objected to my creative use of the Lower Water spell (he liked assigning useless spells to L1 magic users). I still say that since the human body is mostly water, the Lower Water spell is a perfectly acceptable attack method. There wasn't anything in the wording to say I couldn't (though this was nearly 40 years ago, so I think they've rewritten it), and the DM tried for 15 minutes to find a supportable reason why I couldn't do it. I insisted that all the bad guys who witnessed the results of the spell roll a Distraction test.

As much as I sometimes miss the feel of the old school (roll 3d6 in order, roll for 1st level hps and you get 2 randomly-determined spells in your spell book) game, I don't think I'd ever want to back to actually playing that way.

I do miss the unique characters that that method of character-gen created (point buy builds tend to look very cookie-cutter) but I certainly don't miss the wildly-varied power levels that could create within the same party.

I also like that the spell write-ups are a little more clear (though some do still leave room for creativity.)

What, you don't want to run the risk of dying of acne again?