I think the reason classes end up in so many games is because designers play games with classes and then, well its an ouroboros. What do I think classes are good for?

1) Enforcing a setting, a world with fighters and magic users is significantly different to a game with paladins and wizards.

2) the ability to easily lock abilities away from each other to stop over powered builds

Honestly, the problem of class bloat and niche protection made me critical of the concept. Now I prefer skill-based systems where players can just build their character from scratch to reflect whatever the concept is, like arcanist, witchknight, nightmage, mystic theurge, or whatever.

Furthermore, magic-users always get more attention than martials while martials get shit. Martials can't do anything besides whack at stuff. They don't have maneuvers, martial arts, combos, stunting, etc. because some self-styled critics online said it was too "anime" and too "mmo". They can't even build strongholds or acquire followers anymore.

My players like classes because it reduces analysis paralysis. They thought they'd like full freedom to design, but found it made it really, really slow. Sometimes they couldn't decide what to do. Having even a minimum class structure really helped.

If anyone can develop any skill, you might as well allow multi-classing.  Two ways,  of trying to develop the ultimate player character.

I'm not a huge fan, of either.

It eliminates the roles, within the adventuring party.

There has to be a better way to design classes to avoid bloat. If classes are supposed to serve particular roles, then the rules should focus on that mechanically and then leave the fluff in the hands of the player.

For example, Pathfinder introduced an inquisitor class that is basically an urban equivalent of the ranger. It even has an equivalent of favored enemy for analyzing whatever is being inquired.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on December 25, 2024, 10:00:21 AMThere has to be a better way to design classes to avoid bloat. If classes are supposed to serve particular roles, then the rules should focus on that mechanically and then leave the fluff in the hands of the player.

For example, Pathfinder introduced an inquisitor class that is basically an urban equivalent of the ranger. It even has an equivalent of favored enemy for analyzing whatever is being inquired.

The solution I had to that in my system was to effectively break the classes up into a couple of discreet chunks; what I ended up labeling the background, class, and path.

Background supplied all the non-combat abilities such as skills and other abilities that a D&D style class would have; Arcanist, Aristocrat, Artisan, Barbarian, Commoner, Entertainer, Military, Outlaw, Religious, and Traveler.

Class was the broad strokes of how the character fights; Berserker, Ironclad, Mastermind, Skirmisher, Mage, Mechanist, and Mystic.

Paths were specific roles in combat the classes could select; Brigand, Captain, Defender, Disabler, Ravager, Sentinel, and Striker for the fighting classes, and Abjurer, Benedictor, Empowered, Interdictor, Maledictor, Manifester, and Summoner for the casting classes.

Most advancement came from gaining boons from your background list and talents from your class list. Multi-classing came from being able to choose up to one boon and one talent per tier (levels 1-5, 6-10, 11-15) from a different class' or background's list.

This fits with my belief that classes are most useful as discreet data chunks that make it faster to build a character than a point buy approach. It also limits the tendency towards "tankmage" that I see in many skill and point-buy based games where, despite initially having different specialties, as the points accrue the PCs all converge upon having the most useful attacks, defenses, and utilities as required by the campaign (the fragile speedsters in M&M eventually pick up things like defensive roll to give them some toughness, the tanks pick up improved parrying so they're not relying solely on their toughness).

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 25, 2024, 11:04:33 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on December 25, 2024, 10:00:21 AMThere has to be a better way to design classes to avoid bloat. If classes are supposed to serve particular roles, then the rules should focus on that mechanically and then leave the fluff in the hands of the player.

For example, Pathfinder introduced an inquisitor class that is basically an urban equivalent of the ranger. It even has an equivalent of favored enemy for analyzing whatever is being inquired.

The solution I had to that in my system was to effectively break the classes up into a couple of discreet chunks; what I ended up labeling the background, class, and path.

Background supplied all the non-combat abilities such as skills and other abilities that a D&D style class would have; Arcanist, Aristocrat, Artisan, Barbarian, Commoner, Entertainer, Military, Outlaw, Religious, and Traveler.

Class was the broad strokes of how the character fights; Berserker, Ironclad, Mastermind, Skirmisher, Mage, Mechanist, and Mystic.

Paths were specific roles in combat the classes could select; Brigand, Captain, Defender, Disabler, Ravager, Sentinel, and Striker for the fighting classes, and Abjurer, Benedictor, Empowered, Interdictor, Maledictor, Manifester, and Summoner for the casting classes.

Most advancement came from gaining boons from your background list and talents from your class list. Multi-classing came from being able to choose up to one boon and one talent per tier (levels 1-5, 6-10, 11-15) from a different class' or background's list.

This fits with my belief that classes are most useful as discreet data chunks that make it faster to build a character than a point buy approach. It also limits the tendency towards "tankmage" that I see in many skill and point-buy based games where, despite initially having different specialties, as the points accrue the PCs all converge upon having the most useful attacks, defenses, and utilities as required by the campaign (the fragile speedsters in M&M eventually pick up things like defensive roll to give them some toughness, the tanks pick up improved parrying so they're not relying solely on their toughness).

Greetings!

Good stuff, Chris! Hey, and I hope you are having a wonderful and blessed Christmas!

Concerning Character Classes, roles, and such within the campaign, I agree very much. I often bristle at the "Skill-Based" people that crow about "Skill-Based" is superior to the primitive and silly "Class-Based" approach.

As I well recall, I played Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay for *years* GMing and so on, of course. WFRP was a very fun game, innovative and cool. However, the whole "Skill-Based" thing really isn't all that and a bag of chips. I get that some folks just enjoy the preference, which is fine, but there is nothing "Primitive and Silly" about "Class-Based" games. Running WHFRP for several long campaigns, eventually, ALL of the Characters gain enough careers, max out the sweet skills, and all become essentially the same character, with the same skills and abilities. They just started out along a different road to get there, but they all end up with the virtually same character profile. Spellcasters in WHFRP being somewhat standing apart, as it requires a huge devotion of time and experience to develop the spell abilities, hence the spellcaster's lack of all of the uber skills and abilities. Otherwise, all the characters are the same at the end of the day.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: SHARK on December 25, 2024, 04:38:15 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 25, 2024, 11:04:33 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on December 25, 2024, 10:00:21 AMThere has to be a better way to design classes to avoid bloat. If classes are supposed to serve particular roles, then the rules should focus on that mechanically and then leave the fluff in the hands of the player.

For example, Pathfinder introduced an inquisitor class that is basically an urban equivalent of the ranger. It even has an equivalent of favored enemy for analyzing whatever is being inquired.

The solution I had to that in my system was to effectively break the classes up into a couple of discreet chunks; what I ended up labeling the background, class, and path.

Background supplied all the non-combat abilities such as skills and other abilities that a D&D style class would have; Arcanist, Aristocrat, Artisan, Barbarian, Commoner, Entertainer, Military, Outlaw, Religious, and Traveler.

Class was the broad strokes of how the character fights; Berserker, Ironclad, Mastermind, Skirmisher, Mage, Mechanist, and Mystic.

Paths were specific roles in combat the classes could select; Brigand, Captain, Defender, Disabler, Ravager, Sentinel, and Striker for the fighting classes, and Abjurer, Benedictor, Empowered, Interdictor, Maledictor, Manifester, and Summoner for the casting classes.

Most advancement came from gaining boons from your background list and talents from your class list. Multi-classing came from being able to choose up to one boon and one talent per tier (levels 1-5, 6-10, 11-15) from a different class' or background's list.

This fits with my belief that classes are most useful as discreet data chunks that make it faster to build a character than a point buy approach. It also limits the tendency towards "tankmage" that I see in many skill and point-buy based games where, despite initially having different specialties, as the points accrue the PCs all converge upon having the most useful attacks, defenses, and utilities as required by the campaign (the fragile speedsters in M&M eventually pick up things like defensive roll to give them some toughness, the tanks pick up improved parrying so they're not relying solely on their toughness).

Greetings!

Good stuff, Chris! Hey, and I hope you are having a wonderful and blessed Christmas!

Concerning Character Classes, roles, and such within the campaign, I agree very much. I often bristle at the "Skill-Based" people that crow about "Skill-Based" is superior to the primitive and silly "Class-Based" approach.

As I well recall, I played Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay for *years* GMing and so on, of course. WFRP was a very fun game, innovative and cool. However, the whole "Skill-Based" thing really isn't all that and a bag of chips. I get that some folks just enjoy the preference, which is fine, but there is nothing "Primitive and Silly" about "Class-Based" games. Running WHFRP for several long campaigns, eventually, ALL of the Characters gain enough careers, max out the sweet skills, and all become essentially the same character, with the same skills and abilities. They just started out along a different road to get there, but they all end up with the virtually same character profile. Spellcasters in WHFRP being somewhat standing apart, as it requires a huge devotion of time and experience to develop the spell abilities, hence the spellcaster's lack of all of the uber skills and abilities. Otherwise, all the characters are the same at the end of the day.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

One thing I've learned from the experience is that when you're actually building a claas system, if you want meaningful choices in your classes you want to start building for a very tight 4E style balance, THEN, once you have that, you have a solid framework for your classes to break from in meaningful ways.

As an example, character resources (mana, spell points, manuever points, whatever) were very easy to give meaningful differences to once you have a baseline to break from. Mages, for example build up power by drawing energy from the Arcane Web, which ebbs and flows so they make a check each turn for how much power they can draw. Some rounds it's better than the balance, other rounds its worse, but it means sometimes they can pull of chain of powerful spells, other times not much more than basic ones.

By contrast, the Mechanist gets all their power during rests which they pre-spend on their devices' effects. Because I know about how much power is consumed on average in a typical encounter I know how much power overall they will need (plus a little extra since some of their prepared effects may not be the best fit for what they run into.

Meanwhile, Skirmishers build up "momentum" by employing their particular path special abilities, allowing them to pull off stunts they wouldn't be able to against opponents they hadn't been pressuring with their set up moves.

All of these use the same basic power structure on average, but each has its own ebbs and flows to make them distinct from each other.

The way 4e handled classes is widely hated, but I think the idea of having distinct roles, power sources and so on makes sense. Even if the implementation was bizarre and arbitrary from a fluff perspective, the intention to reduce class bloat is a good one.

The way to avoid class bloat is to simply not create new classes for every little niche and specialty under the sun. Is your character a soldier?,a gladiator?,a berserker?,a knight? Great! Your character is a FIGHTER. All of those other descriptors can be done as different background packages or something. A special class isn't needed for every character concept.   

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on December 24, 2024, 01:10:41 PMFurthermore, magic-users always get more attention than martials while martials get shit. Martials can't do anything besides whack at stuff. They don't have maneuvers, martial arts, combos, stunting, etc. because some self-styled critics online said it was too "anime" and too "mmo". They can't even build strongholds or acquire followers anymore.

And then you have a game like L5R where the Bushi get plenty of options to keep them flavorful and varied.

I'm reading Monster of the Week right now. It has classes but calls them "playbooks". It has terrible class bloat. There's lots of fuzzy definitions, redundancy, overly niche concepts, etc. The whole list would be better represented using a skill-based system with advantages and disadvantages taken at character creation to suit the character's concept.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on December 24, 2024, 01:10:41 PMHonestly, the problem of class bloat and niche protection made me critical of the concept. Now I prefer skill-based systems where players can just build their character from scratch to reflect whatever the concept is, like arcanist, witchknight, nightmage, mystic theurge, or whatever.

I have found that even skill based games benefit from having a selection of 'Archetypes' like StarWars d6, that have a certain amount of points already pre-spent, (with free form advancement afterwards) to be a much better way to get players into a given game.

But it does need to be done right.

Quote from: Tod13 on December 24, 2024, 04:17:32 PMMy players like classes because it reduces analysis paralysis. They thought they'd like full freedom to design, but found it made it really, really slow. Sometimes they couldn't decide what to do. Having even a minimum class structure really helped.

Very this. I've lost track of the number of players who actively dislike games like gurps.

When I published my own book way back the approach I went with was something in the middle.

You choose a core profession that gives you some starting skills and they cost less to rank up. And from there you can do as you please. The player had a basic frame they can build off of rather than spending sometimes hours or days trying to settle on the exact same thing.

So player A might start as a knight and be proficient in heavy armour, but might not be as proficient as the bard who started training into heavy armour and trained longer than the knight. Though the bard is likely slacking off on their actual barding to pull that off. But it can be pulled off.

Early Shadowrun had a similar ideal. You had the archetypes and you could branch out into some of the other styles. Or you could go freeform and build whatever.

Quote from: Exploderwizard on December 26, 2024, 02:49:39 PMThe way to avoid class bloat is to simply not create new classes for every little niche and specialty under the sun. Is your character a soldier?,a gladiator?,a berserker?,a knight? Great! Your character is a FIGHTER. All of those other descriptors can be done as different background packages or something. A special class isn't needed for every character concept.   

Greetings!

Excellent stuff my friend! I suppose there *is* a certain allure to embracing yet another specialized Character Class. I think there is a strong argument for the traditional "Generalist"--the classic FIGHTER. However, having said that, just having a generic FIGHTER that somehow embraces a whole host of archetypal Fighting Men, Warriors, Soldiers, and various Martial Champions is somehow not viewed as being very sexy or attractive. I admit, I am something of two minds about this, so at the risk of dancing along the line of hypocrisy, I rebuke it. There *are* merits and attraction points to having all kinds of uber specialized Character Classes. There are. However, to see the greater wisdom requires some measure of sacrifice. Embracing a generic FIGHTER is at the end of the day, mostly sufficient. Beyond such considerations of sufficiency, for the "Greater Good"--it steadfastly blocks off the otherwise inevitable growth and profusion of class bloat, and a kind of endless death-spiral of ever-increasing Character Powers, all of which are instituted to engage Player interest, but also the design demand to differentiate from whatever Character Classes established previously.

This is where I think there is merit to having skills, talents, background packages, feats, whatever. Most of the archetypal warriors are flavoured differently by their culture, armour, weapons, and to some extent, weapon and fighting techniques, style, and tactics. All of which can be modelled through such elements as skills, feats, talents, background packages, cultural lores, and so on. Vikings, Legionnares, Samurai, Imperial Chinese Soldiers, Mongolian Horsemen, Byzantine Cataphracts, are after all, all FIGHTERS. As an philosophical aside, yes, they are all Fighters, but they aren't all each other. So, there are some differentiation required and desirable. That differentiation can be accomplished through the previously noted elements, instead of making up yet another specialized Character Class. "All Vikings are FIGHTERS, but not all FIGHTERS are Vikings." That nice philosophical tidbit is useful here I think, and appropriate.

I agree though, the solution to that is not creating more and more specialized Character Classes.

Having "Class Bloat" blows the doors open in the campaign for a cascading effect of increasingly difficult problems and dynamics that really are a mess. I think that additional Character Classes can be fine, but they need to be carefully considered and carefully designed, and have legitimate distinctions from other classes. A kind of corollary to this is that by actually *limiting* how many Character Classes you create, there is actually more "Design Space" present in which to make an effective and interesting new Character Class, without constantly blurring the distinctions with other Character Classes.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK