Quote from: jhkim on February 04, 2025, 01:24:23 PMIf you really want simple character creation, then for any system the easiest is just to have a bunch of pregen characters. Then the player just picks which pregen they want - like in Marvel Superheroes, Shadowrun, or many other RPGs. If you want players to just pick an archetype and use it, then this is the way to go.

you can have pregens for a class based system too. The last page of almost every AD&D and D&D module have a few.

As someone who had to take a lot of math classes for my engineering degree, I have never been detoured by math in a game, and I even struggle to grasp just how much other people might struggle with or dislike math because it has always come naturally to me.

I really truly don't know whether classless or class systems in general have harder math to make characters.  I can see both easy and hard systems existing for both styles of games.

One dynamic that may not have been addressed (I apologize but I do kinda skim threads if it seems like a lot of banter happens), is someone who is not entirely familiar with RPGs in general or the specific RPG that the character is being made for, in a classless system that person may build a character that ends up being effective at things that are not important, and ineffective at important things.  Where as with a class system, there should at least be, within that game, pre-defined avenues of effectiveness or niches so it can be harder to build/make a character that may serve no purpose.

Of course if you're playing with friends and just having fun, your friends probably can go along with the joke of you having a useless character that is trying your best to get by. But that is something I don't expect new players to try doing.

Quote from: blackstone on February 04, 2025, 01:29:29 PM

Quote from: jhkim on February 04, 2025, 01:24:23 PMIf you really want simple character creation, then for any system the easiest is just to have a bunch of pregen characters. Then the player just picks which pregen they want - like in Marvel Superheroes, Shadowrun, or many other RPGs. If you want players to just pick an archetype and use it, then this is the way to go.

you can have pregens for a class based system too. The last page of almost every AD&D and D&D module have a few.

Agreed. When I said "any system", I meant both class-based and classless. The 3E Basic Set had pregen characters, for example.

The third edition Unearthed Arcana had some interesting rules for generic classes, races-as-classes, and gestalt classes (2 classes at once).

Quote from: jordane1964 on February 04, 2025, 11:42:16 PMThe third edition Unearthed Arcana had some interesting rules for generic classes, races-as-classes, and gestalt classes (2 classes at once).

Unfortunately, their main result when used was to make a complicated game even more so, particularly as the levels went up.  I ran a full-own campaign using all those rules up to about level 11-13, and it almost killed me.

Quote from: jordane1964 on February 04, 2025, 11:42:16 PMThe third edition Unearthed Arcana had some interesting rules for generic classes, races-as-classes, and gestalt classes (2 classes at once).

While I favor class systems exclusively, I'm not a huge fan of most multiclass/dual class/gestalt things.  If you are creating a character in a class-based game, you have the soft expectation that you can either bring an existing concept and choose which class matches it closest, or look through the classes and use one as a starting idea for a character, and that the resulting character will be ok for whatever time you spend in that pretend world.  When you add the ability to stack classes (especially if it's multiple ways to do so) you are inevitably creating a much greater imbalance between the best and the worst than you had in your inevitably-unbalanced initial class system.  Gestalt in particular makes it tough because many combos are total poop compared to others.

So now the guy that walks in with an extant idea now has to do more research to do it "right"- usually including "how exactly powerful are all the other PCs, so I land in the right area?".  And the guy who goes through classes and thinks "that sounds neat" is usually hosed, because you'll have some class like monk which grabs him right away, but actually you should be building some gestalt bit that dosen't really involve monk at all to be what the monk is.

Basically ideas like that have the intention of "pick two things, now you're a third thing that is both of those in some fashion" but in practice the designers almost never have the foresight to test most or even many of those and that then steps on top of the original design completely.

Much better to stick with some set of classes and then use houserules to fix any imbalance that actually matters at your table (or that you think might, if it's your first time- you can always adjust later). 

Quote from: Banjo Destructo on February 04, 2025, 01:49:31 PMAs someone who had to take a lot of math classes for my engineering degree, I have never been detoured by math in a game, and I even struggle to grasp just how much other people might struggle with or dislike math because it has always come naturally to me.

I really truly don't know whether classless or class systems in general have harder math to make characters.  I can see both easy and hard systems existing for both styles of games.

One dynamic that may not have been addressed (I apologize but I do kinda skim threads if it seems like a lot of banter happens), is someone who is not entirely familiar with RPGs in general or the specific RPG that the character is being made for, in a classless system that person may build a character that ends up being effective at things that are not important, and ineffective at important things.  Where as with a class system, there should at least be, within that game, pre-defined avenues of effectiveness or niches so it can be harder to build/make a character that may serve no purpose.

Of course if you're playing with friends and just having fun, your friends probably can go along with the joke of you having a useless character that is trying your best to get by. But that is something I don't expect new players to try doing.

Well that's ironic. It's extremely easy to make a dud in a class system, for example you can just write down fighter, monk, soul knife or truenamer. Conversely, I've never seen anyone manage to make a useless character in a classless system, even on purpose. This is perhaps their primary advantage. When you're using a preset package of powers (which is all a class is), you're depending on the designers to understand their own game at all, and then to understand it well enough to know which abilities are roughly equivalent, which abilities are useful to a particular archetype, and which abilities complement each other.

And that's why one class gets ninth level spells, and the other gets +1 to attack rolls and a feat.

Of course, incompetent designers aren't rare, and neither are they uniquely prevalent in one type of game. There surely are bad classless systems where "know what music butterflies prefer" has the same cost as "summon the actual Devil and command him permanently." I just haven't had the bad fortune to encounter one, whereas bad class based systems are the dominant systems in the hobby.