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.

I see class based systems as just a short cut/guard rails for character generation.   When I was playing Shadowrun back in the day, I always preferred point buy instead of the simpler priority system because of the full control/tweaks I could make to the character.  Now that I'm much more interested in rules light systems, I don't think I'd opt for that though if I were to ever go back.  With rules light games though, most of the time whether or not its class or skill based makes much less of a difference since the mechanics/complexity is lower to begin with.  Class based still saves you a bit of time/headspace but it's not hard picking a few skills to get a blanket bonus in and a perk or three manually instead.

Quote from: JoannaGeist on Today at 06:05:02 AMConversely, I've never seen anyone manage to make a useless character in a classless system, even on purpose.

I have.  I have seen more than a few of them in Call of Cthulhu.  One common one is players that spread their skill points too thin trying to do everything and end up being bad at everything and failing all the time.  Another is people who use the point but attribute system to dump their POW stat because they don't understand what the stat does.  They start with 35 SAN and are indefinitely insane if they lose 7 SAN which doesn't take long.  when you fail 65% of SAN checks.

Quote from: yosemitemike on Today at 09:38:24 AM

Quote from: JoannaGeist on Today at 06:05:02 AMConversely, I've never seen anyone manage to make a useless character in a classless system, even on purpose.

I have.  I have seen more than a few of them in Call of Cthulhu.  One common one is players that spread their skill points too thin trying to do everything and end up being bad at everything and failing all the time.  Another is people who use the point but attribute system to dump their POW stat because they don't understand what the stat does.  They start with 35 SAN and are indefinitely insane if they lose 7 SAN which doesn't take long.  when you fail 65% of SAN checks.

Me too.  In fact, every campaign of Hero System or GURPS I have run, I had to review the characters carefully before play started--not because of power-gaming or outright cheating but because of players gimping their characters unintentionally.  It got so bad that I ended up putting together a check-list based on archetypes.  So you are a "ranger".  Did you remember to buy X, Y, and Z?

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on Today at 10:28:23 AMMe too.  In fact, every campaign of Hero System or GURPS I have run, I had to review the characters carefully before play started--not because of power-gaming or outright cheating but because of players gimping their characters unintentionally.  It got so bad that I ended up putting together a check-list based on archetypes.  So you are a "ranger".  Did you remember to buy X, Y, and Z?

I saw that quite a bit in Hero system as well.  Because of the sheer numbers of options and ways to build a character, it was easy to accidentally build a character that didn't really function or couldn't really do whatever they were supposed to do.  I saw the same thing in M&M 3e even though it's much simpler than Hero system.  Players that didn't know the system well would make a character that just didn't work.  One common problem came from the way bonuses are paired in the game.  The sum of these pairs can't exceed the game's power level+10.  Bonus to hit and damage was one of these pairs  Problems arose when a player skewed these too hard in one direction or the other.  They wound wind up with a character that hit a lot but did not damage or one that would do a ton of damage if he could hit anything. 

Another one came up in pretty much every classless system I have ever run.  It happens when a player goes into character creation without a sufficiently strong concept for the character.  They wind up with a character that is just a pile of various...stuff.  This looks good.  I'll take this.  The end result is a character where nothing meshes with anything and that doesn't really work.  A concrete example is people who don't account for what occupation they will take or how skill points for that occupation are calculated in Call of Cthulhu.  This can make a big difference in how many occupation skill points a character gets.   

I'll second the "here's your massive (100+) pile of points; buy whatever you want" issues of classless character building.

I'm going to be introducing a group to M&M3e in the near future (ostensibly to give the GM who's basically run 5e Forgotten Realms for the last three campaigns a break, but actually because it's time the group experience something other than D&D5e without stepping too far outside of their familiar d20 mechanics for their first outing).

But I am not having them build their own PCs. Half of them barely have a handle on the classes as it is. Giving them a mess of points and letting them go to town is just asking for a mess.

They're going to tell me what they want (within the parameters of the setting* I give them) and I'll build their first PC for them  and then introduce them to the point buy when it comes time for them to "level-up" (on the theory they'll then have specific things they'll want to improve.**

I'm not even going to insist on original characters (though no more than one Wolverine or Deadpool allowed... this is not a Multiverse campaign) though I will encourage original concepts if possible. This is mainly about breaking them out of the "All is 5e" mindset.

* Street-level heroes (Year-One Batman, rookie Spider-Man, Cloak&Dagger, Blade, B-list mutants) in a world where "Last Issue the Justice League-expies died saving the world, who will save us from the next threat?" and the long term campaign arc will be them growing to become those heroes.

** I'll probably build initially so a few things are slightly below the power level limits so they'll have some obvious things to improve on.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on Today at 10:28:23 AMIn fact, every campaign of Hero System or GURPS I have run, I had to review the characters carefully before play started--not because of power-gaming or outright cheating but because of players gimping their characters unintentionally.  It got so bad that I ended up putting together a check-list based on archetypes.  So you are a "ranger".  Did you remember to buy X, Y, and Z?

I also would have to review characters for Hero and GURPS, but I also think that it's a reasonable practice to review characters for almost any system - certainly for more complex ones like 3E or 5E D&D, or 2E D&D with kits. I usually review characters as part of session zero where we talk about who the party are and what they're doing.

I'd agree that character review takes more effort in Hero and GURPS compared to some systems, but they also offer more flexibility. Class systems do have merit and I've used them, but many point systems (like Hero and GURPS) clearly offer a greater variety of characters.

Chris24601 replied about this under a different thread on classes, but it makes more sense to reply here, I think:

Quote from: Chris24601 on Today at 10:56:32 AMSimilarly, by the time you've a la carte bought all the proficiencies and skill and attribute levels needed to be a competent knight... how many points do you really have left over? Again, once you add it all up, choosing to be a warrior is probably a de facto "class."

The only thing not expressly labeling those as "classes" does is leave if open for someone to try and build, say, a gish who mixes the warrior and caster traits, but doesn't actually have enough points to make it viable so they end up with something gimped. They'll learn in time, but it's a bad first impression for any system.

Alternately, the classless system just ends up with every PC converging on some sort "ideal build" as they buy up all the most useful options (in fantasy this would be the "tankmage").

That simply isn't the case. GURPS has a spectrum between IQ-emphasis and DX-emphasis that has some similarity to very broad classes, but that still offer a wider range than any other class system. Hero doesn't have the equivalent. Neither GURPS nor Hero have any single "ideal build", and they both allow for mixed spellcaster/fighter types (i.e. fighter/magic-user or Basic D&D elf) without being gished.

In practice, they can and do offer a greater possible variety of characters. Now, having more variety of PCs isn't inherently a good thing, and there can be other possible drawbacks. But I think it's plainly false to say that Hero or GURPS end up with the same thing as classes. They don't.