Quote from: Thor's Nads on December 02, 2024, 03:05:59 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on December 02, 2024, 01:57:15 PMUltimately, all classes can be boiled down into anal retentive variations of fighter, thief, mage and priest.

You could argue, and I do, that there are only two classes: fighting-men and magic-users. Everything else is just variants of these.

I think there's a bit more than that, here's my list:

physical combat specialist (fighter)
athletics specialist (run, jump swim, climb, lift, etc etc etc)
stealth specialist
lore specialist
social specialist
protector
artillery (usually magic)
battlefield control  (usually magic, but also warlord)

All of these, even the fighter and mage, are dependent on having mechanics and setting where they are needed.  If you're playing orc with a pie in a box, most will have no role.  And if you're playing a stealth game where winning is getting the McGuffin without being noticed, then all you need is the stealth specialist.

Quote from: Orphan81 on December 02, 2024, 12:57:19 PMGoing from a strictly Dungeons and Dragons and the typical classes (Which means No Artificers/Gadgteers) I think making real interesting variations of "Rangers" is probably challenging.

Ranger already comes off as a specialized Fighter... but if you veer in certain directions with it you'll start stepping on the toes of Barbarians and Druids in the "I'm a guy who likes wild places too."

The only obvious things that come to mind when doing specializations for them is really honing in on one type of enemy like "I'm an Undead Hunter" or "I'm a Giant Hunter" but if your Ranger can't do that out of the box, then what's the point of even having a favored enemy to begin with?

Yeah definitely. The lightly equipped scout/raider/commando/skirmisher/huntsman is not only a valid archetype, but an immensely popular one across mediums. D&D has a problem with the things that archetype should be able to do being scattered across Fighter, Ranger, Barbarian and Rogue.

Quote from: yosemitemike on December 02, 2024, 09:22:15 AMThe problem with artificer type characters is that most of the people who play that kind of character are forever trying to create this or that gadget to give the character an ever expanding list of free new abilities.  My clockwork thing can fly and gunpowder exists so I want to make a bunch of bomb drones.  I want to make a things that blows flour to reveal invisible enemies.  The only way to really deal with this is to draw a hard line and say, "No".  If it's a class based system, you can do what the class description says you can do.  If it's a points based system, you can do that if you spend the points to get that ability.  Otherwise, no.  No ever expanding list of free abilities through tinkering.  If there's a generic tinker ability that lets the character create undefined gadgets to do...stuff then I just don't allow it at all.  That sort of thing is just a constant headache and waste of time.

.   

I'm not going to say thats not an issue that can come up but what you are butting up against is an older problem. The problem you are describing is the same problem you sometimes find in any game where players make spells. The player says they want to create a new spell and the spell the player wants to make A spell that solves some issue they particularly don't like.
And the same answer that has been used since the beginning of dnd still aplyes you are makeing a new ability here are the rules we are working under and move from there

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on December 02, 2024, 12:16:54 PMI would say that class bloat combined with niche protection makes it harder to design class features without becoming anal retentive about it. A lot of the D&D classes arose as game conventions rather than being modeled after well defined literary archetypes. So their concepts get increasingly anal retentive and self-referential to justify their existence, when a good world builder would nix most of them.

For example, the sorcerer was added in third edition to introduce the new spontaneous casting rules. As of 5e, the preparation and spontaneous casting mechanics are barely distinguished, so the sorcerer doesn't have much reason to exist as a separate class anymore.

4e's introduction of roles and power sources is a better way to handle things and avoid redundancy. So naturally it was thrown out with the bathwater.

Personally I've started to think the secret is to not have niche protection and accept that some characters will manage to cover a bigger chunk of the imaginary pie then another but that usually comes at a cost or trade off of some kind. To use a simple example it's the "how do you respond to the red mage?" question. In case anyone reading doesn't know what that is A final fantasy red mage can cast both white (heals/basic buffs)and black magic (elemental damage) as well as use small shields and melee about on par with the rogue. To me I don't see a problem because that character will be spread thin if they try and do every thing. There will be holes in what they can do even withing there off the paper skill set. A simple example of that is did the player prioritize white or black magic in there spell selection?
On the topic of 4E something I heard recently I think apply to 4E very well. The problem with DnD is that no matter what they do they are stuck with certain baggage and if they get to far away from that baggage and what it does people will complain and let them know. So 4E can be a good game with legitimate problems that strayed to far from the core DnD formula and then in the fallow up edition 5E they moved back in the traditional direction.

Quote from: Orphan81 on December 02, 2024, 12:57:19 PMGoing from a strictly Dungeons and Dragons and the typical classes (Which means No Artificers/Gadgteers) I think making real interesting variations of "Rangers" is probably challenging.

Ranger already comes off as a specialized Fighter... but if you veer in certain directions with it you'll start stepping on the toes of Barbarians and Druids in the "I'm a guy who likes wild places too."

The only obvious things that come to mind when doing specializations for them is really honing in on one type of enemy like "I'm an Undead Hunter" or "I'm a Giant Hunter" but if your Ranger can't do that out of the box, then what's the point of even having a favored enemy to begin with?

Well I came in to roleplaying from video games forwards in to paper rpgs so the first thing that I notice is that they tend to be the default distance physical damage dealer. particularly given that most games that have them seems to lack archer or hunter classes. I will also agree that favored enemy can be a bit odd to deal with when some of the more out side the box options are taken.
I suppose it could be argued that the I hate giants and am a giant hunter is A bit odd if the unspoken rule is don't try hunting them before level 4 or 5.

Quote from: Thor's Nads on December 02, 2024, 03:05:59 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on December 02, 2024, 01:57:15 PMUltimately, all classes can be boiled down into anal retentive variations of fighter, thief, mage and priest.

You could argue, and I do, that there are only two classes: fighting-men and magic-users. Everything else is just variants of these.

I think much of the game; can be summed up within Physical, Mental, and Social skills / abilities / specialties etc.  At least from a very basic perspective.  Strong or fast, intelligent or wise, persuasive or manipulative, etc.

Quote from: ForgottenF on December 02, 2024, 06:50:19 PM

Quote from: Orphan81 on December 02, 2024, 12:57:19 PMGoing from a strictly Dungeons and Dragons and the typical classes (Which means No Artificers/Gadgteers) I think making real interesting variations of "Rangers" is probably challenging.

Ranger already comes off as a specialized Fighter... but if you veer in certain directions with it you'll start stepping on the toes of Barbarians and Druids in the "I'm a guy who likes wild places too."

The only obvious things that come to mind when doing specializations for them is really honing in on one type of enemy like "I'm an Undead Hunter" or "I'm a Giant Hunter" but if your Ranger can't do that out of the box, then what's the point of even having a favored enemy to begin with?

Yeah definitely. The lightly equipped scout/raider/commando/skirmisher/huntsman is not only a valid archetype, but an immensely popular one across mediums. D&D has a problem with the things that archetype should be able to do being scattered across Fighter, Ranger, Barbarian and Rogue.

The hardest part about designing a ranger is that there are a lot of different views on what it ought to be.  Rangers have varied quite a lot over the various editions, so referring to rpg history isn't as helpful as it ought to be. 

Referring to the skill list for my game, here's what I would pick as core for a "ranger":
  Bow
  Spear
  Navigation
  Stealth
  Track
  Survival (find food, water, shelter, heat, etc)

Others will certainly have a different view

Favored enemy, should be level appropriate.  No level 10 enemies, for a level 3 character.  That's a Wipeout, waiting to happen.

Quote from: Darrin Kelley on November 26, 2024, 06:39:59 PMMentalists, telepaths. They have always been a very difficult thing to handle in superhero games and elsewhere. They present untold problems for a GM.

Small digression into the Telepath archetype and how I handle it...

I love telepaths in my games (supers or otherwise). There is an inversion impulse for GM's to feel that secrets aren't meant to be known. The whole point of being a telepath, adjusted for genre, is to *be* the guy that knows. I love indulging players in that power - because they begin to realize that some of that stuff is *heavy* and can't be dealt with on their own. "Oh shit... the Duke is actually a fucking demon-worshipper cult-leader... and oh shit... I think he knows I know because HE'S A TELAPATH TOO..."

A big part of this is that I don't let telepaths be these lone outliers with those abilities. They exist in a continuum of other telepaths - and maybe it's just an environment they can access that has its own set of rules. For instance, being a telepath in the Marvel universe means you're rubbing up shoulders against some real heavyweights: Professor X, Emma Frost, Jean Grey (when she's not batshit crazy), Cassandra Nova etc. not counting the all the b-tier telepaths out there, and they share the Astral Plane as a medium of congress with one another. Then consider the *monsters* that dwell there: Shadow King, all the fucking Demons and occult monsters sensitive to psychic phenomenon. Which of course crosses paths potentially with magical folks.

The issue of reading minds is powerful and it should be. But also consider most people don't *think* in terms of how we write words down. They think in chunks of impulses. We want to pretend that its well ordered, but most people don't think like that. It's like opening a box of cats and car-horns of thoughts and ideas. Intelligent people with high willpower might have more cohesive thoughts "well ordered minds", and I try to reflect that.

What it comes down to is I make it so that telepaths are their own secret society of people that can lift a veil into a realm that everyone touches but are ignorant of. But the deeper they dive into it, the more scary it is and it becomes almost a burden to know that they are small-fish in a very large very deep sea. Reading minds? pfft, that's the easy stuff. Dealing with being one of those "special people" in context of the setting - that's much scarier.

I generally feel this way about most "archetypes". Archetypes only exist contextual to their setting. There is no Gadgeteer archetype in my Caveman Magical Pleistocene setting for instance. So if it exists, the setting supports it fully... otherwise it wouldn't exist. Most of the considerations are cosmetic issues that you need to give mechanical support to in order for a player to have fun. But that's a system choice. It's also one of the reasons I use my current system of choice (blah blah blah you know what I'm gonna say, heh.)

To your point - I've seen may GM's say the same thing about Telepathy. In fact I had a GM crater our Rifts campaign literally in the first scene, because I was playing a Telepath that mind-read his superior officer (I was playing a Coalition Psi-Stalker) and it turned out they were a demon in disguise and his "big baddie". To him, I effectively ruined the whole game. Yes he was a novice GM, but he got really pissed and insisted I was "mind-raping" everyone.

Which is funny, because I literally only tried it with one NPC, and it happened to be the Big Baddy in disguise. But I've seen other GM's say similar things about telepath players.

It's funny to me because most well known telepaths in fiction do actually surface read people unless they have moral prohibitions against it (understandably). But from a GM perspective, in this case above... what could I even DO about it? To me that's where the real game is.

Quote from: Thor's Nads on December 02, 2024, 03:05:59 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on December 02, 2024, 01:57:15 PMUltimately, all classes can be boiled down into anal retentive variations of fighter, thief, mage and priest.

You could argue, and I do, that there are only two classes: fighting-men and magic-users. Everything else is just variants of these.

I would broadly agree with you. Skill-monkeys can easily be replaced by spellcasters. You're either stabbing/shooting stuff or you're waving miraculous hocus-pocus at problems.

The rubber hits the road with the setting and system backing up the gameplay.

Interesting thread, i have lately been thinking of this as well. I really believe that Druids are hard to create for. There are almost no resources about them that i can find.

Quote from: radio_thief on December 03, 2024, 11:27:00 AMInteresting thread, i have lately been thinking of this as well. I really believe that Druids are hard to create for. There are almost no resources about them that i can find.

That's largely because they were really just the Celtic priestly class and a lot of their aspects were spun off into our traditions of wizards (ex. Merlin).

Realistically, they should have just been a culture specific version of the cleric and/or wizard; maybe with some setting specific alternate rules (ex. Druidism was an oral tradition; one of the main reasons we only have second-hand written accounts; so spellbook-based spell prep doesn't make sense for them if you were presenting them as wizards).

Relatedly, the actual bards (vs. troubadours) were associated with the same culture as individuals who memorized and repeated the oral traditions.

Really, there's a whole chunk of the WotC-era traditional classes that should really just be culture-specific fighters (barbarian), rogues (ranger), clerics (druid), and wizards (bard) tailored for a less civilized and centralized setting.

What several of you are discussing about context and setting also applies within the class to class design.

For example, however difficult rangers and/or druids are to design within a given set of rules and settings, each one is harder to design when the other is present.  It's only marginally harder, because they don't completely overlap in the D&D mindset, but there is still some overlap.  I've felt for years that in D&D 3E for example, the ranger would have been better served as a fighter/druid hybrid (with a slightly more focused druid).  Perhaps with the "ranger" name then repurposed for something between the fighter and rogue, with no magic.

You get the same effect sometimes with D&D paladin and cleric, though the paladin special abilities and lack of weapon restrictions makes it seem less than it is.  It becomes really apparent when designing in a different system, which is why sometimes you see the equivalent of a robe-wearing priest paired with a paladin, which makes it easier.

But yeah, it's all pointless unless the mechanics of the system support the distinctions the classes are built around.  That cuts on both extremes, too.  If the mechanics are all but missing, then the class distinctions don't mean much.  But if the mechanics are nigh universal, it's also an issue.  That's the whole problem with fighters in 3E--too many other ways for everyone else to excel at fighting, with the fighter defined as only that.  To make that work, either drop some of the other classes, or redesign the fighter to have a broader niche. 

The "problem" with Fighters in 3e are that, setting aside, the mechanics for being a Fighter are painful when spellcasters are breaking the system left and right.

The goal of 3e was to give non-casters options in terms of their development and progression. The problem is that non-casters are taxed and nickel-and-dimed in order to do a single mode of play "decently". It doesn't feel good to make piddly progression that demands itemization to make up the difference.

What should have happened is that Feats should be much beefier. There should be means to acquire Feats outside of level-progression (which is mentioned in the 3e DMG but everyone pretends it's not there) and the GM should set the tone of what he wants from his Fighters (and non-casters in general) customized to the setting.

Fighters in 3e are half-trick ponies. Still my favorite class.

Quote from: ForgottenF on December 02, 2024, 06:50:19 PM

Quote from: Orphan81 on December 02, 2024, 12:57:19 PMGoing from a strictly Dungeons and Dragons and the typical classes (Which means No Artificers/Gadgteers) I think making real interesting variations of "Rangers" is probably challenging.

Ranger already comes off as a specialized Fighter... but if you veer in certain directions with it you'll start stepping on the toes of Barbarians and Druids in the "I'm a guy who likes wild places too."

The only obvious things that come to mind when doing specializations for them is really honing in on one type of enemy like "I'm an Undead Hunter" or "I'm a Giant Hunter" but if your Ranger can't do that out of the box, then what's the point of even having a favored enemy to begin with?

Yeah definitely. The lightly equipped scout/raider/commando/skirmisher/huntsman is not only a valid archetype, but an immensely popular one across mediums. D&D has a problem with the things that archetype should be able to do being scattered across Fighter, Ranger, Barbarian and Rogue.

Well I can speak to a small extent on the scout aspect of D&D at least in 3.x. Basicly in 3.x there tends to be a lack of movement abilitys in general.  One of the few non spell abilitys I can think of is spring attack. The second thought is the bonus damage that the "scout" class gets for moveing every turn it attacks (if memory serves the condition is met by taking a five foot step).
To be honest the lack of a default hunter is a bit odd. Any way one of the things D&D seems to miss is that for players to strike and evade threw movement you need to have that option either in the rules at baseline or for there to be ability that enable it. The part I find baffling is that there's so little to enable that in any way. One of the few things that I can think of in 3.x specifically is spring attack and shot on the run. Both are gate kept behind at 2 and 3 other feats and +4 bab. They clearly knew that being able to move attack move was a powerful ability but locked it behind a fairly steep tax. A similar problem is in the lack of ability's that increase your move speed. If every thing have the same or near the same list movement you can never out run an opponent. Melee attacks need to be able to gap close but you also need to be able avoid being pined in to melee by default. DnD kind has had this problem where they don't want to give movement boosts even short term ones but movement at least in battle map games is one of the most powerful basic ability's.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 03, 2024, 12:38:15 PM

Quote from: radio_thief on December 03, 2024, 11:27:00 AMInteresting thread, i have lately been thinking of this as well. I really believe that Druids are hard to create for. There are almost no resources about them that i can find.

That's largely because they were really just the Celtic priestly class and a lot of their aspects were spun off into our traditions of wizards (ex. Merlin).

Realistically, they should have just been a culture specific version of the cleric and/or wizard; maybe with some setting specific alternate rules (ex. Druidism was an oral tradition; one of the main reasons we only have second-hand written accounts; so spellbook-based spell prep doesn't make sense for them if you were presenting them as wizards).

Relatedly, the actual bards (vs. troubadours) were associated with the same culture as individuals who memorized and repeated the oral traditions.

Really, there's a whole chunk of the WotC-era traditional classes that should really just be culture-specific fighters (barbarian), rogues (ranger), clerics (druid), and wizards (bard) tailored for a less civilized and centralized setting.

Well in the  Druids case the first question you kind of end up asking is "what games  Druid?"  And from there you kind of have a direction to go in. the reason being that  Druids are surprisingly inconsistent class in what they can do in a given system. So I'm thinking of  3 different druids when I type this with 3 different origins  DnD's Druid WoWs druid and log horizons Druid.(not this is one table top rpg one video game rpg and one literary rpg)
Now the most basic example right off the top is how is the concept of the druid changing there shape is handled.
In standard DnD its generally limited to normal animals and tends to be an anti spell casting choice.
In WoW its in but includes ability's like the moonkin form that expressly makes spells stronger .
In log horizon it doesn't exist they are expressly part of the priest classes and can not shape change at all but does get spirit pet summons.
And you are right a big reason for this is that it was an oral tradition so there are holes in the record all of this is based on.
Though I will partially disagree with you in that all of these classes are just regional variation on stock classes.
The prime example in my mind is the number of traveling musician that I have met and listened to in my life. Some of them even still tell stories and sing songs that are based in things that really happened.
In meany ways the traveling musician or singer is kind of universal its just that wotc era dnd had a given version of that idea.
The barbarian is defiantly more setting flavored but that seems to have been that they where unwilling to make the barbarian in to a straight berzerker (A change that meany other propertys make use of).