Zornhau Forums

That's kind of the way Savage Worlds does things to a degree, but honestly I don't see it as that big of an issue for the type of game being played.

The thing about Old-School D&D is that it's not meant to model heroic fantasy. It's not really meant for courtly intrigue and politics. It's not even meant for Tolkienesq quests to save the world. If you read the kind of stuff they were referencing back then, the kinds of material they were writing back then, the way things seemed to be focused, the game was very specifically about the kind of conan-esq "go into the wilderness or haunted ruins in order to overcome challenges and get rich" thing. Gygax himself mentions that they only really added in elves and hobbits to cash into the Middle Earth craze that blew up in the 70s. Otherwise, the game would read a lot more like Howard write it than JRRT.

So for the purposes of explore-the-dungeon fantasy, broad archetypes are pretty useful. Particularly in an era before skills existing. Your class role is generally secondary to the choices you as the player make in trying to outwit and overcome the obstacles ahead of you. This is particularly true if you look at combat as a fail-state.

The game does not incentivize combat. Right up until AD&D2e, the overwhelming majority of your XP came from retrieving gold and treasure. If you're playing to your incentives, you want to avoid combat and danger as much as possible because it drains your resources. Thus, your class abilities generally come up primarily because something went wrong. If the fighter is rolling an attack, the cleric using their healing and protection spells, the magic user casting something, or the thief having to disarm something, it means you've already exhausted your better options. This is also why traps and puzzles were so popular. It's very much player-vs-environment more than "what skills and numbers are on my sheet."

Things get somewhat messier and less fun when you start making very specific classes. If you have just the big four (Fighter, Cleric, Magic-User, and Thief) then each one is very broad. That fighter could be RP'd as a barbarian, a ranger, a noble knight, a whatever you wanted. The thief could be an Indiana Jones explorer, a cut-purse, an acrobat, or an assassin. When you start cutting the bits up though, the very existence of Ranger, Paladin, and Barbarian as classes automatically diminish the Fighter as simply being "a soldier."

Broad classes are definitely the way to go.

... Man. Now I want to go play D&D.

Agamemnon wrote:Things get somewhat messier and less fun when you start making very specific classes. If you have just the big four (Fighter, Cleric, Magic-User, and Thief) then each one is very broad. That fighter could be RP'd as a barbarian, a ranger, a noble knight, a whatever you wanted. The thief could be an Indiana Jones explorer, a cut-purse, an acrobat, or an assassin. When you start cutting the bits up though, the very existence of Ranger, Paladin, and Barbarian as classes automatically diminish the Fighter as simply being "a soldier."

Broad classes are definitely the way to go.

... Man. Now I want to go play D&D.

I can see that.

Although, it might even then be interesting to have the reverse classes, maybe. Like, imagine leveling up and then getting to chose sub-classes.

The important thing there would be, the sub-classes should be quite specific, less in terms of abilities, moreso in terms of flavor. I imagine them as where you really connect the base class gameworld-agnostic archetypes with the setting. And of course i would also ask "how many subclasses can i stack/combine?"
I can definitely see the appeal of a class system like that, as the basic idea here is, in my opinion, that class should only limit your character so much as in making them the best at a particular thing in the group, possibly.
LotFP's Specialist certainly seems to support that notion, at least.

Now i don't know a game that does this, but i do believe Warhammer Fantasy RPG was mentioned somewhere? It's not quite the same, but still an interesting way to do it. (Isn't WFRPG just modified Rolemaster?)



Oh, and, if it sounded before like i thought LotFP was a bad game, i would like to vehemently dismiss that notion.

I've written about it on that blog thing before. In my home compaign, we wound up with an interesting kind of solution. Everyone basically rolls up base classes, and if someone wants to do something a little different, we just wing it. It's not a good solution if you aim to publish something, but it works pretty well at the table. For instance, Barbarossa wanted his dwarf to be a survivalist. We're playing LotFP, which gives pips for class skills, basically.. So we just changed it. We decided he was a bush-dwarf, basically. Spent his life in the wild. Instead of getting points in archetecture as he advances, he'll get it in bushcraft. Does this step on the halflings toes? Maybe, a little. But for a single exception for a single character? I'm fine with it.

The other option we tend to do is the unspoken notion that your character can change through play in ways that aren't part of their class features/XP track. If you wanted to play a paladin in my game, but we don't have that class? Be a fighter who is pledged to the church. Play up that knightly thing, and as a GM, I'll find excuses to make you more paladinly as we play.

Agamemnon, in your blog article you conclude that when it comes to customization and complexity you can't have you cake and eat it too. But there is one type of character generation system that is infinity customizable and extremely simple.

A "fill in the blanks" system like that used in Risus and The Window. In these games you have a set number of points to go towards things like characteristics or skills but you get to make up the categories yourself entirely.

A few Risus characters might look like this:

Bob the Berserker
Viking (4), Womanizer (3), Gambler (2), Poet (1).

Andy the Astronaut
Piloting spaceships (4), Not puking in Zero G (3), Hacking (2), Self-pity (1)

These games are so simple you can write all the rules on a postit note and you will literally never see the same character played twice. Not only does the same system work for Vikings and Astronauts, you could make a hundred viking berserkers and they would all be unique mechanically.

thirtythr33 wrote:Agamemnon, in your blog article you conclude that when it comes to customization and complexity you can't have you cake and eat it too. But there is one type of character generation system that is infinity customizable and extremely simple.

A "fill in the blanks" system like that used in Risus and The Window. In these games you have a set number of points to go towards things like characteristics or skills but you get to make up the categories yourself entirely.

A few Risus characters might look like this:

Bob the Berserker
Viking (4), Womanizer (3), Gambler (2), Poet (1).

Andy the Astronaut
Piloting spaceships (4), Not puking in Zero G (3), Hacking (2), Self-pity (1)

These games are so simple you can write all the rules on a postit note and you will literally never see the same character played twice. Not only does the same system work for Vikings and Astronauts, you could make a hundred viking berserkers and they would all be unique mechanically.

I alwayss had difficulties taking Risus seriously. They say it's a great prototyping/testing game for "game concepts", but people seem to often forget to distinguish that setting does not equal system whenever they talk about it. Personally, i feel like Setting is largely not something that need be tested much - it grows organically as one plays anyway.

I actually really, really like the "fill in the blanks" kind of mechanics for exactly that reason. It lets you define your character without forcing you to comb through thirty pages of special abilities to decide what might be interesting to your character.

The problem with fill in the blanks characters though is that it is incredibly easy to wind up with characters that feel mechanically "samey." Fate suffers from this to a strong degree. It doesn't matter if your character is Strong as an Ox, a Special Ops Mercenary, Lightning Quick, or a Jedi Assassin -- you pay your fate point, you get +2 to the roll. The Stunts help alleviate this to some degree, but at that point you are going back to "here's a list of character abilities you need to choose from" again.

I've got a setup in my back pocket i think actually alleviates this and makes it work to some degree, but I'm not allowed to work on it right now.

Agamemnon wrote:I actually really, really like the "fill in the blanks" kind of mechanics for exactly that reason. It lets you define your character without forcing you to comb through thirty pages of special abilities to decide what might be interesting to your character.

Far be it from me to ever deny this. I played the Dresden Files RPG once, and the character creation is, in my opinion, a huge part of what is so fun about these systems.

Agamemnon wrote:The problem with fill in the blanks characters though is that it is incredibly easy to wind up with characters that feel mechanically "samey." Fate suffers from this to a strong degree. It doesn't matter if your character is Strong as an Ox, a Special Ops Mercenary, Lightning Quick, or a Jedi Assassin -- you pay your fate point, you get +2 to the roll. The Stunts help alleviate this to some degree, but at that point you are going back to "here's a list of character abilities you need to choose from" again.

and this is the reason why i never felt the urge to play it again.

Agamemnon wrote:I've got a setup in my back pocket i think actually alleviates this and makes it work to some degree, but I'm not allowed to work on it right now.

all in due time!

nemedeus wrote:

Agamemnon wrote:I actually really, really like the "fill in the blanks" kind of mechanics for exactly that reason. It lets you define your character without forcing you to comb through thirty pages of special abilities to decide what might be interesting to your character.

Far be it from me to ever deny this. I played the Dresden Files RPG once, and the character creation is, in my opinion, a huge part of what is so fun about these systems.

Agamemnon wrote:The problem with fill in the blanks characters though is that it is incredibly easy to wind up with characters that feel mechanically "samey." Fate suffers from this to a strong degree. It doesn't matter if your character is Strong as an Ox, a Special Ops Mercenary, Lightning Quick, or a Jedi Assassin -- you pay your fate point, you get +2 to the roll. The Stunts help alleviate this to some degree, but at that point you are going back to "here's a list of character abilities you need to choose from" again.

and this is the reason why i never felt the urge to play it again.

Agamemnon wrote:I've got a setup in my back pocket i think actually alleviates this and makes it work to some degree, but I'm not allowed to work on it right now.

all in due time!

The interesting thing about having spent as much time as we have in the editing/revision stage - my daydreaming designer brain has been compiling notes on the next project for the last few months. By the time we get 'Bastards out the door and in the wild, I'll have half another game done.

That's about my experience.
Point in Case: The last few days, i was busy trying to come up with a RPG / Trick-Taking Card Game / Collectible Card Game Concept where a Character's Hitpoints are the number of Tricks the opponent needs to trump to win the fight, and the Character's respective Decks are representing the sums of their fighting prowess.