Using the tool of "Character Class"

[Christoffer Lernö]

There's already a discussion on character classes, but this is not going into the theoretical stuff. I want to sort out how character classes can be used to assist in character creation.

I'm gonna write my personal observations to have something to start with.

As I see it, character class mechanics in it's basic form works by limiting player choice.

This opens up a lot of possibilities for the game designer(s). The basic uses seem to be the following:

1. Making sure the characters fit with the game world
2. Making character balance easier
3. Simplifying character creation
4. Adding details

Not every class system uses all of these, and not some doesn't even use any of them.

Let's look at these uses:

1. Making sure the characters fit with the game world

The typical use is making classes that correspond to actual game-world professions. Some games have more generic classes, but deliberately stays away from some types of classes so that making such characters impossible.

2. Making balancing easier

The less player choice, the easier it is to balance the pieces one has. In one way or the other, the player choice must be limited or the rules bigger. I think it's pretty self-explanatory

3. Simplifying character creation

By already providing skills, abilities and background more or less neatly packaged (the amount differs widely between games), character creation time may be reduced, but most importantly novice gamers need to look through less rules and skill lists to get started.

4. Adding detail

By providing classes like "Dragon Hunter" one can introduce very specialized abilities and skills which provide a lot of extra flavour to the world. For more general games, adding too many skills both reduces the chance that specialized abilities/skills are aquired as well as making it harder to get an overview of abilities/skills when creating characters.

Ok, there are probably more things to it, but this is just stuff off the top of my head.

The question I'm asking myself is, when should we make the step to go to character classes, and how much player choice should we strip in doing so.

An extreme example of character classing should be old D&D. Here we have Fighter, Cleric, Magic-User, Dwarf, Elf, Halfling. Here player choice is minimized. What you can input is your class, stats and gender. Maybe starting equipment too, but that's pretty much it. It might be interesting to look at AD&D for comparison. 2nd ed compared to basic D&D has races and class seperated. There are weapon and non-weapon proficiencies (wait! D&D has languages, didn't it?), age and length are also variable quantities but there it stops.

Let's compare this to BRP which I believe do had classes, which were only used for limiting skill choices. Here the class is basically used for balancing, whereas D&D used it for 1,3 & 4 as well.

Parameters in character classing tend to be:
1.  #number of classes

2. amount of skills/abilities to chose from if any

3. point allocation techniques or not (especially if they are required rather than optional)

4. special class abilities or not

5. certain classes cannot be combined with certain other parameters or not (for example no elven paladins, or you have to have 9+ strength to be a fighter)


It could be further be discussed what effects these parameters have on the game and what other decisions they are compatible with.

Interested?

[kamikaze]

As an example, I'm using fairly rigid character professions in my science-horror setting book for DUDE, http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/DUDE/Malevolence.html">Malevolence, and I explain why in the character creation section.  The exact implementation of them might change before it's finished (I might write them up as a collection of Powers, and might change the "superior" benefit), but those are the professions I'm going to use.

I use them because that's how characters in the source materials seem to operate.  I can't think of a single truly "multi-class" character in the main source materials, and for the obvious reason: a character who can do everything, or who is at least competent in multiple fields, doesn't feel helpless against a situation as often, and helplessness is one of the central fears in science-horror.

This works in DUDE because there are no skills, only powers and basic DUDEness tasks.  If I had an extensive skill system, as with my http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/Phobos/">Phobos system, I'd have to almost totally rewrite character creation.

[ADGBoss]

BRP does not have classes per se.  Essentially (from the RQ model here) you rolled randomnly based on the culture and race you had chosen. The tables were weighted towards Farmer and Herder or whatever the most common careers in the society were. This represented your parent's occupations.  It affected what skills and their modifiers that you received.

Once you started playing though anyone could learn any skill if they were determined enough.  Class was really replaced by career paths and since raising your skills was due to training or experience directly, not going up level, it had a lot of Character freedom.

Yet there were still ROLES in society. You could be a Shaman or a warrior or a Sorcere or a Priest etc and that was more a Job description you attained then a class.  More akin to a 3E prestige class.

In Seraphim: Candlebright all characters go through a progression of skill choices, did they go to high school, college etc until they become Seraphim. Now there are specialites of Seriph but essentially they all fulfill the same ROLE in society.

However, I think there is a canotation (not here in this discussion but in RPG society in general)  that Classes are defunct and immature as far as RPG design goes.  I do  nto agree with this of course.  I would readily play a system with heavy classes because it does help define you not only in society but also in the group of other characters.  This is not always a bad thing.

I think the Class = Level argument blinds alot of people. Just because D&D3E and its ancestors use it (and I love all D&D btw) does not mean that we have to have Class = Level.  I am a Ranger vs I am a 5th Level Ranger.  You can be a trained class and still use a more BRP or skill based experience system.

I once asked a friend who was designing his game and haing issues with Initiative why he HAD to use a d10? His answer was I do not know, we always have. That was his answer. Inertia blinded him.

Well anyway I hope my 2 Lunars helped

SMH
ADGBoss

[M. J. Young]

Someone has distinguished the generalist from the specialist thus: the specialist knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing; the generalist knows less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything. I have tended toward the role of generalist in my real life, and when that is an option in games I find my characters gravitating that direction.

There is an innate problem with generalists. We are very rarely the best at anything. For all the things I know, there is always someone readily available who knows more and can do better. On the other hand, specialists find it far more necessary to rely on others, or else to force their particular solutions on your problem. In some medical conditions the opinion as to whether you need an operation or some sort of medicinal treatment often is guided by whether your physician is or is not a surgeon--not because surgeons don't understand medical treatment, but rather because they understand surgery far better and know its efficacy intimately. There is truth to the axiom that if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. If all your skills are in combat, you will tend to think of fighting as the solution to whatever confronts you.

Class systems encourage the proliferation of specialists. That, in a real sense, is their primary function.

In one of the old Chainmail D&D supplements I once owned, there were wandering monster lists that included groups of fighters, groups of magic-users, groups of clerics, groups of thieves--homogenous adventure parties of high level wandering the dungeons together. The problem these groups faced was that their skills were all in the same areas. The character party, with its varied resources, was always able easily to defeat these if challenged. There might be specific adventures in which a fighter can do everything that needs to be done, or a thief can go it alone; but by and large, the limitation of class forces the characters to be dependent on each other.

It also increases the strength of the party in an unexpected manner. In most situations, one great fighter supported by three other people who can fight a bit or otherwise lend their aid is a better combination than four mediocre fighters who can also do other things. Similarly, the great thief is worth more than four amateurs for what he does. By forcing the characters to specialize, you increase the resources of the group by making each an expert in his field. A Jack of All Trades is usually a Master of None, as the addage goes, and the party who can turn to an expert in the field when they need something done is usually better off than one that has a bunch of amateurs each trying in turn to do something so far above their abilities they shouldn't even think themselves in the same league.

Running generalist characters, I often find myself trying to determine the best tools to use in a given situation. An excellent example is one of the characters in the forthcoming Multiverser novel, who over the course of her adventures learns to use magic, psionics, martial arts, and a pair of revolvers. When she faces a fight, she nearly always hesitates, unsure what the best choice would be for this situation. By contrast, the soldier with whom she shares some of her adventures has three guns, and is better at each of them than she at any of hers, and so rarely thinks about what to use next. There is a sense in which generalizing has made her more self-reliant; yet there is also a sense in which it has made her more vulnerable.

OAD&D allowed some races to generalize, in the sense that they could multi-class from character creation. It was quickly apparent of those who took two and especially three classes that the thinner they spread their abilities the less value they had to the party as a whole, save only if it was desirable to divide into smaller groups each of which had core abilities represented.

Multiverser uses no classes. This is in part because it does not seem realistic. I admit that I like the "primary skill area" system I first encountered in Star Frontiers, that suggested it would be easier to learn skills related to your chosen field than to learn those outside it, but that doesn't much reflect the generalist nature of my own life. (There is a degree of that in Multiverser, in that skills in different major areas rely on different basic attributes, thus a character may well excel in one area as against another.) Multiverser expects its player characters to function more independently; the character party is regarded an artificial construct which may form in a natural way if players wish but is not forced on the game. Even so, players tend to be specialists, putting their efforts into the skills and abilities which most fit their self-image, whether that be a fighter or a healer or a technical wizard. The value of specialization is recognized even when the possibilities are open-ended.

Personally, I think if you're going to have classes in a game system, you need a logical explanation for why they are there. D&D has such an explanation, built on the cultural concepts of the milieu--people tended to apprentice to others who specialize, and so they also specialize; each profession has a certain snobbery of its own that informs it that the much-touted skills of the other professions are not worth pursuing (particularly not at the cost of increased expertise in one's chosen career). In a situation such as Star Trek such specialization can similarly come from military structure--if you're a medic, they will train you to be a doctor, but if you want to become a marine that may require special approval. If you're just arbitrarily saying that there will be classes, you will always have the problem that the players don't understand why they can't learn to do that if they're a this, and they will probably be right.

I think I've rambled long enough. I hope some of this was helpful.

--M. J. Young

[Paul Czege]

Nothing on-topic to say, really, only that I just realized how much I've missed M.J. Young's posts. Where you been, maaaaan?!

Paul

[simon_hibbs]

The typical use is making classes that correspond to actual game-world professions. Some games have more generic classes, but deliberately stays away from some types of classes so that making such characters impossible.

Why is this a good thing? Surely if players want to play certain types of characters, and the GM agrees, is it realy the game designers' place to preclude that unnecesserily?

2. Making balancing easier

The less player choice, the easier it is to balance the pieces one has. In one way or the other, the player choice must be limited or the rules bigger. I think it's pretty self-explanatory

Again I think this is clearly false. If every character is created using the same common set of choices and options, then the game will be pretty-much self ballancing. I have rarely seen posts about problems with game ballance in classless games, but they're a staple of discussion lists on class-based games such as D&D.

3. Simplifying character creation

By already providing skills, abilities and background more or less neatly packaged (the amount differs widely between games), character creation time may be reduced, but most importantly novice gamers need to look through less rules and skill lists to get started.

This can be accomplished using character templates, as in GURPS, or career packages as in RQ and Call of Cthulhu. These provide all the speed of classes without limiting player choice.

4. Adding detail

By providing classes like "Dragon Hunter" one can introduce very specialized abilities and skills which provide a lot of extra flavour to the world. For more general games, adding too many skills both reduces the chance that specialized abilities/skills are aquired as well as making it harder to get an overview of abilities/skills when creating characters.

Again, this can be done using skills packkages or templates, you don't have to have strict character classes for it.

The question I'm asking myself is, when should we make the step to go to character classes, and how much player choice should we strip in doing so.

The question I'm asking is why do you want to strip away player choice? To my mind an RPG should be about providing tools to enable players and GMs to play games, not arbitrarily restricting their freedoms. Even where you might want to restrict choices for genre reasons, I don't see that character class-specific restrictions are relevent to genre convention.

Let's compare this to BRP which I believe do had classes, which were only used for limiting skill choices. Here the class is basically used for balancing, whereas D&D used it for 1,3 & 4 as well.

BRP games (RQ and CoC are good examples) generaly had the concept of occupations, but these were only realy character templates. They provided a set of recommended skills that were apropriate to characters with backgrounds in particular social roles (soldier, priest, sneak thief, etc). Essentialy they said 'here's X skill points to distribute among this list of skills). Taht's it, after character generation there were no further arbitrary limits. Every character got some skill points they could use to raise any skill. Also, there was usualy an option to get a fewer skill points than throught he careers, but the ability to use them to gain any skills you wanted thus bypassing the career limits completely.

Finaly, there are ways to put class-like limitations into classless games. GURPS does this a lot. For example, to be able to use magic in GURPS a character must usualy buy a special 'Magery' ability, other characters usualy can't use magic. You could theoreticaly build-in other rstrictions into such an advantage, such as a restriction on using swords ( for whatever cockeyed, setting-based reason).


Simon Hibbs

[Christoffer Lernö]

Sure, I can spell it out for you Simon.

The typical use is making classes that correspond to actual game-world professions. Some games have more generic classes, but deliberately stays away from some types of classes so that making such characters impossible.

Why is this a good thing? Surely if players want to play certain types of characters, and the GM agrees, is it realy the game designers' place to preclude that unnecesserily?

First: there is nothing that say the GM can't create a new class. Other than that, let's say the GM picks up the new game and everyone sits down to make characters. Bob decides to be a Garukkhar Warrior with sword as his primary weapon. Unfortunately the Garukkhar are supposed to be very peaceful creatures. Bob doesn't know that. He only sees that they get +2 for Dex and that would make them kick ass.

In the end, the player group might resemble what they usually play in some other world in some other game, totally losing the particular flavour of the setting. It doesn't occur to Bob that he can make a Garukkhar Mystic which is a much more reasonable character given the cultural cicumstances.

This is not saying that breaking archetypes isn't fun. It's just that if it's done ALL OF THE TIME, then the archetypes aren't really archetypes and the setting loses flavour.

2. Making balancing easier

The less player choice, the easier it is to balance the pieces one has. In one way or the other, the player choice must be limited or the rules bigger. I think it's pretty self-explanatory

Again I think this is clearly false. If every character is created using the same common set of choices and options, then the game will be pretty-much self ballancing. I have rarely seen posts about problems with game ballance in classless games, but they're a staple of discussion lists on class-based games such as D&D.

Not at all. If there are x choices and options, there are more optimal combinations than others. By introducing skill costs and so on more or less blance might be introduced. I think most "self balancing" systems you are thinking about are skill based systems. When you start introducing abilities, that's when you're talking about having to spend a lot of time trying to balance things. And if you have to do that, then you might introduce bugs, like the cheap tricks in Champions to get more points.

I can give you a heap of more examples.

As for D&D I think that was pretty balanced. Are you talking about AD&D which introduced heaps of additional player choice (esp. 3rd ed after what I heard)? If so, you're not talking about the same thing I am.

3. Simplifying character creation

By already providing skills, abilities and background more or less neatly packaged (the amount differs widely between games), character creation time may be reduced, but most importantly novice gamers need to look through less rules and skill lists to get started.

This can be accomplished using character templates, as in GURPS, or career packages as in RQ and Call of Cthulhu. These provide all the speed of classes without limiting player choice.

You're stating an obvious contradiction: "choice without paying for that in character creation time". If a player has n choices to do, that's gonna take longer than n-1 choices. That's just the way it is. I'm not saying there is no merit to those approaches, but you can't claim they are quicker.

4. Adding detail

Again, this can be done using skills packkages or templates, you don't have to have strict character classes for it.

In this you are right, however I believe I was listing benefits of introducing classes and not claiming no other method had some of these benefits as well?

The question I'm asking is why do you want to strip away player choice? To my mind an RPG should be about providing tools to enable players and GMs to play games, not arbitrarily restricting their freedoms. Even where you might want to restrict choices for genre reasons, I don't see that character class-specific restrictions are relevent to genre convention.

Simon, have you played Shadowrun? I have played it a lot. I don't remember once in any group someone actually used the Archetypes. They were simply too unoptimized. And to be honest, in Shadowrun you don't get any points for having a consistent character.

The majority of all characters had little that actually differentiated them from the others. Ok, so maybe one character could drive a car and some other couldn't. And if you did a mage you were gonna be really different of course.

What differentiated the characters the most was simply their image, and that had nothing to do with abilities or skills. I particularly liked a character a friend made, a communist elf shadowrunner.

Choice only ever made characters more streamlined and similar, especially when you had to sacrifice efficiency for customization and characterization.

There do is a thing called "too much choice".

Sure, with a firm (good) concept, you can do a lot with freedom. But my experience is that something like that is an exception rather than a rule. People do better at customizing a template or a class than creating something from scratch.

BRP games (RQ and CoC are good examples) generaly had the concept of occupations, but these were only realy character templates. They provided a set of recommended skills that were apropriate to characters with backgrounds in particular social roles (soldier, priest, sneak thief, etc). Essentialy they said 'here's X skill points to distribute among this list of skills). Taht's it, after character generation there were no further arbitrary limits.

I know, isn't it funny. First you have to choose, and then you have to chose again. I especially dislike those game where you had a curency to spend which was uneven. Like 1 point to raise from 3 to 4 but 2 points between say 7 and 8. Usually aggravated by multipliers in skill cost.

I can't say I made better characters just because I could chose where I could spend my every single point. It became more an exercise of getting as much characterization without losing too much efficiency.

[Bob McNamee]

As far as balance problems go...
As a long term Champions GM, we had all kinds of play balance problems with an all choice points based character construction system. Its amazing how unbalanced characters different folks can construct (in isolation to one another) with the same number of points.
Not thats its a genre well suited for Character class construction methods.

Bob McNamee

[jdagna]

There's a significant advantage of class-based character design that I think has been left unaddressed.

Classes provide the new or casual gamer with a set of choices that help him to get started more quickly in designing and understanding his character.  If he chooses a fighter, he knows his skills are in combat even if he doesn't know how combat works yet.  Likewise, he knows a rogue is going to sneak around, and mages/clerics use magic.

Of course, what helps the beginner make a character quickly soon begins to feel like shackles to the experienced player.  As a result, systems start to reintroduce complexity, or start with a point-assignment system that pretty much requires you to fully understand the rules to know how to build the character you want.  Furthermore, you have to know something about role-playing just to know what character it is that you want to build.

To some extent, my complaint with AD&D is that it has continued to muck up class-based simplicity by adding so many choices in.  Which skills are useful?  Is a +1 to Dex worth a -1 to Str?  And other choices.  I'm an experienced role-player, but trying to make an AD&D 3E character was a bit more work than I preferred.

The trick is to find a compromise.  Get new players started quickly, but don't restrict the experienced ones.

I've tried to do this in Pax Draconis with Career Areas (10 total), their specialties (8 per Career Area), and having character advancement involve changing specialties.  Thus, you start off with assigned skills and equipment for your starting specialty (which can be determined randomly to further assist the new player).  Then, you can change specialties; either within the same Career Area (for a limited skill selection, but high effectiveness to use the GNS term), or specialties from different Career Areas (for a wider range of skills, but lower overall effectiveness).  Furthermore, ANY skill is available to ANY character - your Career Area and specialty merely influence the experience cost to learn it.

[Mike Holmes]

I think that Justin is right in his assessment. Classes are easier for the newbie. Mr. Mearls has said the same. That simple choices appeal to most players. Because most players never get beyond that point in involvement.

This is hard for us designers to understand because we are, by definition, already more involved and knowledgable of these things than most players ever want to be. As such, we design games for ourselves. And in doing so we can alienate the casual player.

That said, I think that the "simple choices" method does not have to be Classes. Lots of other cool ways to do it.

Mike

[Jeremy Cole]

Classes provide the new or casual gamer with a set of choices that help him to get started more quickly in designing and understanding his character.  If he chooses a fighter, he knows his skills are in combat even if he doesn't know how combat works yet.  

Of course, what helps the beginner make a character quickly soon begins to feel like shackles to the experienced player.  As a result, systems start to reintroduce complexity

The trick is to find a compromise.  Get new players started quickly, but don't restrict the experienced ones.

Or have a choice?  Archetypes are available for newbies and a more free system is there for experienced players.  This is used in a lot of games.  Pale Fire mentioned the 'non-optimised' characters in Shadowrun.  I think these are exactly the 'little of all combat skills', or 'little of all magic skills', that a newbie may want.

Jeremy

[Le Joueur]

Classes provide the new or casual gamer with a set of choices that help him to get started more quickly in designing and understanding his character....

Of course, what helps the beginner make a character quickly soon begins to feel like shackles to the experienced player.  As a result, systems start to reintroduce complexity

The trick is to find a compromise.  Get new players started quickly, but don't restrict the experienced ones.

Or have a choice?  Archetypes are available for newbies and a more free system is there for experienced players.  This is used in a lot of games.  Pale Fire mentioned the 'non-optimised' characters in Shadowrun.  I think these are exactly the 'little of all combat skills', or 'little of all magic skills', that a newbie may want.

For Scattershot we came up with the idea of Exemplars in conjunction with our chapter order set-up.  It's a point-based system, but the Exemplars are there for "newbies" and those days you're just too tired to think up a character.  Each has narrow packages of abilities to make selections from (to keep them from being exactly identical), and yet the Persona Development system based on our Sine Qua Non Persona management Technique lets them evolve differently.  Alternatively, you can use the 'regular' pointed-based Persona Development from Chapter Two.  Does that meet your needs?

Fang Langford

[jdagna]

Or have a choice?  Archetypes are available for newbies and a more free system is there for experienced players.  This is used in a lot of games.

Yes, definitely.  I'm not actually a fan of classes, but I do think that many games have forgotten to look at what classes accomplish when the designers do away with the concept.

Levels are actually the same thing: they help the casual player and confine the experienced one.  I dislike levels, but we shouldn't forget that an amateur gamer can be rather overwhelmed on where to spend his 5 skill points (or whatever) sometimes.

[Christoffer Lernö]

If we look at archetypes vs. classes, I have a good reason for prefering the latter.

Shadowrun is a good example. As I think we can agree on, archetypes are less optimized than customized characters (and I would go so far as to say they are also a whole lot more consistent).

Now player A, the newbie, choosen an archetype whereas B, the experienced player makes a customized character.

If B is good at optimizing, he might be running a character with up to twice the chance to survive a firefight. Now, how fun is that for the newbie?

How fun is it to be constantly deprotagonized because you didn't know the game well enough (this applies to overly complex mechanics as well, or games where you have to "learn the system well" to do well in say for example combat)

What we have then is actually a system which punishes beginner players. I think a lot of the Fantasy Heartbreakers especially are of this quality. They add complexity to give more choice for optimizations, but this is something that just confounds newbies.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think you should have take a course to be able to play a roleplaying game. It's a matter of taste. Incidentally it also explains some of the design decisions for Ygg.

If we use classes, or some solution which has the same feature, we give everyone the same advantage. Theoretically. You can throw in a bazillion choices with classes too and destroy that benefit. There are lots of ways to nullify the advantages of classes, I don't think I need to list them.

If we want to look to a good clean implementation of classes, we only need to look at basic red box D&D. Simple, straightforward, and the "from 10 years and up" on the box wasn't lying. It shows how classes can simplify a game.

[Jeremy Cole]

If B is good at optimizing, he might be running a character with up to twice the chance to survive a firefight. Now, how fun is that for the newbie?

How fun is it to be constantly deprotagonized because you didn't know the game well enough (this applies to overly complex mechanics as well, or games where you have to "learn the system well" to do well in say for example combat)

I think you'll find that that's gamism and Shadowrun is gamist.  Skill in character creation is rewarded in game, and the newbie will suffer, that's the nature of it.

The advantage of archetypes is that a newbie can run through the game mechanics a few times and get his teeth cut, and hopefully learn some strategies.  But when he knows what he's doing he can go back and make his own optimised character.  This is a lot less daunting than building a character who will probably lose his right lung in the first session.

I don't like Shadowrun, guns don't kill people and combat is long and crunchy, but easy use archetypes are important in gamist rpgs.

Jeremy