I am looking at making a Class based RPG System.

But i do not know where to start...

- The Core Dice Mechanics
- The Classes themselves
- The Setting that it takes place in

Where would the best place to start?

Thanks Ben

Start with these two things:
- What kind of experience do you want players to get from your game?
- What kind of choices should players make in your game?

Answering those two questions will help you make everything else, including whether a class system will work for your game or not.

It may be helpful to compare to games that do aspects you find interesting, and what things you find not worthwhile (for example, what is it that other class based games do that makes you want to go with classes?  What do you want to do differently?  But answer the first two questions at the top, otherwise everything else is meaningless).

Otherwise, your question is like, "I'd like to start a novel without any idea of what it will be about, should I start with grammar, editing, or layout first?"

Chris

I think you should just think about it for a bit.
Let the idea form in your brain for a day or so. Then put everything you have done. Don't think about it you can read it over later. Just put down your thoughts and then go through thinking about mechanics and such.
Good Luck!

Think about your favorite single session of your favorite RPG.  Then ask yourself why it was awesome.  How did it make you feel, and what got you to that point.

Another big important question is why are you making a game at all?  Why not play what's already out there?

Not to say that you shouldn't be making games, but understanding why you want to do things different could get you a long way toward figuring out what you want.

Our group figured out what we liked and didn't like about existing systems, and started from scratch with the kind of mechanics and tone we wanted to provide.  From there it was a whole lot of trial and error and writing and re-writing and playtesting and focus-grouping and a ridiculous amount of work.  Five years later, we still don't have a finished product, but we've had an awful lot of fun!

I usually start with core dice mechanics.

You don't need to take a linear approach to game creation.  It's likely that you're going to make alterations to just about everything on a regular basis anyway, so it doesn't really matter where you start.  I jump around from topic to topic costantly, as I get bored quickly (I also don't like to force creativity; that approach is futile).  If you're having trouble figuring out where to start, try working on what part interests you the most, and perhaps that will give you some momentum to get the creative juices flowing.

I think everyone does this differently.
For instance. I started out wanting to redo 2nd edition AD&D.
By the time I figured out what I wanted it was mechanically nothing like 2eAD&D, but Similar in spirit.
My main inspiration came when I figured out what I wanted. Which was a set of characteristics (attributes)
that governed as much as possible. I wanted everything that the character did to reflect those characteristics.
Knowing that that was the direction I wanted to take helped me immensely.
From there I'd work on one thing then another. No real order, but if I had a good idea I'd go RIGHT THEN and write it down.
Most of the time its lost entirely or at best altered when remembered and never as good.
So my advice would be to brainstorm on what you want to play or perhaps GM.
Once you figure that out its cake.
a large cake made of blood sweat tears and endless hours of hard work. But a damn fine tasting cake once its out of the oven.

Brent

Recall back to why you even started thinking of writing an RPG. Write down your reasons.

Further, if your reasons are that you are dissatisfied with current RPG's or such, recall back even way further to when you started roleplaying and write down the reasons you went to that first session, and also write down the reasons you went to the second session.

To flipside a lot of these questions...

Also make sure to think about the roleplaying session you disliked the most.

What made you dislike it?

Was it something in the rules? (This could be a list of things to make sure your own game avoids...)

Was it the fact that you couldn't make a character that fit the situation? (This might simply be a factor of the GM and no matter what game you write, you might not be able to fix it without including some good GM advice in your book...or it might be something that needs to be addressed through some good play examples describing the way you envision both GOOD and BAD sessions)

Was it a personal conflict at the table? (Looking up some good roleplaying theory sites [such as the archives here] might get your mind thinking about ways to address this, but there will always be interpersonal conflicts no matter how well designed your game is)

My other recommendation would be to write up a 24 hour version of your game to get your mind in order regarding the game...then come back to it a week later and rethink about your game before moving into deeper development.

Wow, there's some great advice in this thread.

Here's what I tell aspiring game designers:

Have a vision. Are you creating a game just for practice? If so, what do you want to learn? If you're creating a game to play yourself or to share with others, first write out a paragraph that describes what's awesome about this game. Write it as if the game is finished. Like this (using Rob Bohl's game as an example):

Hey, I just wrote this game called Misspent Youth. It kicks ass. It's a dark future sci-fi game with a strong punk ethos. You play a bunch of disaffected teenage Youthful Offenders fighting The Authority. The rules are designed to build a traditional story structure with rising action, climax, and so on. The characters have traits that they can 'sell out' when the going gets tough. Selling out a trait flips it to its awful, 'adult' form. Like Cool sold-out becomes Trendy. The GM actually takes a black marker and REDACTS the character sheet.

1. Players create high fantasy characters by selecting combinations of ability scores, race, class, powers, and feats. The elements work together in synergistic ways, so there are good "builds" and bad "builds."
2. The Dungeon Master (DM) prepares an adventure, usually a fantasy location consisting of linked encounters. The encounters include monsters, traps, tests of character skills, and social "role-playing" encounters.
3. The players, working as a team, explore the DM's adventure. They fight the monsters, find and avoid the traps, use their skills to pass the tests, and interact with each other and the DM (via his non-player characters) in role-playing scenes. Sometimes they succeed; sometimes they fail.
4. Successful encounters earns characters experience points (XP). Repeat through more adventures.
5. When a player earns enough XP, he can raise his character's level. This lets him improve the character in a variety of ways, including offering more choices of powers and feats. This allows the player to apply what he's learned to building a more optimal character.
6. More powerful characters can face more dangerous adventures. The danger and scope of play ramps up over time. The first ten levels are called the "heroic tier" where the characters face fairly mundane problems (for a fantasy world) close to "home." The second ten levels are called the "paragon tier" where the characters travel a lot and face the fantasy world's biggest issues. The third ten levels are called the "epic tier" where the characters leave the world often to visit other worlds and face the universe's biggest issues.
7. Sometimes characters die. Players can just make up new characters--maybe at level closer to the rest of the surviving player characters, maybe back at 1st, depending on the style of play.
8. At level 30, a character reaches his pinnacle and achieves a kind of apotheosis and becomes a sort of god.

create a set of comparative values

consistency of rules vs realism
speed of play vs decisions
simplicity of character creation vs flexibility/detail

everything you do in the design is a tradeoff.  Deciding up front what you value in a game makes it easier to look at those tradeoffs from an overall game perspective instead of being stuck in the weeds.