Well designed class and restrictions

Hello guys.

I'm going to be concise here.
The point is :

If you had to design some "classes" for a roleplaying game, will you make them as different as possible and giving them particular power that are proper to their class. Right ?

But, for example, we have a warrior and a thief/rogue.
Are you going to lock all strength-related skills only for the fighter/warrior and all dex-related skills only for the rogue/thief or will you prefer let the choice to your player ?

I have read the thread about balance rencetly on the forum and I was wondering... is freedom choice is more important than "balance" or mechanism ?
Why let the choice to the player if it's obviously less viable ? The warrior is going to have a lot of strenght by default. So why do he even consider to take acrobatics since there's other classes in his group that can do it better ?

We can see a lot of videogames not letting the choice to players. If you're a warrior you're not going to be sneaky. But in roleplaying games you can. And for me that's the point to play a rpg. Do what you want.
But what about rules and game design ? I saw a lot of people complaining about balanced things, talking about numbers, op things... I'm not talking about self-nerfing where people fear so much about being broken that they could fight with a spoon instead of a sword but people who don't care about all that stuff ans just play what they want.

What you guys think ? Do you prefer when the rules defines clearly what your character has to be, or being free to make whay you want even if it's that make your character potentially less powerful ?

The purpose of classes is to present archetypes and to act as a form of mental shorthand. A is a Z therefore we can expect he can do the following...

Classed systems are inherently about pigeon-holing and restriction. If freedom of choice is a strong concern for a system then one of the other design paradigms like skill-based (BRP), life-path (Traveler), free design (Fate), and open mechanical design(Hero) are better choices.

I'm seeing some big assumptions in here. So if class design is what you're after, make sure you break down your assumptions too. It's when you don't do this that you get unnecessary conflict.

Ednoc said:

But, for example, we have a warrior and a thief/rogue.
Are you going to lock all strength-related skills only for the fighter/warrior and all dex-related skills only for the rogue/thief or will you prefer let the choice to your player ?

I have read the thread about balance rencetly on the forum and I was wondering... is freedom choice is more important than "balance" or mechanism ?
Why let the choice to the player if it's obviously less viable ? The warrior is going to have a lot of strenght by default. So why do he even consider to take acrobatics since there's other classes in his group that can do it better ?

We can see a lot of videogames not letting the choice to players. If you're a warrior you're not going to be sneaky. But in roleplaying games you can. And for me that's the point to play a rpg. Do what you want.
But what about rules and game design ? I saw a lot of people complaining. . .

What you guys think ? Do you prefer when the rules defines clearly what your character has to be, or being free to make whay you want even if it's that make your character potentially less powerful ?

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For example, "obviously less viable." You and the player might have different ideas of what's viable. Or to put it more bluntly, if the goal of a game is to always roll the highest numbers possible, it should be explicitly stated so that a player can clearly say "this character choice of mine doesn't result in rolling the highest numbers possible."

The fighter and rogue you mentioned are archetypes typically designed with two goals in mind. Fighters exist to kill stuff, and rogues exist to steal stuff. These are great functions to have if you're playing an RPG about killing and stealing stuff. If the RPG is about more than than, well, you're going to need different classes (or none at all).

These two classes were used uniquely for example purpose and can be enlarged to the others like for bow user type or a magician, etc.
Sorry for the inconvenience and lack of precise informations since I still have to do a lot of improvements with my english.

The things was to know, for anybody who wants to participate, what do you think works best or fits you better.
Having many choices or let th rules guiding you.

I assume both are enjoyable and in facts they are.

Thanks for your answer btw.

Two of the purposes behind classes are niche protection and ease of generation.

You are talking about niche protection, but seem to be missing that unless you expect each character to master everything in their niche, there needs to be overlap with those in different niches in order to cover all bases.

Also remember that even with niche protection, there are lots of different things you do (pillars in D&D 5e terminology). Combat, social, exploration, sneaking, investigation. Different classes can fulfill different roles in these.

It really depends on a lot of circumstances, but the basic question is, would a character still find the ability useful even if they aren't the best at it? For something like Athletics on a Rogue or Wizard, it might be helpful to go from having a penalty to having a bonus. If everyone needs to swim across a lake, then having a decent chance to succeed means that you won't be holding everyone back.

Of course, that assumes they even have a chance to succeed, which isn't always the case. If the game is designed in such a way that high-level challenges are supposed to be a challenge to high-level specialists, then there's no point in taking the skill you would be bad at, because you're still going to fail anyway; in those situations, allowing the character to take an ability that will never work for them just seems like bad design. D&D 5E is good at keeping difficulties in the range where everyone can still try, but D&D 3E is designed in such a way that difficulties are impossible unless you're a specialist.

If you're designing a class-based game where you don't want people to succeed at things they aren't good at, then one option is to get rid of skills entirely. If only fighters are capable of climbing walls and only wizards are capable of reading languages, then you can just make those things rely on basic stat checks, knowing that the fighter is going to have high Strength and the wizard is going to have high Intelligence. It just depends on what kind of world you're trying to describe.

Ednoc said:

Hello guys.

I'm going to be concise here.
The point is :

If you had to design some "classes" for a roleplaying game,

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If I /had/ to? So there's no chance of getting the gun away from whoever's holding it to my head?

Class-based games are probably the most prolific, since immitators of D&D are the most prolific sort of RPG, but that doesn't make them good. D&D was first, and happened to use classes, so lots of RPGs still use them, even though they're not so great a design technique. If Traveler or RuneQuest had come out in 1972 and been accused of satanism or something, thing's'd be completely different.

will you make them as different as possible and giving them particular power that are proper to their class. Right ?

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It's a real kettle of wyrms. How do you divide up the universe of possible character concepts? How do you avoid leaving some out or making others dominate?

But, for example, we have a warrior and a thief/rogue.
Are you going to lock all strength-related skills only for the fighter/warrior and all dex-related skills only for the rogue/thief or will you prefer let the choice to your player ?

Click to expand...

The former might work OK if you have efficient MCing. But even breaking out the two could be a huge mistake.

I have read the thread about balance rencetly on the forum and I was wondering... is freedom choice is more important than "balance" or mechanism ?

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That's like asking if being able to breath is more important than oxygen. ;P Balance in an RPG supports freedom of choice, it's all about choice, about having lots of choices, and those choices meaning something and being things that work mechanically to support those choices - meaningful & viable choices.

Do you prefer when the rules defines clearly what your character has to be, or being free to make whay you want even if it's that make your character potentially less powerful ?

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The rules should clearly define as many choices as possible, choices that you can then use to define into being the character you want, without having to waste too much effort assuring that it's going to be viable along side the next character.

Blue said:

Two of the purposes behind classes are niche protection and ease of generation.

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Just two?

No, classes are ubiquitous because they provide a large variety of features that are harder to capture in more free form methods of chargen.

In addition to niche protection and ease of generation, you also have to factor in:

Ease of playtesting/balancing: If you are designing a game, and you want to have a varied non-degenerate experience, the easiest way to do it is limit choice to a set of classes. This gives you a finite set of conditions to test, and lets you make tweaks that aren't global and therefore don't force you to reconsider absolutely everything. Point buy systems are notoriously unbalanced, because most point costs are ultimately arbitrary and inorganic.

Enforced variety: If you have a selection of balanced classes, you almost guarantee variety of experience simply because people like trying something different. If you have more freeform chargen, chances are most players will gravitate toward a single obvious path.

Enforced breadth: Classless systems tend to strongly encourage each character to invest everything in doing one thing and doing that one thing well. This is a horror show for gameplay in a social game, because most RPGs (indeed, IMO, all RPGs as a defining element) are composed of several minigames. What you run into is the "Decker Problem" of cyberpunk games, where every person on the team is only good at one thing, and can't easily interact with anyone else. A similar problem happens with space opera games and 'star fighter pilots'. If you have a classless system, to succeed in your chosen role, you typically are forced to spend everything on your chosen role, leaving your character rather hapless outside of their role (and everyone else hapless in yours). What you want in a game is regardless of what 'pillar' of gameplay you are currently exploring, everyone can contribute at least a little. Classes are a way to enforce that any character meets those requirements, because with a class which is well designed you can enforce that the player must take secondary or tertiary abilities that they would never buy if they had a cost. In this way, PC is broadly skilled rather than just a Johnny-One-Trick.

Honestly, 'classless' chargen is such a poor design, I'm surprised anyone still does it. I can understand back when we fetishized 'realism' how people might have been misled into pursuing classless chargen, but in practice I didn't observe any increase in 'realism' with point buy chargen and further I think we know by now that realism doesn't solve all problems. Even modern games that don't have 'classes' per se such as Skyrim or Path of Exile, still have various markers and design patterns to try to steer the free form character generation along predictable lines.

Celebrim said:

Just two?

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No, not "just two". That's why I didn't write "only two" or "the two main ones".

They were two of the many facets that I wanted to discuss.

What works best for me? Many choices, because I don't like being told that my "ranger" has to be either a two-weapon-fighter or an archer. Why not just say "you're not allowed to use a shield?"

Celebrim said:

Enforced breadth: Classless systems tend to strongly encourage each character to invest everything in doing one thing and doing that one thing well. This is a horror show for gameplay in a social game, because most RPGs (indeed, IMO, all RPGs as a defining element) are composed of several minigames. What you run into is the "Decker Problem" of cyberpunk games, where every person on the team is only good at one thing, and can't easily interact with anyone else. A similar problem happens with space opera games and 'star fighter pilots'. If you have a classless system, to succeed in your chosen role, you typically are forced to spend everything on your chosen role, leaving your character rather hapless outside of their role (and everyone else hapless in yours). What you want in a game is regardless of what 'pillar' of gameplay you are currently exploring, everyone can contribute at least a little. Classes are a way to enforce that any character meets those requirements, because with a class which is well designed you can enforce that the player must take secondary or tertiary abilities that they would never buy if they had a cost. In this way, PC is broadly skilled rather than just a Johnny-One-Trick.

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Really hoping you're wrong about all those classless systems that I haven't played. They sound pretty crummy if non-optimizers can't contribute to anything "at least a little."