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Well designed class and restrictions
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7162491" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Just two?</p><p></p><p>No, classes are ubiquitous because they provide a large variety of features that are harder to capture in more free form methods of chargen.</p><p></p><p>In addition to niche protection and ease of generation, you also have to factor in:</p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7162491, member: 4937"] 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. [/QUOTE]
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