The "Functional Support" Model

[RFisher]

I’d like this model.

The highest levels of editions that didn’t follow this model have often seemed poorly playtested. I think this would result in a better product in all tiers.

Many groups will never get to the paragon tier. Many groups will never get to the epic tier.

As for groups that would reach paragon tier before the paragon books were out... <shrug> Not much different than people who want to play gnomes bards. You have to wait. Either don’t switch until all the books are out. Or suspend the campaign until the paragon books are out. Or make it up yourselves.

This cycle would basically repeat, so the PHB4 would go back to levels 1-10.

Wizards doesn’t need to put out core D&D books just for the sake of putting out core D&D books. D&D isn’t where Wizards makes the bulk of its money. It’s OK to let the game be “complete” for a few years.

 

[RFisher]

Not really. GURPS -> supplements with new rules.

Well...GURPS had two kinds of supplements: Rule supplements and world books. Oh, they tried to call them all world books, but Martial Arts was clearly more rules than world and Old West was clearly more world than rules.

The world books often had vanishingly few new rules.

The rule supplements either expanded an existing subsystem or provided a new subsystem. The core rules were really fairly complete.

At least in 3/e. And it did have the benefit of being 3/e. From what I’ve seen, the 4/e core—building on 3/e—has an even more complete core. I haven’t been keeping up with what their doing supplement-wise these days, though.

 

[Betote]

Not really. GURPS -> supplements with new rules. HERO -> supplements with new rules. White Wolf is like the king of splat books.

GURPS is a complete game. Its supplements are genre and/or setting information. It's useful, but not needed, although in 4e it has deviated to the "Player book / GM book" model.

About HERO, I know nothing. I know it's pretty popular out there, but it never crossed the sea to us

And the oWoD books were games by themselves. And it was just the splatbooks and their growing überification what killed it. But Vampire: The Masquerade is, by itself, a complete game in one book.

"Complete" doesn't mean "no expansions allowed", just that all what you need to experience the *core* game is in the first *core* books.

See Mutants & Masterminds. It's a full game in just one book. It has a lot of splats, and every one of them adds something to the game, being it setting material (Freedom City), genre add-ons (Iron Age) or just optional rules (Mastermind's Manual), but the whole game is contained in the first core book, because if you play with it alone, you don't feel anything lacking.

In D&D4, you're thinking "where's my Barbarian?". In Basic, you're thinking "where's my fireball?". So none of them is a complete game just with the first core book(s).

 

[MerricB]

GURPS is a complete game. Its supplements are genre and/or setting information. It's useful, but not needed, although in 4e it has deviated to the "Player book / GM book" model.

In D&D4, you're thinking "where's my Barbarian?". In Basic, you're thinking "where's my fireball?". So none of them is a complete game just with the first core book(s).

However, you're thinking "where's my Barbarian" only because it was in a previous edition (and wasn't even in the core of oD&D, 1st or 2nd edition). I think 4E gives you enough to play 30 levels of it with a wide variety of characters from the start. There are two areas where it really does feel lacking: magic items, and rituals. Basic PC choices? Not so much.

I certainly know that with GURPS 3e, I had a very basic framework with about no details to use. GURPS Magic was pretty much required if I wanted to run any fantasy stuff, and I never enjoyed the system enough to go through the hassle of creating my own monsters for it.

Cheers!

 

[RFisher]

I certainly know that with GURPS 3e, I had a very basic framework with about no details to use. GURPS Magic was pretty much required if I wanted to run any fantasy stuff

Nah. I played in fantasy GURPS games that only used the Basic book magic. The Magic book had a lot of good stuff in it, but the Basic book was sufficient.

Heck, the sample adventure was a fantasy world without magic.

 

[Victim]

GURPS is a complete game. Its supplements are genre and/or setting information. It's useful, but not needed, although in 4e it has deviated to the "Player book / GM book" model.

About HERO, I know nothing. I know it's pretty popular out there, but it never crossed the sea to us

And the oWoD books were games by themselves. And it was just the splatbooks and their growing überification what killed it. But Vampire: The Masquerade is, by itself, a complete game in one book.

"Complete" doesn't mean "no expansions allowed", just that all what you need to experience the *core* game is in the first *core* books.

See Mutants & Masterminds. It's a full game in just one book. It has a lot of splats, and every one of them adds something to the game, being it setting material (Freedom City), genre add-ons (Iron Age) or just optional rules (Mastermind's Manual), but the whole game is contained in the first core book, because if you play with it alone, you don't feel anything lacking.

In D&D4, you're thinking "where's my Barbarian?". In Basic, you're thinking "where's my fireball?". So none of them is a complete game just with the first core book(s).

Well, not really. I'd be perfectly happy making a barbarian warrior with the core 4e books - considering the whole lack of magical primal rage powers in previous editions, most 3.x barbarians I've seen would be represented more closely by 4e fighters than the barbarian class anyway. The new barbarian looks cool, but it also looks different enough that I don't really feel the need for it to do the things I used barbarian to do before.

Most of the recent GURPS releases seem to be more rules oriented supplements - more powers, gadgets, etc.

So if one game (DnD) isn't complete without specific character powers X, then I don't see why that doesn't apply to the disciplines (or whatever they're called now) from the newest clan book, the full rules for another type of Exalt, more super powers, etc.

MnM does seem to be an exception in that most of the UP rules content is basically derived from the creation system in the core book - with the core book, you pretty much have all the same stuff, it's often just not made explicit.

 

[Umbran]

I would imagine that WotC designers would want (and would be wise) to do end-to-end design of many classes before publishing anything. I would fear for the cohesiveness of the design if they hadn't finished the paragon and epic tiers before publishing the heroic tier, for example. So, in terms of initial development time, done properly your model would have taken longer.

In terms of third party support, your functional model would seem lacking. I would imagine third party publishers would like to have a whole end-to-end view of how the game is supposed to work before they started putting out any classes.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I should make it pretty clear that this isn't really "my" model per se. I'm not going to claim ownership of it, or encouragement of it. I just think it was an interesting alternative, and kind of wanted to hear what others thought about it. I do think it's a little bizarre that we have 30 levels of design when most groups don't use all of them, but I'm not sure if breaking them up is a good idea (I'd just prefer condensing them, probably).

Umbran's points are very fair.

The "completeness" thing kind of confuses me because a Lv1-10 game *is* complete. It's just kind of not what we're used to as D&D players, so it probably seems incomplete, in the same way that an edition without druids seems kind of incomplete to a lot of people.

 

[Fifth Element]

I'd buy the Functional Support model if it came in colourful box sets. Nostalgia hits my wallet hard.

 

[Slander]

In terms of the core 3, expanding the breadth of available content makes more sense to me than expanding the depth of existing content. Since we're talking about a class-based system, I prefer classes to be more tightly defined than generic and catch-all. Given that, I don't believe a class-based system could be made that includes "all the options" in one book.