How do you choose a class?

[The Firebird]

I write Cleric in the box where it says class

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I want something that will intellectually engage me. What that means varies a bit based on the game, but it generally precludes the "I swing my sword, end of turn" classes, although I'm well aware I have players at my table who like that sort of clarity of purpose.

 

[The Soloist]

I talk with the other players, and we try to come up with a coherent group that will cover the bases for the RPG we will be playing. Because we change GM every 3-4 months, the character turnover is rapid. In 2024, I played two brawlers (Paranoia, Vaesen) and an investigator (CoC). Next time I'm a player, I'll go for a diplomat or a technician.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

What RPG game did anyone have trouble figuring out what to play, or what seemed like it might be fun? (setting aside rules or core systems... just talking at the character creation stage here...)

I probably had more problems with creating PCs when I started out in the hobby, but those difficulties are lost to my memory.

These days, most of my problems come down to “how do I create this character in this system” or settling on fine details when presented several options. IOW, narrowing my options down to actual decisions.

For instance, in HERO, there might literally be hundreds of ways to create a certain type of character.

Or in D&D 3.X, you might have several feats that would work well for a PC, but since they’re a finite resource, you have to pick and choose carefully if you want your play experiences to approximate the ideas you have in your head. One time that cropped up for me was when 3Ed was introduced, and my group decided to continue the campaign we’d started in AD&D, through 2Ed, and into the (then) new edition.

I had the conversion guide, but there were certain things that were simply not going to convert well or at all for certain characters. So I settled on trying to model the key aspects of how characters had worked in play in the prior editions. That led to one character dropping one of his 3 classes.

Thing is, I’d been through a similar situation before. When I was in a group in Austin, we decided that- to combat GM no-shows and RW pressures- everyone in the group had to design a campaign to run, and everyone had to have a character for every campaign. Each week, we scheduled someone to be the primary GM and someone else to be the backup, and the rest of us had to bring what we needed for the 2 scheduled games. (Boardgames were our 3rd option, but we rarely needed it.)

Because of this, I decided to take inspiration from Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion cycle and create a character whom I could model in almost any system, for any setting as a personal challenge. I came up with Slapstick, a mercenary who used evil clown makeup & wigs to hide his features & identity. Think of him as a heroic/antiheroic version of The Joker or tragicomic Punisher. (IOW, not quite a villain…but not far from one.)

He got statted out for 2Ed, HERO, GURPS, Torg, RIFTS, and a few other systems. I only played a couple versions of him.

 

[sevenbastard]

I always go with a PC who is good at stealth and combat. I have a type.

 

[Clint_L]

I put party dynamics at the forefront. Being the DM a lot, I like to let others choose their characters first and then make my character with that information. Let my fellow players drive it a bit since I get to do that so much when I'm on the other side of the screen.

After that, I try to make my new character different from my previous or other current ones in either mechanics, role/style, or both. Recently it was jolly Beast Barb -> merciless War Wizard -> caretaker Grave Cleric. And that's just the 5e games.

Same. Plus, probably like most of the folks on this forum, I tend to be the guy in the group who knows the rules, so it's pretty easy for me to step into any class or role.

 

[Tonguez]

My general thought processes go I want a character who can ... um acrobatic melee style, dextrous, hmm monk or rogue? ew swashbuckler? - I'm a Pirate yeah!

or I want I want small and no magic - eew grenades instead = okay Gnome Alchemist, why doesnt this game have tiny gnomes?

for DnD its often hmm hmm Zealot Druid looks interesting, and Barbarian for the Rage - eew Bearbarian Zealot!

 

[John Dallman]

For me, this isn't a process I can analyse completely. There's a mixture of several criteria:

• Is there something in this setting I want to learn more about? For example, in Avalon, there's a dominant religion, but as far as I knew five years ago, there hadn't been any PC clerics that were members. So I created one, have learned a lot about the religion, and helped develop the spell lists for some of its aspects.
• What will be needed in a party? For the GURPS 4e Dungeon Fantasy campaign, it was obvious we'd need skilled hand-to-hand fighters, so I took a Knight (the heavy armour and weapons template) and found it entertaining. There are a lot more options for combat tactics in GURPS than D&D, so it isn't just "attempt to hit, roll damage if successful, turn ends."
• How does the party fit into the setting? This criterion has had many different effects, but it usually starts with who the character's family are, and their social and economic position. My sole D&D 5e character to date was a dwarven apprentice stonemason, who got conscripted into an army in wartime, and became an adventurer to earn money to get his father's hand regenerated after an accident.
• What should I do for the player group? In the occult WWII campaign, my character in the first strand was up at the sharp end of the party and got a lot of solo scenes as an infiltrator. So in the next strand, I'm playing a character who's mainly about supporting the other characters. This includes being the notional leader, which mainly involves taking responsibility rather then telling the other PCs what to do.

 

[JAMUMU]

How many moving parts does this class have? How much do i need to plan ahead for this class? How many decisions do I have to make during play? The class that answers closest to "Not very many! Not at all! Like 3 at most!" is the one I pick.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Personally, I don't really have a process. I just usually immediately have an idea about what kind of character I'd like to play, and this has consistently been the case since I even heard about D&D, let alone played it. What that exact idea is will change based on the the RPG, the setting, and so on, of course.

The main I time I deviate from just playing what immediately occurs to me is in class-based RPGs where you kind of want a balanced party. In those situations I tend towards playing Leader or Support classes (kind of the same thing), unless people already have those covered.

I loathe systems with highly random character generation because my experience is you end up with things that doesn't at all match what I was actually interested in playing, and having played plenty of them over the years, I can safely say this isn't going to change. Playing a random class has never, ever been more or even as fun as playing a class I picked.

What that means varies a bit based on the game, but it generally precludes the "I swing my sword, end of turn" classes, although I'm well aware I have players at my table who like that sort of clarity of purpose.

I have met players who claimed to want that "clarity of purpose". They then consistently picked high-to-medium complexity non-spellcasters (or even light spellcasters like 5E Paladin), rather than the actual most-straightforward classes. Which, like, good for them, but it kind of convinced me that you don't need to go terribly simple, design-wise, to please them.