2E Class Creation Rules

[the_bruiser]

Nowadays, of course, it's not my bag. But at the time - I thought they were halfway decent rules.

It's interesting to me that you say that. A point-buy D&D has been my 'holy grail' ever since.

POINT ONE
Skills & Powers / Spells & Magic were crack to me. I remember spending an entire Christmas break just killing that system. We were playing at the time a game where you could buy 'extra' attribute points by paying EXP penalties... well, I crushed that. My dream character was built like this:
* Buy points high enough for dual classing.
* Start as cleric, get ridiculous shapechange, basic healing, and a bunch of at will / periodic abilities, etc., focusing on taking a bunch of martial arts abilities along with warrior combat abilities.
* Dual to thief, get the decent intro skills.
* Dual to wizard and start progressing as Transmutationist, or whatever it was called.

That guy was sick. He could fight with a THAC0 close to a fighter and with the Tentacles spell and Haste he could attack like 11 times per round.

POINT TWO
I've built a 3E point-buy system that my players LOVE. It's based around buying feats - every class ability from every class is dropped down to being a feat. Players pay an 'entry cost' to be able to access class lists. It's been great for us. Of course, now we all have kids and haven't played in a year, so I guess I just read this site now for fund.

 

[karlindel]

I have a friend who broke down the 3.5 classes into a point buy system. He costs BAB, Base Saves, Class Abilities, Feats, Skill Points, and Spellcasting. Each level you received 40 points to buy these bonuses for your character, with limits on BAB and Base Saves based on Level.

He started off by deconstructing the classes and setting it up so that each could be built using the system. He then tweaked them, adding power to some (such as the paladin and bard) and de-powering others (cleric and druid).

Spellcasting had to be bought in increments of at least 10 points (to avoid abuses of severely cheap but powerful packages) and had a base cost (for schools of magic, clerical domains, keywords (such as fire, air, etc.)) modified by other factors (# of spell slots, casting on the fly vs. memorization, focus requirement for all spells, etc.).

It had the benefit of extreme customization, although the drawback of being math intensive. He developed spreadsheets to make character creation go more smoothly. Of course, it also included a lot of his personal idiosyncracies as the costing was based on his assessment of an abilities' value and he also tweaked many of the spell levels, keywords, and the like. All in all, it was an impressive undertaking.

 

[jmucchiello]

And bards? I hate bards! Never a problem since I never knew anyone who played one in 2E anyway.

Every 2e character I played was a fighter/bard multiclass (we didn't enforce the multiclass restrictions AT ALL). I never touched the 3e bard class because it lacked all the cool wizard spells.

I guess I should point out my own Character Customization book for creating 3.0 compatible classes. The 3.5 version never saw the light of day (and is only 80% complete at that). A different approach was Buy The Number (by Spencer Cooley) which is an experience point buy system (buy abilities as you receive xp). Both are for sale on RpgNow/DriveThruRpg. I'd link to them but I don't have the ENWorld based links handy.

As for 4e: if the GSL were more OGLish, I'd have put some effort into a system of basic stat1, stat2, choose role, choice 3 combat effects from menu1, etc with formulas to map out the main power for each level. Level 1 daily might be 2W or 1W with effect-1. Taking that option (in lieu of a 2W on stat2 power) allows the level 1 encounter power with 1W and a weaker effect using stat2, etc. The PHB 2 and up classes have made this menu selection idea slightly more difficult, but not so much so. The real trick was figuring out how to invent the class powers. But I never delve to deeply into the mechanics of this idea.