D&D 4E Classless D&D 4e: A game designer's ramblings

[pukunui]

Hi everyone,

Just to keep things separate, I'll start a new thread on the other thing that Mearls said in his recent message board post: it should be easy to you could play classless d&d with the 4e rules.

Here's the quote:

You can also roll things back another step and do some crazy stuff with the structure of the classes. Since many of the elements of character progression are unified, you could run classless D&D by allowing players to select maneuvers and spells from any class they want, mingling the two together, or start everyone with access to all heroic abilities and grant access to divine and arcane via feats.

I know that will make some people happy. I don't know that I'm all that interested in classless d&d, although I'd be willing to try it, but what does make me happy is the implication that 4e is going to be highly customizable and that it's going to be fairly easy to do so. 3.5 is actually fairly difficult to customize, at least for me it is, so this is good news as far as I'm concerned. EDIT: If 4e is more customizable without having to worry too much about balance issues than 3.5 was, then I will be happy (happier?) and I'm sure some other people will be too.

 

[MaelStorm]

We'll have to see the Core Books first, but it is a dream come true.

I think it is perfect for DM and players. Great design flexibility.

 

[WhatGravitas]

I've said that in the other thread, but from this (and other hints), I get the suspicion that 4E is basically the end-user front of a more generic RPG engine, made for "cinematic action", where the fantasy flavour is a possible dressing.

What does that mean? 4E will be great for us gearheads and hobby designers. WotC has a solid basic game to build upon, more streamlined than the d20 engine, opening up things like CoC d20, Star Wars d20, Wheel of Time d20 and many things like that again.

D&D is just the "prime" product, but perhaps they may follow-up by a more generic, more customizable version - the motor of the "game system" so to speak. That would explain why the new GSL is probably different - they don't want to open up 4E, because they only want to open up the underlying gear (like d20), but keep their specific fantasy interpretation for themselves.

Sort of a "Game Engine SRD". That would allow people to develop things for 4E using that base, but would affect "copy & paste" publishing severely - meaning they are perhaps trying to establish a generic system, minus D&D. But that's just speculation.

Cheers, LT.

 

[Sitara]

I htink people may be taking this a bit outof proportion. I mean, dndn GURPS this is not. (and this is a good thing!)

 

[Aloïsius]

That's very interesting. I think I have more reason to wait a few months before buying 4e, so that I can use those possibilities.

 

[Pbartender]

It'd sure be nice to see these suggestions codified in an Appendix of the 4E DMG.

 

[HeinorNY]

As I posted in the other thread, my 2 cents on this is that what will differentiate classes in 4E are only the talents/feats, access to skills, flat bonuses to BAB and defenses, so it's gonna be incredibly easier to create new and balanced classes, or play with no classes at all.

No more balance issues when creating a class/prestige class such as:
"Is it balanced to give this class a Good BAB instead of a medium BAB? It has to poor saves and a good save, 8 skills pts per level. Maybe if I give it 4 skills pts per level I can give it another good save."
"This prestige class has special abilities as powerful as a Xth level character, so the requirements should be hmmm 2 or 3 feats? 2 good feats or 3 weak feats? Should it have spells per day or its own separated spell progression?"

Instead of that nightmare, all you'll need to do is distribute flat bonuses at 1st level (take a look at SWSE to know what I'm talking about), starting feats/talents, number of skills trained, and assign access to powers.

Tweaker's heaven.

 

[pukunui]

I've said that in the other thread, but from this (and other hints), I get the suspicion that 4E is basically the end-user front of a more generic RPG engine, made for "cinematic action", where the fantasy flavour is a possible dressing.

What does that mean? 4E will be great for us gearheads and hobby designers. WotC has a solid basic game to build upon, more streamlined than the d20 engine, opening up things like CoC d20, Star Wars d20, Wheel of Time d20 and many things like that again.

D&D is just the "prime" product, but perhaps they may follow-up by a more generic, more customizable version - the motor of the "game system" so to speak. That would explain why the new GSL is probably different - they don't want to open up 4E, because they only want to open up the underlying gear (like d20), but keep their specific fantasy interpretation for themselves.

Sort of a "Game Engine SRD". That would allow people to develop things for 4E using that base, but would affect "copy & paste" publishing severely - meaning they are perhaps trying to establish a generic system, minus D&D. But that's just speculation.

Cheers, LT.

That sounds good to me.

As I posted in the other thread, my 2 cents on this is that what will differentiate classes in 4E are only the talents/feats, access to skills, flat bonuses to BAB and defenses, so it's gonna be incredibly easier to create new and balanced classes, or play with no classes at all.

No more balance issues when creating a class/prestige class such as:
"Is it balanced to give this class a Good BAB instead of a medium BAB? It has to poor saves and a good save, 8 skills pts per level. Maybe if I give it 4 skills pts per level I can give it another good save."
"This prestige class has special abilities as powerful as a Xth level character, so the requirements should be hmmm 2 or 3 feats? 2 good feats or 3 weak feats? Should it have spells per day or its own separated spell progression?"

Instead of that nightmare, all you'll need to do is distribute flat bonuses at 1st level (take a look at SWSE to know what I'm talking about), starting feats/talents, number of skills trained, and assign access to powers.

Tweaker's heaven.

And that sounds even better. I want to be able to customize stuff without having to worry too much about balance issues. I pretty much avoided any tweaking with the 3.5 rules because I was too afraid of messing up the balance. I made some changes, and some of them probably had significant balance issues (I chose to use the Weapon Group feats and Spontaneous Divine Casters variants from Unearthed Arcana, for instance). So if I'll be able to do some tweaking of the 4e rules without making something too over- or under-powered, I'll be one very happy camper indeed.

 

[Darkwolf71]

Slow down, Billy.

The classless thing is pure noodling/theorizing/game tinkering on my part. It isn't something that the core game comes out and tells you how to do.

The guy's just rattling random designer thots.

 

[mearls]

Yes, as Darkwolf71 said, this is a bit of an overreaction to what I said in the other thread. That was speculation, which perhaps wasn't clear in my first post.

So, while it's sort of cool to have like 15 threads with my name on them on EN World there's some overreaction going on.