Creating New Classes: ClassCalc (TM) vs. CCE

[sepulchrave]

It's interesting to me that, although the CCE is frequently invoked by many contributors to this site when questions of balance are involved, ClassCalc, developed by Hamilton Meyer is never referenced.

Is this an oversight, or has Mr. Meyer's formula been rejected or debunked? It's been listed in the electronic utilities section of this site since Eric Noah's time, and I've used it with moderate success. Instead of a flat point system, ClassCalc scales the relative value of abilities by level - i.e. a "special" at 1st level is worth more than one at 20th level. The "average" point count for a Core Class is 296 (it uses a different scale to the CCE).

Anyway, an interesting thing occurred to me yesterday. What if you create a class which falls within the accepted margin for both ClassCalc AND the CCE. With two different methods of calculation, each trying to emulate the (no doubt mythical) method by which WotC originally conceived the classes, surely the chances of it being balanced are extremely high. There will be a natural tendency for wackiness to be - "cancelled out" - so to speak. In fact, the more class calculators that there are, the better. Perhaps a kind of "Golden Mean" can be reached, and balance can be somewhat assured - assuming they don't all repeat the same errors when assigning values to certain abilities, of course.

Anyway, feedback would be appreciated on this one. Just in case ClassCalc has, accidentally, been relegated to obscurity, the link is

http://rpg.hmimages.com/tools.cfm

 

[Frostmarrow]

I tried it. I don't know if the results are trustworthy. According to the program the different core classes are worth the following:

Barbarian: 294
Bard: 295
Cleric: 308
Druid: 295
Fighter: 299
Monk: 298
Paladin: 296
Ranger: 292
Rogue: 297
Sorcerer: 297
Wizard: 297

You can clearly see that the cleric is more powerful than the rest of the classes. This is only natural as the game designers wanted to make the cleric more common. Rangers are valued less than any other core class. I toyed with this for a while. I want the ranger to become more common in my game. I changed stuff, so as to bring it to 298 pts (same as monk). This would make the ranger a bit more common than the paladin but about as common as wizard, rogue or sorcerer. Fighters and clerics will still be dominating the game.

What I did was to remove all spell casting ability plus access to the concentration skill (which she would have very little use for without the spells). Instead I added 2 extra skill points to bring it to 6 skillpoints. This ranger is worth 298 pts. Pretty neat, don't you think?

Ps. You might have guessed that a tool like this only would be used to justify changes to the ranger. Ds.

[Edit On a side-note Monte Cook's alt.ranger weighs in at a whopping 355 points! Holy cow.

 

[drowdude]

Can someone provide a link to the CCE? I *know* I had the link... but now I cant seem to find it...

 

[Alfblack]

Bump..

Need the links also!!

 

[hong]

Google is your friend:

http://www.community3e.com/dn/class_d20cce.pdf

 

[BluWolf]

I tried the Classcalc but found it a little too obscure.

I created spreadsheets for the CCE. Nothing fancy verymanual but ti allows me too see a littel easier, what I'm looking at.

It was just a matter of comfort for me, thats all.