Celebrim
Legend
Ankh-Morpork Guard said:
Why would you assume that when I said specificly that that wasn't what I was talking about? Why would you assume that when I specifically said that what I was talking about was turning class abilities into feats? Why would you say that when I said that one obvious approach would be to take the prerequisites for the class and make them instead the prequisites for a feat? Was it because you couldn't read, or did you just have to have something stupid to say?
Ok, so now after I've done it, you think its a pretty stupid thing to say. Personally, I think its only a pretty stupid thing to say if I can't do it, and frankly given all the arguments about how PrC's are essential for providing mechanics that I got earlier in this thread I don't think that its a entirely obvious you can do it until after you've tried it - but, have it your way.
No, I'm proving something pretty important, and that is that it can all be done with base classes and feats. So now you say, "Well why have base classes at all?" Why not use something like an entirely skill based system? Ok, fine I'll answer that.
First, because players expect D&D to have classes and levels. That sounds like a cop out, but its also a valid reason. Classes and levels are now an accepted part of the game, and the influence of the class/level system extends well beyond D&D and would be familiar to alot of people whoever never played the game. Giving up class and levels certainly can be done, in the same way that we could give up hit points, but it would be much less recognizably D&D.
Second, because one of strengths of a class and level based system is that it gives the game a degree of precision. It lets you say things like 'bring a 7th level character', with the reasonable assumption that all 7th level characters will be able to contribute roughly the same ammount to the party (assuming the DM makes the challenges reasonably broad), and it lets you say 'this monster is a suitable challenge' for 7th level characters. If you've ever played a skill based system like GURPS, you'll realize that that is not necessarily the case. Depending on how the character is built, one X point character can be radically more capable than another. Also levels are big hurdles that people look forward to.
Now, we can do that presumably with just one class - 'the base class'; but, the problem with that is that, again, if you've ever played a skill based system the character creation system you know that they almost always depends on a certain ammount of cooperation on the part of the player to achieve 'good' results, because there is nothing that stops players from becoming one trick ponies. While GURPS offers alot of wonderful character creation flexibility, in practice it is a min/maxers paradise. The same could be said of WW's WoD system, which in theory was supposed to support role playing but in practice supported power gaming. And it only takes one in the group to harm the game for everyone else by hogging the spot light. As we all know, one trick ponies usually do pretty well in RPG's simply by overwhelming foes with thier one all powerful trick. We want to force players to spread thier skill points around, and to do that we have to set mins and maxs on the points that they can spend in a variaty of categories each. Each level they have to buy a certain minumum and maximum advancement in all the areas important to the game - attacks, skills, advancement toward feats, saving throws, spell advancement ect. But once we've done that, the array of mins and maxs we've set in each category becomes effectively a list of possible classes, so we've ended up in attempting to balance our classless system, creating classes anyway.
Once its clear that we might as well create classes anyway, then it becomes clear that we might as well chose a reasonably space spanning subset of the possible classes that we feel we can balance, and some minimal ammount of flavor as a means of guiding new players, while still retaining a high degree of flexibility. Exactly what the optimum number might be I can't say, but it could be as low as three (Blue Rose does this) or it might be as high as ten or twelve, but with a well designed system you can cover every possible in theme character concept with just a handful of classes. In my opinion, this is the best of both worlds.
Generally speaking, I think you want to minimize the number of things that are class abilities. IMO, each class should have no more than one (maybe two) abilities which are completely unique to it. Otherwise, you are going to far in telling the player what to build, instead of leaving it up to the player to design the character. Putting no unique abilities in a class might be ok (but it would certainly suggest a very small array of possible classes), but one ability has the advantage of increasing the uniqueness and attractiveness of each class in a very memorable way.
Now since I did some work, let's be fair and reverse the questions, and see if you can do some work. Why have feats at all? Why have skills? Those aren't trivial questions. You don't need either feats or skills. You could make everything a class ability. You could make a class for every possible character concept. In fact, some people might be inclined to argue that that is just exactly what the community seems bent on doing given the number of pages of paper that have been spent on PrC's. Can you think of some reasons why we might not want more than ten or so classes? Why do you think that among paper RPG's more have dropped PrC's than do the reverse (which is seen in some cRPG's) of making class trees in which some Prestige classes have other Prestige classes as prequisites? Why do you think that some cRPG's do have class trees?
