Do we really need Classes anymore?

[Numlock]

The joy of the class/level system is that it allows characters to build characters that they know will have a certain effectiveness, and that it allows the DM to create adventures that will challenge those characters without needing in-detail knowledge of those characters.

GURPS doesn't even come close to that. GURPS characters can have a wide variance in what they do, and it's very easy to build a character that is useless in the adventure it plays. (It should be noted that the only edition of D&D where this was true was also the edition that abandoned the class structure to the greatest extent yet seen in core D&D: 3E).

Cheers!

This is wrong way round argumenting. Adventures should based on the skills and powers of the PC's and not the other way round.

For a GM having a list of Skills, feats and powers describing your PC's is more useful than a list of classes, because one class can be played many very different ways.

 

[garrowolf]

Well I was actually talking about separating levels from classes. I think that we just need a class framework for building characters but not actual classes.

One of the things that I did was to have everyman skills, as in Hero System, but based on your tech level. You also start with all of your savings throw based skills as well. You have several primary skills you can take and these will define your "Class" for your character.

So if you pick fighting skills to be your primary skills then you are effectively a fighter. If you pick Persuasion, Streetwise, and Survival then you are a Rogue. If you pick Academics, Operations, and Tactics then you are a Naval Officer. If you pick Arcane, Sorcery, and Telekinesis then you are a Sorcerer.

Each skill has it's own feat list. The feats are just another way of saying class features so I folded it in to the feat list. In a way you are creating a class just for you.

So what does a class system do better? The crunch is there in the system and skills. The game engine is where balance has to occur. I can see using a class system to fix a bad game engine but we've been designing games now for over 30 years in the gaming industry. We can do better.

The only possible thing I can think of for using a class is where the class is replicating a very linear training situation or a social class that special feats are tied to such as a Royal Guard or Thieves Guild but even then I think that this can be handled just fine in a paragraph description.

 

[Scurvy_Platypus]

To my way of thinking, you've got a whole bunch of different issues that you're tossing into the whole "we don't need classes" bag...

Basically I think that level based games are starting to shed their need for classes. They have been together for so long that most people don't see how that could be but we have Mutants and Masterminds and D20 Call of Cthulhu already that don't have classes and they work fine without them.

There's never been a "need" for them. It's been a preference in some cases and a deliberate design choice in order to focus on certain things in others. Calling M&M a "level based" game is going to annoy some folks, as they consider level as being used to limit the overall power/capability of a character, not as something to pursue (unlike D&D).

You've explicitly called this out as D&D instead of a general rpg thing, so in the context of D&D, classes are a core part of what makes D&D "D&D". If you removed classes (as some versions of d20-based games have done), plenty of folks might say it's a good game, but very few of them will say "Oh yeah, it's totally D&D". Whether or not you could play "D&D styled" games of dungeoncrawling and mass killing is completely beside the point; it's such a fundamental part of the D&D identity, you're not going to get rid of it.

In a broader sense (rpgs in general) there's been a pretty consistent split of non-classed and classed rpgs, so I'm not quite sure the point you're making.

If certain traits (feats, class features, talents, etc) are available in a certain way so you can't get them in stupid ways (ie they require prerequisites of level or each other) then which way you place them in order to create a class is largely not only unnecessarily restrictive on the player but on the whole game system. You are railroading the player down your view of a Fighter or Rogue, etc. Then you give them options to Multiclass and you negate your own railroading and the point of having Classes again.

Errrrr.... what? I'm sorry but this just doesn't make sense to me. Can you break it down further? From what I can figure out...

You might like the character building "mini game" of how to make a character, but not everyone does. Note, I'm not talking about making an _optimised_ character, that's a whole other issue. Some people love screwing around with putting points into this or that skill and tweaking every little aspect of a character. Others don't.

The funny thing is you'll find both of those people on either side of the class vs classless debate. Additionally, you've got a whole other group of person that wants "realism" of a greater or lesser degree. They frequently like classes because they can make a class that reflects their idea of what's "reasonable" or "realistic" for a person with that sort of background to have. Of course on the other side of the realistic fence, you've got people that complain how a class (and level-based for that matter) system forces you to have characters that don't necessarily make sense (high level scientists or other skill monkeys having high combat capability).

I know that certain settings need Archetypes that are laid out. However if we define them as Archetypes and just say that a particular player is close to or is deviating from a traditional Archetype is all we really need to do. If there is a social consequence to creating a weird character type then let that occur. Maybe require a background explaining how that character learned those strange combination of skills.

First, why is it that "archetype" gets a free pass and you don't hate it, but you hate "class" instead? There really isn't a whole lot stopping you from changing the name from "class" to "archetype" if it makes you feel better.

Both options are constraining choices. The one of the biggest differences is that if they're calling it an "archetype" instead of a "class" they game system author explicitly gives you permission to change things, usually by saying something along the lines of "Feel free to add [skill or power] from another archetype if it matches the player's vision of the character better."

D&D doesn't explicitly contain that instruction, but it's an option for any GM that feels like it. The problem isn't that the rules don't explicitly tell the GM they can do that, the problem is that too many GMs and players refuse to deviate from "Rules as Written"; that's a completely seperate problem and a failure on the part of the game group, not the game.

If you have some Archetypes laid out then the players will have an idea of your setting but most of the time the players are going to either want to create something traditional or not.

Ummm.... this doesn't make sense to me. To me it reads like you just said "Archetypes help the players have a feel for your game world, but most of the time people are going to want to play anything."

Which is sort of a "Yes, and...?" statement to me. Of course some players are going to want to play a stereotyped (another term for "class" or "archetype") character. "Dude, I wanna be a badass fighter like Conan!"

Classes provide just as much of a background for the setting as "archetypes" do. And again, not everyone is really going to feel like spending hours making some character. Honestly, if I'm expected to learn a huge amount of background information just so I can figure out what kind of a character to make? I won't play the game. Period. I'll find another group or hang out with my friends and just do something else.

The problem is again an issue of flexability. For people that want to invest minimal effort into the game, classes/archetypes/stereotypes are ideal. Same thing for people that have minimal experience with the game system. You know, early in the days of 3.0 D&D I saw an awful lot of folks that showed up and were curious about D&D but were nervous about all the rules they had to learn. The advice I saw frequently given? Find someone that knows the game and they'll teach you over the course of a few months. Regardless of whether you find that advice appalling or not, the complexity level of the game goes up a fair chunk when it's completely open/class-less.

Now, presenting a method for class-less play? That's something that could certainly be done and should probably be given as an option. However, that of course does make the issue of balancing the system much more difficult.

Why restrict the players or yourself as a GM and more importantly why go through the work of creating the classes in the first place?

Because some people don't see it as a restriction. You're confusing your subjective preferences with some sort of objective truth that doesn't exist.

Understand, I say this as a dude who's go-to system is PDQ, which relies on player-defined traits (in other words, a players stats/skills/etc are entirely up to the player); I'm a strong supporter of the class-less (and even level-less) approach to rpgs. But systems like the 3.x d20 system definitely have their place; I'm even working on several d20-based projects.

The class system provides a clear example of the sort skills and characters one can expect to find within a setting.

The class system provides a much lower barrier to entry for certain types of players. It's important to realise that the whole "some kinds of players" thing doesn't mean "For those players that have played rpgs for a while and their tastes have changed" or something like that. While it can be a factor in some cases, plenty of folks from the moment they try rpgs are better suited to one style of game system as opposed to another.

The class system allows for an attempt to have a niche for each player within the group, allowing the players to feel as if their character has a value.

In the specific case of D&D/d20, the class system is part of the process of trying to ensure a "balanced" game; balance being defined as a character being able to meaningfully contribute to an encounter, as well as a GM having sufficient tools to be able to design an encounter with the goal of it being challenging but not unintentionally insurrmountable.

Strange as it might sound to you, designing classes is where at least some folks dip their feet into the general arena of design. It's a starting point where people that are interested can actually sit down and think about the underlying assumptions of the game system, in terms of character competence, encounter difficulty, player expectation, etc. There's an awful lot of potentially complex stuff that can go into class design. The results of this may or may not be obvious in the final design of the class, but a well designed class has some thought behind it. It's also where folks play around some with mechanical subsystems, looking to tweak the game in "small" ways. Of course, certain gameplay changes for a class have far-reaching implications, but that's part of what a designer should be thinking about as well.

The class system provides a base frame of reference. Sure, you can do a game without classes, but it's harder to judge mechanical interactions in a number of respects. Starting from a fixed point with mostly consistent assumptions means it's easier for a designer (either company or homebrewer) to develop their creations.

In other words, d20 can work with a non-defined class/archtype structure. However, there's been a decade of work done within the context of the class structure which means that it's significantly easier to look at something and say "that'll probably work" and "That combines with that to produce gameplay we don't want; we'll need to limit one of these mechanisms in some way."

For better or worse, it's a part of the balancing system of d20. While folks bitch about how useless the CR system is (and it does have problems), the CR system is much friendlier for people that are inexperienced with either GMing or the game system in general. Lots of rpg systems basically shrug and say "do whatever sounds good... you'll figure it out eventually" when it comes to the actual question of designing encounters of some sort. The class system is a part of how that balance is set up in d20. Doesn't mean it's perfect, doesn't mean there aren't better ways, just sayin' it's a part of the assumptions and things would be much more difficult if it hadn't been set up that way.

Some people also like the minigame of character building, as I've mentioned before.

I think I've offered plenty of reasons for why D&D has classes and why it should continue to do so. Understand that in the context of whether or not "d20" should have classes, it's a bit of a moot point. The d20 system you're playing around with (released under the OGL) is out in the wild for folks to play around with and do whatever they want. Make it class-less or not as you want. But at the time it was put out there, it was released with the expectation that it would be supporting D&D. This is important because when you look at 4E, WotC have closed off the ability to system hack the rules the same way. Which means that as far as _WotC_ is concerned, if you're doing it class-less, you're playing it wrong.

The joy of the class/level system is that it allows characters to build characters that they know will have a certain effectiveness, and that it allows the DM to create adventures that will challenge those characters without needing in-detail knowledge of those characters.

I'd strongly disagree with you. It takes no effort whatsoever to find people optimising characters far in excess of what you'd expect a character to perform as. A rather vocal chunk of folks that dislike 4E explicitly dislike it because the characters "are all basically the same" and there isn't the ability to blow the character competency assumptions out of the water.

No, not everyone plays that way and not everyone has to play that way, but it's a strong component. What the class system does provide is an idea of what the designers of the game expected in terms of overall competency.

The class system can aid a GM in creating adventures, but at least in the d20 system a GM that doesn't actually have knowledge of the characters and just relies on a class name and a level? That's a GM that's going to have serious problems.

My own perspective and all, so it doesn't mean I'm "right" just what I've seen.

 

[pawsplay]

The joy of the class/level system is that it allows characters to build characters that they know will have a certain effectiveness, and that it allows the DM to create adventures that will challenge those characters without needing in-detail knowledge of those characters.

GURPS doesn't even come close to that. GURPS characters can have a wide variance in what they do, and it's very easy to build a character that is useless in the adventure it plays. (It should be noted that the only edition of D&D where this was true was also the edition that abandoned the class structure to the greatest extent yet seen in core D&D: 3E).

Cheers!

In the extreme form of your argument, a balanced game is one in which any characters can play in any adventure, without knowing who the PCs are or their precise capabilities. I'm not sure I would call that a strength; you would basically be saying PCs are interchangeable.

In the less extreme version, GURPS is as good as D&D at matching adventurers to adventures. If you plays GURPS Fantasy, you still have the knight, the scoundrel, the noble, the magician, and so forth. The players and GM should both have a clear picture of what they intend to play, of course. After all, you wouldn't want to try to run a Dark Sun game in D&D and have the players show up with a warforged paladin, an Evermeet wizard, and a Solamnic knight. Provided you can summarize the game, along the lines of, "We're playing a police procedural set in Transhuman Space" or "this will be a Dark Sun inspired swords-and-sorcery campaign," you should not have any problems with PC capabilities matching adventures. In fact, if you have certain assumptions in play, like there being a healer or a lockpicker, it's much easier in GURPS to get someone to pick that up as a secondary speciality than it is to modify a D&D party on the fly. And if at the end of the day, someone wants to play a cowardly thief with minimal combat skills, they can. Some would consider it a feature and not a bug that a certain mix of PCs would rather flee from the royal guard than slaughter them.

I've seen some unusual PCs in GURPS, but I've never seen a "useless" one.

 

[Beginning of the End]

If you read these two quotes together, seemingly, GURPS characters should all devolve to the same, supposedly optimal killer build, and yet any two characters will not be of comparable power, suggesting they are not built to the same killer build. It is possible that one of these things is true and the other isn't, both are true in an inobvious way, or neither is true.

You've reversed one of the statements. The two proper statements are:

(1) All characters with optimal killer builds will look similar.
(2) Characters which aren't optimal killer builds will be left behind.

Assuming, of course, that "combat balance" is the goal. (Which is usually the unstated assumption here.)

GURPS achieves "balance" in a different way than 4e. Rather than making all characters roughly equivalent in numbers and scope of abilities, your point budget roughly amounts to a purchase of screen time in a particular area. It would be an exceptionally strange GURPS game in which "I win melee combat" left the other characters with nothing to do. And just to be clearing, completely dominating one area is usually non-trivial until you get to higher point totals, or you resort to exotic constructions. GURPS is well-balanced in that you can create a character with their own area in which to shine.

Part of the problem with this discussion is that "balance" can mean many different things in an RPG. I recommend checking out The Many Types of Balance.

You're focusing primarily on spotlight balance, but spotlight balance has very little to do with the system and relies a lot on scenario design. You may be the only cyberdecker in the group, but if your GM puts you in a deserted island scenario with no tech you're screwed (to take an extreme example).

And even within the context of spotlight balance, GURPS has some issues: Some spotlights require a lot of points to actually master, while other spotlights can be mastered with fewer points (due to the disparate number of skills required for one vs. the other). Due to the complex system mastery, you can easily find that you thought you specialized in a spotlight only to discover that you missed key skills and now need to salvage or rebuild your character.

GURPS also features numerous and well-documented "unequal paths" to the same result: You can spend 50 points using one build and get result X; whereas achieving result X in a different way might require 100 points. This again becomes a system mastery issues, where one player can build a character efficiently and get two or three spotlights while another player with less experience may only get one.

GURPS is great for its immense flexibility. When it comes to balance, though, it's merely mediocre.

 

[MerricB]

In the extreme form of your argument, a balanced game is one in which any characters can play in any adventure, without knowing who the PCs are or their precise capabilities. I'm not sure I would call that a strength; you would basically be saying PCs are interchangeable.

Indeed; my argument was phrased poorly.

There are certain assumptions that a D&D adventure generally makes: that the characters have a way to heal, that they can fight, and that there are certain skills (spells) they possess.

That said, you can make the statement "an adventure for 4th level characters" in D&D and it means something to the potential DM. Likewise "an adventure for 12th level characters".

My limited experience with GURPS indicates that it's a lot more predictable with lower point (gritty) settings, where the variance of abilities isn't so high. Once you get to higher point (super) settings, making such assumptions about PC abilities is very much more difficult: there's not really much of a baseline.

Cheers!

 

[MerricB]

They have been together for so long that most people don't see how that could be but we have Mutants and Masterminds

Since when is M&M a level-based game? Because... it isn't. At least the 2nd edition I played wasn't.

M&M is a power-cap system. Your powers can't be better than "this good". It's entirely possible to build a character who is gimped on key stats (defenses, attacks, etc.). System familiarity is really important to the game, so that you don't build horrible characters.

(That said, we still had horrible balance problems with a few powers, such as Constitution Drain...)

Cheers!

 

[garrowolf]

Okay M&M isn't a normal level system. It is a bit weird how it deals with it but I like it. I think that it does Supers better then any other game system I've seen. I was thinking of levels as power levels from that game.

I do like that ability to get a general idea of power level from the "level" of a character. I think that it is a good framework to reflect general living experience.

I didn't think I was talking specifically about D&D but about modern class based systems. It does have a large market share but I never really liked it for other reasons. I was thinking more about D20 Modern, Spycraft, D20 Call of Cthulhu, T20 Traveler, Pathfinder, D20 Stargate SG1, Star Wars D20, etc. It wasn't an attempt to bash D&D, I can do that all day long but I just don't care.

About the issue of balance I don't see how having classes improves play balance except to limit the character's choices. If the core system is balanced then any characters you create would make sense. However that doesn't mean that they will all be matches for each other in a fight. They just need to be useful in their own way.

Having a balanced party is up to the players and the GM to at least some degree. You can create imbalanced parties WITH Classes. You can create a party that is good in dungeons and not in cities or on the ocean. That is based on the GM either telling the players what kind of PCs he wants for his game or just simply being cruel (or challenging them if they like that sort of thing). If you put players into settings that they don't have the tools to deal with the Classes are not going to save you. IN fact I would say that it would hurt you if you did anything beyond the standard hack and slash game.

Class based systems that deal with more modern settings end up having too many classes or classes that are vague in order to deal with the variety of tasks and challenges possible.

I didn't say that I hate class based systems but after a while of thinking about it I don't remember enjoying most class based games, usually because of the classes. If I wanted to create a character that was a little different from the standard classes but would have made perfect sense in the setting I would either have to create a new class or warp an existing one. I could come up with a great character in most any other system that didn't require classes. That doesn't mean it was the most powerful character either. I prefer to make more role play type of characters that can hold their own in their niche.

@ScurvyPlatypus I don't really understand how you don't understand the difference between a class and an archetype. A Class is like going down a hallway. An Archetype is an example of someone that went down a hallway. Classed and Point Based Systems use Archetypes all the time. All it shows is an example of a created character and what a character sheet might look like filled out. IF you have Archetypes of a bunch of NPCs such as police, military, bankers, and bums then you can help the players and the GM understand the values for the characters better. It's just an example.

If you have that example of a police officer then a player can look that the character creation process with an eye to at least have most of the things that the police archetype did but he will usually have more resources to work with. If I want to create a character who was a police officer and that game doesn't have a police officer class then what?

I'm not sure how else to break down the concepts of character creation. It's not a minigame (though that is a funny idea that could be used in a game).

Anytime someone is looking at various character classes they are weighting the set resources of this class or that class. What I am saying is make those resources available to the players creating a character in limited amounts and maybe they will come up with a better and more interesting character then the list of classes you have let them use.

Yes I will agree that the complexity goes up when you go from a limited system to a more universal system. However I don't believe that it goes up in the way you are saying. For instance if I have ten character classes and a new system I could just grab a character that is close to whatever I normally play OR I could look at each one and decide what kind of character I want in this system and setting. In order to do that I will have to figure out a lot of subsystems and what this value means and that value means. So I am having to learn the system to some degree either way.

However if I just take the basic system and learn how characters work I can create that same character and be more confident about my choices.

Now I will admit that a new player who is just pointing at a list of character types with no real understanding about gaming would have a faster time with a class (He would have an even faster time with an Archetype). But beyond that first time creating a character I can't see any advantage.

 

[Scurvy_Platypus]

Now I will admit that a new player who is just pointing at a list of character types with no real understanding about gaming would have a faster time with a class (He would have an even faster time with an Archetype). But beyond that first time creating a character I can't see any advantage.

So really, it seems your question isn't so much "Do we need classes?", but "convince me there's a reason to have classes, because I don't think there is". You appear to have already decided exactly what your opinion on the whole thing is and seem to want someone to prove you wrong or something.

*shrug*

That being the case, I don't have anything further to contribute. I and others have explained reasons for 'em and if you don't accept them, nobody is really going to convince you otherwise. Hopefully you get the answer you're looking for.

 

[Zinovia]

Balance is a dirty word to some gamers, and the Holy Grail to others. To some it means artificial restrictions on character choice, and to others it means you can play in an adventure and know that each character will have something meaningful to contribute to the success of the party. The goal of balance is to prevent one character from being best at everything, and it is generally accomplished by restricting options. Advocates of free choice prefer access to all options so they can build the exact nuanced character they envisioned, even if that character is ineffective.

Eliminating character classes doesn't guarantee freedom of choice when building a character. Most point buy systems have skill trees or increase the cost of learning successively higher ranks of the same skill. Before you can throw fireballs you first have to learn to ignite flammable material, then to throw a fire dart. To get the next rank in hacking costs more than it did to learn the previous one. These restrictions are both there to ensure that you have to invest a lot of points in something to excel at it. Point buy games rarely allow complete freedom of choice, and certainly they don't reward spending points willy nilly on whatever strikes your fancy. The apparent freedom of choice is an illusion.

Players with mastery of that system will know that you are usually better off focusing on a limited number of skills, rather than widely scattering skill points. They also know where the investment of points in a narrow focus stops being worth it, and when they should diversify. Inexperienced players may wind up making ineffective characters without a strong focus, or else focus too narrowly and "waste" points that could have been spent more effectively elsewhere. It takes more understanding of the system to make a balanced character than it does in a class-based system.

Whether or not to use a class-based or point buy system comes down to the type of game you are playing. Modern and futuristic games do better with point buy. Classes are harder to define in those game settings. Although strong archetypes may exist, they won't encompass all the valid character concepts. What class is a legal secretary with a black belt in Taekwondo, or an ex-football player who likes to fix cars? On the other hand, I believe fantasy games do better with class-based mechanics. The archetypes in that genre are much stronger. Spells are usually assigned based on class, and can have very different flavor because of that. Class gives you a pre-defined cohesive package of abilities that fits well into the setting and helps ensure balance.

I tried GURPS fantasy for a year, and disliked it compared to both D&D and Rolemaster. Champions was good for building superheroes, but I don't like it for fantasy. The feel of a game is always tied to the system mechanics, and therefore I don't believe there is such a thing as a universal system. Classes for fantasy, point buy for most everything else.