Hack Or Heartbreaker?

View attachment 85147​

How best to structure your own RPG? It’s not a new dilemma. Back in the day games publishers always sought to innovate, whether that be a relatively small change, like adding spell points to a D&D chassis, or something more fundamental, like dispensing with class and level entirely, making skills more central to the game. Turning over the box or book of a game in the 80s you would usually see an excited description of the unique innovations within; no alignment! Personalised magic! Just d6s! Play an animal! Be evil!

Later, publishers hit upon the notion of a core system that could power multiple games. The next step was to open up that system for others to play with, in the hope that eventually there might be one game system to rule them all. D20 looked like it might actually achieve that at one point, but soon enough other companies followed suit. Now there are dozens of open games systems that the nascent publisher can use to boost their ideas into reality.

As a first step for me and my homebrewed game, I had to decide which route to take. Early on it became clear to me that my best system ideas were built on the shoulders of games I’d played over the years. Like many gamers I have binders full of house rules and other things I had done to tinker with my engine of choice. I had fewer ideas about systems built from the ground up. My decision was clear; I was going to work with an open gaming template.

Perhaps the most appealing thing about pre-existing mechanics is the mental space it gives you to apply your creativity to the things outside of the rules. The story, the flavour, the setting and the presentation. These are the parts of the game where the adjectives come to life. The rule themselves are merely the nuts and bolts, that’s why they call them mechanics.

Having made that decision, the harder decision presented itself; which licence to go with? Wizards of the Coast supplied the hobby with the OGL back in 200O, and that’s powered so many other options. In the end I wanted to stay close to fantasy, and my favourite relation in the D&D family has long been 13th Age. This game has its own SRD, called the Archmage Engine, and it’s one I'm more than passingly familiar with. So, that has become the skeleton of my system.

Staying true to that choice hasn’t always been easy. Every time I pick up a new game I find something interesting that I want to paste into my work. I love the downtime activities in Blades in the Dark. I love the equipment packages in Into the Odd. It’s easy to get distracted and end up with a game burdened like the mule in Buckaroo. Must resist!

So with the SRD in one window, and a blank doc in another, it was time to bring it all to life.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

The biggest strength of a class-based system is that it tells us (at least in part) how the world works. If you have a class that is Vindalan Pirate, and it grants certain abilities and skills and whatnot, then we know what Vindalan Pirates are and what they can do in the world. It helps the player to engage with the setting, and hopefully there's at least one class that grabs the player and makes them more excited to play the game.

While you could theoretically get much of that benefit in a point-based game, by defining a class-template which includes those particular aspects, it tends to not work in practice. If a point-based class-template is just a pile of aspects, then a player can usually just take those aspects by paying the points for them, without actually joining whatever group those aspects are supposed to represent - instead of being a Vindalan Pirate, they're just a freelance pirate, and they aren't engaged with the setting anymore - and in practice, that's almost always going to be the route they take, because it lets the player focus on the specific aspects they want instead of taking the whole package. If Vindalan Pirates have a fearsome reputation that grants them a bonus in certain social situations, then a player who doesn't take the template will instead have more points to spend on swinging a sword or piloting a boat; in fact, a player might even want to take that class-template because they would enjoy that minor social perk, but they may not be able to justify it if they haven't also invested heavily in Charisma or whatever. Leave the social bonuses to the social character, because your job is to swing a sword and pilot the boat, is the common wisdom.

Class-based systems force players to engage with character archetypes in an all-or-nothing manner. If you don't want to be a Vindalan Pirate, or maybe a Corsani Pirate, then you're not going to be a pirate or anything like a pirate. You must be something that holds significance within the setting. And that character archetype probably will include some features that you wouldn't have otherwise chosen (or been able to justify spending the points on), which you now gain the full benefit from. You may not get to carefully pick which ribbons you get, but neither will you be penalized by taking abilities outside of your party role.

I think those are really good points. But having thought about it, I don't think classes, as I envision them, are really necessary for that. The primary difference between a class and a template is that a class continues to be restricting for the character's career, while a template only provides starting conditions. Simply requiring starting templates for a campaign/storyline could fulfill everything you're going for there without any of the class drawbacks, and within a system that doesn't mandate templates.

 

[MichaelSomething]

The same applies to RPG's. The d20 model of zero to hero works for certain kinds of games and not so well for others. I don't think d20 is particularly suited to super hero games, for example. Now, I understand why you would hesitate to play Hero. Fair enough. I have zero interest in a character sheet that's more complicated than figuring out my income taxes. Totally get that. But, you don't have to go that route. You can go simple as well. FATE, for example, is a pretty rules light (or at least light ish) game where leveling is meaningless. Spy genre games also don't work well with the d20 model. We don't play some rookie straight out of Spy Camp. We want to play 007. And, if we're going to play 00 level agents, it doesn't make much sense if we're first level. So, the old 007 game was skill based and didn't have levels at all.

What about Mutants & Masterminds?

http://mutantsandmasterminds.com/

 

[Hussar]

What about Mutants & Masterminds?

http://mutantsandmasterminds.com/

Heh. I did think of that as I was writing. To be honest, I've never played it, so, I really don't know if I'd like it or not. I know that it is quite popular though. So, it's not like you can't do it with the d20 system. That's certainly true.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Rules should also limit that. And oWoD rules generally do in character creation. Requiring a character to reach a certain plateau before being able to use a certain ability makes sense.

I'm not sure how oWoD does it, but if it essentially amounts to gating certain abilities behind different experience thresholds, then that's a rough level system. The concept of levels is too useful to be discounted entirely.

Back to the idea of levels being unrealistic, life is full of 'levels' if you close enough. Martial arts are prime example. A 5th degree black belt is going to be better than a brown belt. Ranks in the military is another example. A general has more abilities at their disposal than a private. With gaming, levels are only unrealistic when it's just 'I just leveled up, now I've got all these supercool powers I didn't have last level!' Maybe it's more that sudden shift that some people don't like about a level-based system? Life is all about gradual progression.

That's not any different between a class+level system and a pure-points system, though. The only difference is that the class+level system sees you progress in everything simultaneously, where the point-based system sees you gain one new ability at a time. There's still a singular instant between not being able to do the thing and being able to do the thing. The question is, in terms of acceptable breaks from reality, which is more acceptable?

Does it make more sense that an adventuring wizard will have necessarily gained some knowledge of combat and improved in their ability to take a hit, by the time they have wielding enough powerful magic for them to unlock further secrets? Or does it make more sense that an adventuring wizard should only improve their spellcasting ability, and never learn anything about combat, regardless of how much the witness first-hand?

In the GURPS rulebook, they say how a fighter-type character shouldn't just throw everything into improving their one fighting skill, because it makes more sense for them to also improve their Strength and Dexterity and reputation and tactical skills as they get better at fighting. In practice, players will usually throw everything they possibly can into their one fighting skill, because it gives them an always-hit insta-kill attack by making called shots to the eye, and they never fail to parry. The book flat-out states that it makes more sense to improve in a bunch of different things at once, but then the actual rules encourage you to hyper-specialize. (You can see a similar issue with non-combat skills, where an engineer-type character will never improve at math or physics, because their career depends on their engineering roll and you never improve in math or physics unless you explicitly spend points on them.) That might be conflating two related points, but that just goes to show how great the class+level paradigm works.

Improving everything at once might lead to some silly situations, sometimes, but only ever improving one thing at a time can easily lead to even sillier situations.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I think those are really good points. But having thought about it, I don't think classes, as I envision them, are really necessary for that. The primary difference between a class and a template is that a class continues to be restricting for the character's career, while a template only provides starting conditions. Simply requiring starting templates for a campaign/storyline could fulfill everything you're going for there without any of the class drawbacks, and within a system that doesn't mandate templates.

Honestly, the best and most widely-useful path is probably somewhere between the two extremes. Starting with a defined class, and then branching out with less restrictions from there, is certainly something worth exploring further. You just need to be careful, because it's ridiculously easy to accidentally break a game as you add more choices.

To be fair, though, even D&D hasn't been a purely class-based game since early 2E, before Skills & Powers hit. Free-style multiclassing, feats, and especially the magic item creation rules of 3E and 4E were all point-based aspects that added customization at the cost of balance. Pathfinder is probably the least-balanced edition of D&D ever, simply because they keep introducing new options (and new places to stick those options, like alternate race and class features).

 

[Michael Silverbane]

What about Mutants & Masterminds?

http://mutantsandmasterminds.com/

Mutants & Masterminds is a great game. It does, however, go out of its way to dump the class and level structure common to d20 games.