At Wizards one year, I gave a short lecture to the RPG R&D crew about why clerics are impossible to balance. Since most of their power (healing) helps other characters, it’s power that doesn’t feel cool. To help the cleric feel cool, it needs a double-helping of power, and that’s what we gave it. In theory, one way to balance the cleric is to re-write every class so that a good deal of its power comes from helping other characters in the party. Druids and bards have “helper” abilities, and we discussed giving such abilities to all classes. For example, some folks talked about taking away the 5-foot step as a general rule and re-writing the fighter so that one of the class’s abilities was to allow party members to take 5-foot steps. That was too big change for the system and for fighters, and what actually came out of these conversations was a number of new “helper classes.” The D&D Miniatures Handbook included the healer and the marshal, the 13th Age system included the occultist, and 13th Age Glorantha included the trickster.
The healer in the Miniatures Handbook was sort of like a cleric but even more focused on healing. Over previous decades, I had seen players occasionally create pacifist characters, and a healer class of one sort of another has appeared here and there. It’s a natural enough concept. Unfortunately, it’s a hard concept to get right. The healers from the fantasy world Glorantha, for example, are duty bound to try to protect even enemies from being killed. If a self-righteous paladin in a party can be at odds with the other characters, try a pacifist who tries to keep party members from killing their foes. When Rob Heinsoo and I later wrote 13th Age Glorantha, we balked at writing up a playable healer because the canonical healers in the setting don’t “play nice” with others—ironically because they play too nice with the enemy. As for the healer class in the Miniatures Handbook, it never got a lot of play and didn’t prove popular enough to recur in later iterations of the game.
The marshal was a non-supernatural class that had bard-like abilities to improve other characters’ performances in combat. Mostly, they provided specific buffs to party members, which represented the practical guidance they provided in the heat of battle. There was a lose fit between what the marshal was doing in the game world (barking out orders) and the magic-like bonuses in the game system. In design terms, it represented sort of a Magic: The Gathering approach, in which simple, useful mechanics evoke what’s happening in the game world rather than strictly simulating it. Years later, 4E would double down on the evocative and game-oriented approach instead of 3E’s simulations esthetic. Unlike the healer, the marshal was popular, and similar classes would appear later in the development of D&D classes.
For 13th Age, Rob Heinsoo did most of the classes, but I wrote up the occultist, one of the game’s first all-new classes. The occultist was my attempt to create the equivalent of a cleric, and in particular one that would feel more powerful in play without actually being more powerful. In combat, the occultist mostly observes the attacks made by the other characters and the attacks made against them. The occultist’s spells are instant actions that let another character reroll a missed attack, prevent damage from incoming attacks, or increase damage that their allies deal. In effect, preventing damage is “healing in advance,” but it feels gratifying to interrupt a monster’s attack to reduce damage to a friend. It’s proactive and even aggressive, while healing is more reactive. Likewise, helping a friend land a mighty blow is also a feel-good moment. The other player gets to feel more effective because it’s their character that’s dealing out more damage. The player running the occultist, meanwhile, also feels effective because the effect on play is more dramatic than after-the-fact healing. The occultist is ideal for the sort of player who loves to keep an eye on combat, to watch every turn, and to judge when to apply the right effort for the best effect. For the occultist, friends’ turns and enemies’ turns sort of feel like part of their own turn because the player is monitoring events and deciding when to intervene. Other players’ turns and monsters’ turns are more interesting when you have the option to instantly step in and alter the outcome. For an added touch of cool factor, the class description specifies that there is only one occultist. There are no occultist guilds or even higher-level occultists to make the occultist character feel unexceptional.
For 13th Age Glorantha, I wrote up another helper class: the trickster. As with the Gloranthan healer, the Gloranthan trickster has an iffy pedigree. The wild and unpredictable trickster character from the setting was an uneasy fit with the no-nonsense and gritty RuneQuest system that powered Gloranthan roleplaying. Andrew Finch tells a story of how the clever use of a trickster’s powers managed to defeat an entire temple of Chaotic cultists by tricking them into destroying themselves. The players at the table were geared up for a massive, running battle with the toughest enemies they’d ever fought, and on the enemies’ home territory. The trickster made all that planning and anticipation moot. No one else got to so much as make an attack roll. Thankfully, the trickster makes a better ally than the pacifist healer, and Rob and I were able to make a memorable, playable character that feels like no other class.
If the occultist is ideal for a player who likes to pay close attention, the trickster is good for a player who likes to mix things up and maybe get the snot beat out of them in the bargain. (Can you guess? I enjoy playing both classes.) As with a typical class, the trickster’s abilities work on the character’s turn, but as with the occultist these powers typically help the other characters. With powers such as the Dance of Blood and Slapstick, the trickster helps allies make extra attacks on enemies while provoking attacks from those same enemies on themselves. No one knows what’s going to happen when the trickster takes their turn. For me, the less I know about how my turn is going to end up, the more interesting the dice rolls are. Sometimes the trickster ends up just taking damage for nothing—hey, that’s a trickster for you! To balance the possibility of costly failure, these powers have big upsides when everything works out right.
The trickster’s standard, at-will melee attack deals no damage at all. In the game world, the trickster might be using a chicken carcass as a weapon, and how much damage would you expect that to deal? Instead of dealing damage, “feckless strike” curses the target with bad mojo, so the next time an ally strikes that foe, the ally deals a lot more damage than normal. In a sense, the trickster’s damage is delayed, waiting for an ally to hit that foe and apply the “damage” done earlier by the trickster. Again, the player with the trickster feels effective, and the other player is happy to deal more than normal damage.
The healer in the Miniatures Handbook was sort of like a cleric but even more focused on healing. Over previous decades, I had seen players occasionally create pacifist characters, and a healer class of one sort of another has appeared here and there. It’s a natural enough concept. Unfortunately, it’s a hard concept to get right. The healers from the fantasy world Glorantha, for example, are duty bound to try to protect even enemies from being killed. If a self-righteous paladin in a party can be at odds with the other characters, try a pacifist who tries to keep party members from killing their foes. When Rob Heinsoo and I later wrote 13th Age Glorantha, we balked at writing up a playable healer because the canonical healers in the setting don’t “play nice” with others—ironically because they play too nice with the enemy. As for the healer class in the Miniatures Handbook, it never got a lot of play and didn’t prove popular enough to recur in later iterations of the game.
The marshal was a non-supernatural class that had bard-like abilities to improve other characters’ performances in combat. Mostly, they provided specific buffs to party members, which represented the practical guidance they provided in the heat of battle. There was a lose fit between what the marshal was doing in the game world (barking out orders) and the magic-like bonuses in the game system. In design terms, it represented sort of a Magic: The Gathering approach, in which simple, useful mechanics evoke what’s happening in the game world rather than strictly simulating it. Years later, 4E would double down on the evocative and game-oriented approach instead of 3E’s simulations esthetic. Unlike the healer, the marshal was popular, and similar classes would appear later in the development of D&D classes.
For 13th Age, Rob Heinsoo did most of the classes, but I wrote up the occultist, one of the game’s first all-new classes. The occultist was my attempt to create the equivalent of a cleric, and in particular one that would feel more powerful in play without actually being more powerful. In combat, the occultist mostly observes the attacks made by the other characters and the attacks made against them. The occultist’s spells are instant actions that let another character reroll a missed attack, prevent damage from incoming attacks, or increase damage that their allies deal. In effect, preventing damage is “healing in advance,” but it feels gratifying to interrupt a monster’s attack to reduce damage to a friend. It’s proactive and even aggressive, while healing is more reactive. Likewise, helping a friend land a mighty blow is also a feel-good moment. The other player gets to feel more effective because it’s their character that’s dealing out more damage. The player running the occultist, meanwhile, also feels effective because the effect on play is more dramatic than after-the-fact healing. The occultist is ideal for the sort of player who loves to keep an eye on combat, to watch every turn, and to judge when to apply the right effort for the best effect. For the occultist, friends’ turns and enemies’ turns sort of feel like part of their own turn because the player is monitoring events and deciding when to intervene. Other players’ turns and monsters’ turns are more interesting when you have the option to instantly step in and alter the outcome. For an added touch of cool factor, the class description specifies that there is only one occultist. There are no occultist guilds or even higher-level occultists to make the occultist character feel unexceptional.
For 13th Age Glorantha, I wrote up another helper class: the trickster. As with the Gloranthan healer, the Gloranthan trickster has an iffy pedigree. The wild and unpredictable trickster character from the setting was an uneasy fit with the no-nonsense and gritty RuneQuest system that powered Gloranthan roleplaying. Andrew Finch tells a story of how the clever use of a trickster’s powers managed to defeat an entire temple of Chaotic cultists by tricking them into destroying themselves. The players at the table were geared up for a massive, running battle with the toughest enemies they’d ever fought, and on the enemies’ home territory. The trickster made all that planning and anticipation moot. No one else got to so much as make an attack roll. Thankfully, the trickster makes a better ally than the pacifist healer, and Rob and I were able to make a memorable, playable character that feels like no other class.
If the occultist is ideal for a player who likes to pay close attention, the trickster is good for a player who likes to mix things up and maybe get the snot beat out of them in the bargain. (Can you guess? I enjoy playing both classes.) As with a typical class, the trickster’s abilities work on the character’s turn, but as with the occultist these powers typically help the other characters. With powers such as the Dance of Blood and Slapstick, the trickster helps allies make extra attacks on enemies while provoking attacks from those same enemies on themselves. No one knows what’s going to happen when the trickster takes their turn. For me, the less I know about how my turn is going to end up, the more interesting the dice rolls are. Sometimes the trickster ends up just taking damage for nothing—hey, that’s a trickster for you! To balance the possibility of costly failure, these powers have big upsides when everything works out right.
The trickster’s standard, at-will melee attack deals no damage at all. In the game world, the trickster might be using a chicken carcass as a weapon, and how much damage would you expect that to deal? Instead of dealing damage, “feckless strike” curses the target with bad mojo, so the next time an ally strikes that foe, the ally deals a lot more damage than normal. In a sense, the trickster’s damage is delayed, waiting for an ally to hit that foe and apply the “damage” done earlier by the trickster. Again, the player with the trickster feels effective, and the other player is happy to deal more than normal damage.
