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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 6163615" data-attributes="member: 8461">Hello, and allow me to compliment you on your name; it brings to mind many enjoyable Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising jokes. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Having played D&D for almost twenty years now, I'm starting to grow tired of the class system (but not D&D) altogether.I think that the use of classes works great if people don't sit down to make a character with a specific theme in mind, if there's allowed to be an element of randomness involved (e.g. random ability scores), and if there are prerequisites/restrictions on what choices can be made based on those random results (e.g. ability score requirements for classes). In other words, if character creation is treated as being part of game-play, rather than preparation for playing the game, it can be a lot of fun.If you start out with a specific character idea in mind, however, you have a very real chance of finding yourself struggling to make a class build that can emulate it adequately. That's because classes are inherently limited in what they offer, having set thematic archetypes and matching mechanical abilities. Yes, you can discard the theme of the class, and try and reflavor the abilities, but assuming that works (which is a generous assumption) it can be unsatisfying, as your "different" character isn't different in any meaningful (that is, mechanical) way from another character using the same class.As a practical example, my current campaign is a Pathfinder one. About a year ago, I had a player ask how he could make his new character be a "fire dancer." Some questioning about what that was turned up that his concept was, indeed, for a character that could manipulate fire via dancing.I looked through a lot of books trying to make that work. I had pretty much all of the major Paizo books at the time, and the online resources (e.g. d20PFSRD) helped. I also had a truckload of third-party supplements, to boot.The best I could come up with was that he make a bard, take mostly fire-based spells, and put ranks into Perform (dance)...along with saying that the somatic components for his spells were dances. (I had a few more specific suggestions, but that was the gist of it.)Needless to say, that wasn't a very satisfying answer. His character was still "just" a bard, not really any different than any other. He wanted to use fire-based effects based on dancing alone, but still had to satisfy verbal- and -material-based components for his spells. His class abilities (the ones that used dancing at all) weren't fire-based, and the entire concept wasn't one that was clearly abetted by his character's mechanics.Ultimately, I decided that a <a href="http://www.rpgnow.com/product/51255/Eclipse-The-Codex-Persona-Shareware" target="_blank">point-buy character-builder</a> was the way to go, since it gave me the freedom to build any character concept I wanted without changing games (and make no mistake, that part was very important - I can't "just play GURPS" since no one in my group wants to go through the process of buying and learning an entirely new system, when they like Pathfinder just fine in every other regard...as do I).Indeed, I think that D&D has been moving towards a build-your-own-character model for quite some time. Class abilities that allow you to pick from a list of choices (e.g. rogue talents), alternate class abilities, feats (which are just a universal set of pick-your-own class features), all of these have elements of building your own character to them. Fifth Edition is already talking about, at the highest level of complexity, letting players make their own sub-classes.Despite this, most people who enjoy D&D rebel at the thought of using a point-buy character generator, seeing it as being an irreconcilable break from the game's fundamental traditions, something I think is overstated. The game still plays the same, but now you can play it with the character you actually wanted to play.</blockquote>

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