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<blockquote data-quote="Emberashh" data-source="post: 9027585" data-attributes="member: 7040941"><p><strong>Class Design and the Barbarian</strong></p><p></p><p>So classes in LNO take on a bit of a different structure than I have seen done elsewhere. With the Skill system being as substantive as it will be, I actually wanted to avoid merely having skills be the character abilities; I wanted to do not only that, but also have class specific abilities. The reason being that its just more interesting that way, but also because its what I always found that games like Morrowind or Oblivion were missing. </p><p></p><p>Essentially, each class has 4 Ability Chains, plus a Subclass that simply acts as a 5th chain, and the 5 have a hierarchal structure to them. Each chain has 6 levels, with the Primary ability chain having 7. Naturally, this pegs max level at 30, though this may change (more on that below), and every single level has something new and consequential for the class. </p><p></p><p>The Primary and Secondary ability chains (PrimSecs) constitute the "core" of the class; the Primary Ability defines the overall theme and direction for the class, providing the class its principle mechanics. The Secondary meanwhile most often provides the core Combat abilities for the class, defining how the class fights. Primsecs will be fixed in the class, and will always be present. </p><p></p><p>The Tertiary and Quaternary (Tertquats) meanwhile are less important, and the intent is for there to be options for players to choose from as to what ability chains they go for here. All will still be designed to be thematic to the class (no generic or cross/class ones), but having any particular pair will not be important to the classes core functions, only to whatever build or play style the player prefers. </p><p></p><p>The Subclass meanwhile, while structured the same way as the other Ability Chains, is much more consequential, near as much as the Primary chain is, and will further hone in the specific niche and playstyle for the character. </p><p></p><p>Something I am still testing out, though, is the potential for some number of classless levels. With the Skill System being what it will be, itd technically be possible to play the game entirely classless (though levels wouldn't mean much without them), and the thought occurred to make the early game, say up to level 5, based on this. </p><p></p><p>Doing so has the benefit of allowing for class requirements, which in turn helps emphasize the choice of class as being more consequential to the actions of the players in the game itself, rather than just an out-of-game decision imposed on the character. </p><p></p><p>As such if taken, class levels shift up by some number, and requirements have to be tailored to what can be reasonably cobbled together with the 50 or so skill points you'd earn. This is going to take some extensive playtesting that I haven't had the chance to set up as of yet, but if it were to be the standard, there would be the option to skip it and start with a class instead, which is the current default, and rather than class requirements you'd instead get either some number of skill points to spend or you'd just roll for bonuses to some selection of skills. </p><p></p><p>But anyway, thats the class system in a large nutshell, so let me talk about the first class I designed for this system, my take on the Barbarian.</p><p></p><p>My philosophy with class design, though I cannot really remember why I went this route, was to try to design from the same sort of perspective that Gygax or Arneson may have had, meaning without the long established assumptions of RPGs. Reinventing, to put it plainly. </p><p></p><p>But I also, eventually, came to find a great deal of value in communicating a story, a sort of monomythic quality through the various ability chains. To gain a level wouldn't just represent an arbitrary increase in power or prowess, but would also be the next chapter. </p><p></p><p>And the Barbarian was no exception for sure. </p><p></p><p>The Barbarians Primary ability chain is aptly named "Outlander" and it provides a smattering of different exploration bonuses (specifically to Wilderness Exploration), but its core benefit is to build up to the classical Barbarian Horde. </p><p></p><p>At first this manifests, around Level 5 or so, as the ability to easily dissuade hostile Barbarians from attacking the party, and to instead turn their attention on something else. This is framed, flavorfully, as a representation of the player Barbarians as yet unknown name in the eponymous Outlands. But as the player levels, this grows to allowing the player to call upon a <em>Party</em> of Barbarians as a wild card in battle; they will help the player win a fight, but they won't obey their command if they aren't aggreable to their orders, and will disburse once all the enemies are dead or theres otherwise nothing else to fight. </p><p></p><p>Now, what does <em>Party</em> mean in this context. Essentially, its an offshoot of my Horde mechanics, the thing that makes my combat system work even at bonkers scales. Hordes aren't all that different from your usual Troops or Minion type mechanics, where some number of entities are consolidated into and abstracted into more manageable "stat blocks" (though theres a lot more to them that, but that gets into my Warfare mechanics) and Parties are simply a smaller sub-unit of those mechanics, meant to represent, well, a Party sized force. Anywhere from 6-50 entities, rather than the hundreds to hundreds of thousands that Hordes have. This sub unit I felt was an important bridge to have between single entity blocks and Horee blocks as it makes it easier to depict more types of encounters, but its also proven incredibly useful for just varying up the kinds of enemies one can face.</p><p></p><p>But anyways, once the player reaches level 30, their capstone is the final level of Outlander, which lets them summon, once per month, a horde of up to 5000 Barbarians to fight at the player's command, who will stay with the player until dismissed or destroyed.</p><p></p><p>The Secondary ability is aptly named <em>Smash!</em>. In the spirit of keeping the class as simple as possible (relative to the rest of the game), Smash! Is pretty straightforward. You gain Smash dice, which essentially are just plain bonuses to your damage, and as you level they grow, eventually reaching 2d12 per attack. </p><p></p><p>However, as part of this ability chain you also gain access to a special reaction named Slam!. What this does is let you spend your reaction to make a Wrestling check, to which you can add your React rating, to immediately grapple your target, and throw them a number of feet up to half your Strength; if at any point along the path they collide with an object or some other entity, they will take immediate damage equal to whatever distance you had left, and will have to make a saving throw to not be knocked prone in the same instance. Ie, your Strength is 100, so you can grapple the Ogre and throw them up to 50ft, and lets say they collide with a wall about 25ft away. They'll be hit for 25 damage, and if they fail their resulting save, they're on the ground. </p><p></p><p>With further levels, Slam lets you use your full Strength score, and as a capstone alongside the final punch up to 2d12 for your Smash Dice, all grappling limits for Wrestling checks are removed as well; so by level 30, you effectively can suplex that dragon, and more than that, throw them really hard at a wall. </p><p></p><p>For the initial two Tertquats for the Barbarian, I opted to maintain the relative simplicity, both in flavor and in mechanics. </p><p></p><p>The first is Yawp!. Yawp! is another reaction ability, and one that helps push the Barbarian into an anti-magic direction, with the basic reaction essentially being that you shout so loudly at a mage that their spells get interrupted. As you level, this moves on to the spells themselves being affected, either puttering out in mid-air or, at the highest levels, detonating at a point of the Barbarians choosing. </p><p></p><p>However, Yawp! can at higher levels also serve as an important defensive reaction even against other martial type enemies, with Yawp! Also inducing saving throws to resist being stunned and, as a capstone, resisting having all of your non-magical weapons and armor be completely obliterated by the sound of the Barbarians voice. </p><p></p><p>And the final core chain is simply called Fortitude, and as you'd guess, involves the steady growth of the Barbarian's bulk, with resistance gains, strength and endurance bumps, and a smattering of other benefits, all making the Barbarian a substantive powerhouse, and all without all that much overhead for the player. </p><p></p><p>Now, the subclasses are where things get really spicy.</p><p></p><p>Conspicuously absent has obviously been the Rage mechanic so omnipresent with Barbarians in RPGs. Why I opted to not wrap the class around this is rather simple: barbarians and beserkers are two different things, and as the base class itself is designed to be more emulative of your Conan-type barbarians (both literally and in spirit), the latter concept is better suited to subclass. </p><p></p><p>Hence, Beastheart. With each successive level themed around a particular beast (Frenzy of the Badger, Roar of the Dragon, Prowess of the Centaur, etc), Beastheart not only returns the idea of frenzy or rage to the class, but also emphasizes a playstyle of hitting fast, hard, and with a great deal of destruction. Utilizing exploding dice style mechanics to enable AOE attacks, Beastheart is at home for those that just want to tear things up and be really really hard to kill. </p><p></p><p>The next option is named Honorbound. As one might guess, this is for Conan fans and is built to augment the Outlander ability chain, further developing the Barbarian hordes the class eventually commands (and allowing full command of these allied Barbarians from early on), granting them access to the resistances you build up using Fortitude, but while also building up a mount for the character to use, overall emphasizing the idea of the Honorbound as a barbarian king sort of character. </p><p></p><p>The next option is called Wardbreaker. This takes the anti-magic direction of Yawp! and goes full tilt into it. Not only do Smash! and Yawp! get significantly boosted, especially against mages, but you also gain significant magical capabilities of your own, so to speak. Rather than just shout down spells, you learn to deflect them, and eventually, catch and redirect them at your enemies. </p><p></p><p>And the final subclass is named Guardian. This is effectively Captain America if he was a Viking. A big emphasis on the use of a shield for offense and defense (including the the ability to throw them like boomerangs), but also in just being a sheer tank through their unique shieldwall contribution, which lets them augment a shieldwall with their resistances, and, at higher levels, make the wall virtually impossible to dislodge. </p><p></p><p>And while I didn't really speak on them, part of the design of all these ability chains has been to integrate as much non-combat oriented boosts, ribbons, and explicit abilities as possible. Both because such things are often thematically appropriate anyway, but also because its important to avoid the pitfalls of forgetting to give martial type characters something to do other than kill stuff.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Emberashh, post: 9027585, member: 7040941"] [B]Class Design and the Barbarian[/B] So classes in LNO take on a bit of a different structure than I have seen done elsewhere. With the Skill system being as substantive as it will be, I actually wanted to avoid merely having skills be the character abilities; I wanted to do not only that, but also have class specific abilities. The reason being that its just more interesting that way, but also because its what I always found that games like Morrowind or Oblivion were missing. Essentially, each class has 4 Ability Chains, plus a Subclass that simply acts as a 5th chain, and the 5 have a hierarchal structure to them. Each chain has 6 levels, with the Primary ability chain having 7. Naturally, this pegs max level at 30, though this may change (more on that below), and every single level has something new and consequential for the class. The Primary and Secondary ability chains (PrimSecs) constitute the "core" of the class; the Primary Ability defines the overall theme and direction for the class, providing the class its principle mechanics. The Secondary meanwhile most often provides the core Combat abilities for the class, defining how the class fights. Primsecs will be fixed in the class, and will always be present. The Tertiary and Quaternary (Tertquats) meanwhile are less important, and the intent is for there to be options for players to choose from as to what ability chains they go for here. All will still be designed to be thematic to the class (no generic or cross/class ones), but having any particular pair will not be important to the classes core functions, only to whatever build or play style the player prefers. The Subclass meanwhile, while structured the same way as the other Ability Chains, is much more consequential, near as much as the Primary chain is, and will further hone in the specific niche and playstyle for the character. Something I am still testing out, though, is the potential for some number of classless levels. With the Skill System being what it will be, itd technically be possible to play the game entirely classless (though levels wouldn't mean much without them), and the thought occurred to make the early game, say up to level 5, based on this. Doing so has the benefit of allowing for class requirements, which in turn helps emphasize the choice of class as being more consequential to the actions of the players in the game itself, rather than just an out-of-game decision imposed on the character. As such if taken, class levels shift up by some number, and requirements have to be tailored to what can be reasonably cobbled together with the 50 or so skill points you'd earn. This is going to take some extensive playtesting that I haven't had the chance to set up as of yet, but if it were to be the standard, there would be the option to skip it and start with a class instead, which is the current default, and rather than class requirements you'd instead get either some number of skill points to spend or you'd just roll for bonuses to some selection of skills. But anyway, thats the class system in a large nutshell, so let me talk about the first class I designed for this system, my take on the Barbarian. My philosophy with class design, though I cannot really remember why I went this route, was to try to design from the same sort of perspective that Gygax or Arneson may have had, meaning without the long established assumptions of RPGs. Reinventing, to put it plainly. But I also, eventually, came to find a great deal of value in communicating a story, a sort of monomythic quality through the various ability chains. To gain a level wouldn't just represent an arbitrary increase in power or prowess, but would also be the next chapter. And the Barbarian was no exception for sure. The Barbarians Primary ability chain is aptly named "Outlander" and it provides a smattering of different exploration bonuses (specifically to Wilderness Exploration), but its core benefit is to build up to the classical Barbarian Horde. At first this manifests, around Level 5 or so, as the ability to easily dissuade hostile Barbarians from attacking the party, and to instead turn their attention on something else. This is framed, flavorfully, as a representation of the player Barbarians as yet unknown name in the eponymous Outlands. But as the player levels, this grows to allowing the player to call upon a [I]Party[/I] of Barbarians as a wild card in battle; they will help the player win a fight, but they won't obey their command if they aren't aggreable to their orders, and will disburse once all the enemies are dead or theres otherwise nothing else to fight. Now, what does [I]Party[/I] mean in this context. Essentially, its an offshoot of my Horde mechanics, the thing that makes my combat system work even at bonkers scales. Hordes aren't all that different from your usual Troops or Minion type mechanics, where some number of entities are consolidated into and abstracted into more manageable "stat blocks" (though theres a lot more to them that, but that gets into my Warfare mechanics) and Parties are simply a smaller sub-unit of those mechanics, meant to represent, well, a Party sized force. Anywhere from 6-50 entities, rather than the hundreds to hundreds of thousands that Hordes have. This sub unit I felt was an important bridge to have between single entity blocks and Horee blocks as it makes it easier to depict more types of encounters, but its also proven incredibly useful for just varying up the kinds of enemies one can face. But anyways, once the player reaches level 30, their capstone is the final level of Outlander, which lets them summon, once per month, a horde of up to 5000 Barbarians to fight at the player's command, who will stay with the player until dismissed or destroyed. The Secondary ability is aptly named [I]Smash![/I]. In the spirit of keeping the class as simple as possible (relative to the rest of the game), Smash! Is pretty straightforward. You gain Smash dice, which essentially are just plain bonuses to your damage, and as you level they grow, eventually reaching 2d12 per attack. However, as part of this ability chain you also gain access to a special reaction named Slam!. What this does is let you spend your reaction to make a Wrestling check, to which you can add your React rating, to immediately grapple your target, and throw them a number of feet up to half your Strength; if at any point along the path they collide with an object or some other entity, they will take immediate damage equal to whatever distance you had left, and will have to make a saving throw to not be knocked prone in the same instance. Ie, your Strength is 100, so you can grapple the Ogre and throw them up to 50ft, and lets say they collide with a wall about 25ft away. They'll be hit for 25 damage, and if they fail their resulting save, they're on the ground. With further levels, Slam lets you use your full Strength score, and as a capstone alongside the final punch up to 2d12 for your Smash Dice, all grappling limits for Wrestling checks are removed as well; so by level 30, you effectively can suplex that dragon, and more than that, throw them really hard at a wall. For the initial two Tertquats for the Barbarian, I opted to maintain the relative simplicity, both in flavor and in mechanics. The first is Yawp!. Yawp! is another reaction ability, and one that helps push the Barbarian into an anti-magic direction, with the basic reaction essentially being that you shout so loudly at a mage that their spells get interrupted. As you level, this moves on to the spells themselves being affected, either puttering out in mid-air or, at the highest levels, detonating at a point of the Barbarians choosing. However, Yawp! can at higher levels also serve as an important defensive reaction even against other martial type enemies, with Yawp! Also inducing saving throws to resist being stunned and, as a capstone, resisting having all of your non-magical weapons and armor be completely obliterated by the sound of the Barbarians voice. And the final core chain is simply called Fortitude, and as you'd guess, involves the steady growth of the Barbarian's bulk, with resistance gains, strength and endurance bumps, and a smattering of other benefits, all making the Barbarian a substantive powerhouse, and all without all that much overhead for the player. Now, the subclasses are where things get really spicy. Conspicuously absent has obviously been the Rage mechanic so omnipresent with Barbarians in RPGs. Why I opted to not wrap the class around this is rather simple: barbarians and beserkers are two different things, and as the base class itself is designed to be more emulative of your Conan-type barbarians (both literally and in spirit), the latter concept is better suited to subclass. Hence, Beastheart. With each successive level themed around a particular beast (Frenzy of the Badger, Roar of the Dragon, Prowess of the Centaur, etc), Beastheart not only returns the idea of frenzy or rage to the class, but also emphasizes a playstyle of hitting fast, hard, and with a great deal of destruction. Utilizing exploding dice style mechanics to enable AOE attacks, Beastheart is at home for those that just want to tear things up and be really really hard to kill. The next option is named Honorbound. As one might guess, this is for Conan fans and is built to augment the Outlander ability chain, further developing the Barbarian hordes the class eventually commands (and allowing full command of these allied Barbarians from early on), granting them access to the resistances you build up using Fortitude, but while also building up a mount for the character to use, overall emphasizing the idea of the Honorbound as a barbarian king sort of character. The next option is called Wardbreaker. This takes the anti-magic direction of Yawp! and goes full tilt into it. Not only do Smash! and Yawp! get significantly boosted, especially against mages, but you also gain significant magical capabilities of your own, so to speak. Rather than just shout down spells, you learn to deflect them, and eventually, catch and redirect them at your enemies. And the final subclass is named Guardian. This is effectively Captain America if he was a Viking. A big emphasis on the use of a shield for offense and defense (including the the ability to throw them like boomerangs), but also in just being a sheer tank through their unique shieldwall contribution, which lets them augment a shieldwall with their resistances, and, at higher levels, make the wall virtually impossible to dislodge. And while I didn't really speak on them, part of the design of all these ability chains has been to integrate as much non-combat oriented boosts, ribbons, and explicit abilities as possible. Both because such things are often thematically appropriate anyway, but also because its important to avoid the pitfalls of forgetting to give martial type characters something to do other than kill stuff. [/QUOTE]
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