niklinna
satisfied?
A joke response I made in another thread about the risk of turning D&D into a freeform, classless system got a response of its own saying that would be really cool, although the design "would have to be incredible". Well! Were you to accept this challenge, how might you go about it?
You got your martial features, your caster features, your ribbons, your exploration & social. Can you break it all apart into à la carte features, some possibly in progressive chains or even merging/branching structures? Maybe you get a feature-purchase budget at each level. Maybe you ditch levels altogether and characters advance directly by features costing a certain amount of XP, spendable whenever is appropriate.
Also, since classes are one of the key design features that make D&D what it is for many people, would you make any part of your design still try to reflect that somehow? For example, maybe you have to pick a traditional/recognizable role as your area of specialization, so that features outside of it are still available, but cost more. Anybody who's played the NERO larp will recognize that one right away. (Also see True20 for a partial implementation of this idea.)
You got your martial features, your caster features, your ribbons, your exploration & social. Can you break it all apart into à la carte features, some possibly in progressive chains or even merging/branching structures? Maybe you get a feature-purchase budget at each level. Maybe you ditch levels altogether and characters advance directly by features costing a certain amount of XP, spendable whenever is appropriate.
Also, since classes are one of the key design features that make D&D what it is for many people, would you make any part of your design still try to reflect that somehow? For example, maybe you have to pick a traditional/recognizable role as your area of specialization, so that features outside of it are still available, but cost more. Anybody who's played the NERO larp will recognize that one right away. (Also see True20 for a partial implementation of this idea.)