D&D General [o5e/a5e] Classless D&D? Spitballing thread

[niklinna]

Hm. The idea is interesting, but I have no idea how you'd do it and still claim to have D&D when you got done with it.

Aye, there's the tricky part. A much broader thread would be, "What is it that makes D&D the game it is?" You have the six abilities, the classic core races, the classes & levels, particular class features, the slot- and recipe-based magic system, the specific corpus of spells, and the combat and skill systems—which have changed from edition to edition, but there's a recognizable thread nonetheless. Of all of those, I think you could drop the races and the classes and still have something very recognizable as D&D, particularly if you keep the special abilities generally the same—it's just that they aren't siloed arbitrarily, but by prereq chains at most. Prereq chains, though, are halfway to classes already, which is why I suspect there's little incentive for a freeform system for D&D, even if D&Ds class-based system makes many possible concepts difficult or unviable.

But the NERO larp managed a hybrid class/point-buy system, barring some complaints about rogues being overpowered. Of course, their corpus of spells and special abilities and such is vastly different from D&D, even if the character classes are the archetypal fighter, rogue, arcane (celestial) caster, and divine (earth) caster. Not that I expect to see many people here who know much about NERO.

 

[RangerWickett]

It's hard to do classless with logarithmic spellcasters. Like, fighters and other martials don't get new options at the same rate that that wizards get spell slots, so it's not easy to set the powers up as fungible.

 

[Nivek Loneshadow]

Yeah, this sounds really familiar.
Long time ago, I picked up "Buy the Numbers", but never used it. As I recall, it's an à la carte system for d20 that assigns values to all the various class features, with the intent of allowing players build out PCs to very specific designs. I wonder if that's what you're thinking of?
(Fwiw, the pdf is available for free at dtrpg.)

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

I'm thinking I had a couple other d20/OGL games from that era with a similar goal to eliminate/tone down the class silos, but I don't have my old hard drives available to look for them.

Interesting. I didn't know they published it. I used to follow it on boards similar to these. Seemed a lot of people liked their ideas

 

[cbwjm]

I think if I was going to do this, it would look similar to pathfinder 2. I'd still use levels though it is character level rather than class level and proficiency bonus would still be tied to it. Then, much like others have already mentioned, I'd assign either a cost and/or a level to the various class abilities. Subclasses would be gone. Level 1 might look something like this:

Level 1 | +2 proficiency bonus | Choose 3 (level 1) abilities.

Level 1 abilities might be: fighting style, sneak attack, spellcasting (costs 2 picks), expertise and a bunch of others. Things like weapon & armour proficiencies and hit dice could also be chosen at this level. I'd probably start everyone out with d8 hit dice.

Spellcasting I'd make similar to PF2 in that choosing it at level 1 gets you the first few spell levels as you level up but you'll need to choose more advanced spellcasting options to get to the higher levels.

 

[Buzzqw]

(sorry for my english)
in my game system it works like this:
1) at each level you choose whether to take +1 to weapon knowledge or +1 to magical knowledge
2) every 2 levels you take a feat that simulates some class ability and each feats grant bonuses on saving throws (different feat mean different bonus on ST)
3) skills depend on the choosen profession and the intelligence score
4) hit points are 4 + Constitution bonus + 3 if you gave the point to weapon knowledge
5) every point on weapon knowledge give you a +1 to hit. you can give weapon knowledge point to a specific list of weapons which, depending on how much the points assigned, grants different bonuses and abilities
6) spells point and spell levels depends on magical knowledge

and no class is present!
if you can read italian you can freely download the (italian full 550 pag) manual TUS/OBSS.pdf at master · buzzqw/TUS

BHH