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Message: <blockquote data-quote="steenan" data-source="post: 6017790" data-attributes="member: 23240">There are three main reasons for using classes (or something similar) in a RPG game: tactical roles, genre roles and story roles. Tactical roles are simple. You want the game to challenge player skills with some kind of challenge (usually, but not necessarily, combat) and you want to focus on teamwork, so you limit characters in such a way that each of them may shine in some situations, but in general they're much better together than taken separately. For this, you need some measure of balance, niche protection and synergistic abilities.Using classes in your design helps in niche protection and simplifies designing synergies that are good but not too good (do not allow for balance-wracking combos).When you design classes in this paradigm, you should begin with deciding what a party as a whole should be able to do and then divide the abilities into packages in such a way that they fit thematically within each package and that they have much more synergies between package than inside them. This way, you make sure that characters need each other to be efficient and nobody is overshadowing the rest.Genre roles are archetypes; types of characters that are typical and distinguishing for given genre. When you design a RPG based on a genre, you want to have these character types in play.Class design based on genre roles is a little harder than one based on tactical roles. Genres are shaped by books and movies - media that are not interactive and that have no need for balance between characters. When you translate them to RPGs, you must make sure that spotlight will be shared fairly and nobody will be demoted to a secondary character. And you must do it without loosing whatever makes the genre archetypes what they are.When using this approach, you start by reading several books and/or watching several movies from your selected genre and taking notes on their main and secondary characters - what they do, what they don't, what they do only in crucial scenes (divulging dark or painful secrets, showing previously unknown weaknesses or heroically overcoming previously known ones etc.), what they can't do even when it would be really useful. Then you design mechanics that focuses on these traits.Story roles are used only in some indie games, because they only have meaning in a game focused enough that you know in advance what kind of story it creates (though not what exact story). Such games direct play into interesting conflicts from the very beginning - and to do it they need characters that have appropriate kinds of relations (in the party, with NPCs and with various events in the setting) and that are able to push the story in appropriate directions.When using this approach, you start by deciding what kind of story you want to create with your game. Then you analyze what types of characters will have skills and motivations to push the story in the direction you aim for. You build the classes to create fruitful tension between PCs, without making them enemies. And you require each player to choose a different class.No matter which approach to class design (or what mixture of them) you follow, there are some things to remember:- Classes should always represent something significant in fiction - either who the characters are or what they do in a story. If people take a genre-appropriate character and can't decide what class he or she is, it's a sign of poor design. This also means that you should describe your intended genre and/or setting well enough that they see which characters fit and which don't. - Use classes when you want to push characters into archetypes; don't use them if you aim for flexibility. You must be ready to answer a question like "And how should I build <some character concept>?" with "You don't play this kind of character in this game". A class based system with flexible multiclassing may be fun for optimizers, but it only makes designer's work harder, having most disadvantages of a pure class system and few of its advantages. - Make sure that all classes are able to have dramatic impact in adventures you design your game for. This includes, but is not limited to, spotlight balance, numerical balance and all classes having meaningful ties with the setting (NPCs, organizations, places, events).</blockquote>

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