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Message: <blockquote data-quote="howandwhy99" data-source="post: 7653022" data-attributes="member: 3192">There has been many long years of confused and not very good game design and I agree with a lot of what you say about the need for improving games. However, my relatively recent experience is delivering fun, enjoyable games, but in the currently considered "bad" way. I too am looking for game designs which recognize and give mechanical support for class play, although in a very different manner. I don't want to toss out 40 years of game design because of long term confusion and limited talking points of current design conversations. D&D already is a great game, it's just poorly understood. What I'm suggesting is classes be defined again as behavior within system play. In part that includes assigning players game abilities necessary to enable themto overcome the challenges in those systems, if they are playing that class. But it's not these specific abilities defining the class. It's the focus of play on the starting system, a different system for each class. Talking about class systems in games can lead to the creation of more interesting systems based on class and, yes, we'd see a wide variation in playtest results due to the variety of desired game play.  That's all good, but I didn't see much improvement in my games from 4e. I pretty much skipped it altogether. It's an exception-based game, small in size, similar to MtG - the most successful game of that design. 3.x may have felt better after the confusion of 2e, but it was a massive redesign based on largely misguided game designs theories from the 90s. I now I see how skills (or ability "checks") are inhibiting of game play, not supportive of it. Can we head further down the path of the contemporary story turn-taking games in design? Yes, of course, and we will and definitely should. But let's not stifle growth here. Growth is not eradicating all memory and comprehension card games early games for the one true game theory.  How many people are talking about RPGs which don't play or even resemble storytelling designs though?I think we are looking for two very different things and that's okay. For me, class is among the most defining elements of the games I play, role playing games. And classes are by far the most mechanically defining because they are the roles for the role playing. They are the scopes of challenges faced by players throughout the entire game. Class design and class understanding not only less important in story games IMO, they're completely unnecessary. It's hard to see where RP comes into those games. To me, they are about character portrayal and narrative creation, not game play or role play. Thinking exclusively within that perspective it's easy to understand why class games/RPGs would be considered an antiquated relic which have little to no place in RPG design. Class might as well be a meaningless grouping of game abilities with a theme as that is about the limit of them in this understanding. What are we really getting at with aggregate power groupings as class? How is that improvement? Perhaps better is really narrative techniques applied to classes as labels? I don't think we're not moving in a bad direction, we're just not moving in the direction of D&D.</blockquote>

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