Last week, I talked a bit about how creating a character was a source of fiero for many players – how competing with other players to make the most effective or amazing character was part of the fun of the game for them. I also talked a bit about how this effort could cause some dissonance at the table.
I’ve since been looking at two features of early D&D that have fallen by the wayside in more recent editions (with the possible exception of the edition yet-to-be-released): random magic items, and wizards adding found spells to their spellbooks.
In 4e D&D, and to a significant extent in 3e D&D, magic items are part and parcel of your character’s powers and abilities. Through wishlists and character wealth by level guidelines, the game encourages you to get your hands on exactly the kind of magic items you want or need. Individual DMs tweak this, of course, but the general rule is clear: your headband of intellect and your +2 implement are part of what the game assumes for you, and without it (or some equivalent), you suffer.
3e has an additional quirk with regards to this: it assumes the same thing about wizard and cleric spells. 4e assumes you have those, too, but in 4e, the spells are largely powered down or "ritualized" from their previous-edition versions. So, in 3e, the game encourages you to take into account effects like Scry and Teleport; in 4e, the game instead tries to nerf those effects so that the DM isn't jerked around too much by them: they don’t do much that a party without those effects couldn’t also do (even if it might take that party longer).
Before 3e, spells and magic items both occupied a very different place: they were based on luck, severely curtailed, and ultimately given out by a DM only when the DM was being generous. This created a much different relationship between a spellcaster and their spells, and a fighter and his magic sword, than the more recent editions would create. Rather than an element of your character build, these things were only gained through luck, as a reward, not part and parcel of your character build (less so for Clerics than for Wizards, but the early D&D books are peppered with advice that permits a DM to withhold any cleric spell they want, too). They were more unpredictable elements.
This unpredictability has consequences for things like the balance between classes and even the comparative balance of each spell, but the element of that randomness that I’m interested in today is this: to a large degree, spells and magic items in early D&D were things you had to go get, not mostly things that you automatically got. In each case, it is an instance of a transaction, not between the player and the game rules, but between the people playing the game (lumping the DM in as “a player of D&D,”).
That is, they existed outside of the rules, in the world itself. There was a reason for the Wizard looking for spells or the Fighter looking for a vorpal blade to delve into the world itself, seeking this item or this ability, and extracting it from somewhere the DM had embedded it.
I started wondering…what would a game look like if you did that for 100%, or even 90%, of a character’s abilities? What if Fighters needed to find trainers and magic armors to enable their fighting powers, and wizards needed to find sages and magic scrolls? How might such a game be organized?
So this article is a first-thought kind of article, and I invite you to join me in discussing this idea in the comments.
A Man With No Class
The first thing that jumps out at me when I think about this kind of game is that it probably should abandon the idea of the character class. Classes serve a lot of interesting purposes in game design, but they don’t seem an appropriate tool to use, if all of your character abilities are out there as rewards. There's no reason to list out the rewards that you're predetermined to get (that'd remove half the fun!). Additionally, if there exists out there in some ruin the possibility for you to learn a wizard spell or use a magic suit of plate mail, I’m not going to want to stop a character from pursuing that just because they didn’t check the right box at character creation.
Here I encounter my first design challenge with this. Setting balance math aside for the moment and just looking at what a game design element does to the player, getting rid of classes is problematic. If part of the fun of a game like D&D is pretending to be Merlin or Conan or Bilbo, then going classless limits the ability to express that. You can’t very well pretend to be Merlin if you’re not sure if you’ll wind up knowing mostly fighting and archery moves and maybe no spells. Arguably, this is why 3e and 4e moved away from random spells in the first place: to help empower players to play the kind of spellcasters they want to play, rather than what they randomly get. Same reason they moved away from rolling 3d6 in order for ability scores: to help players make the characters they want.
I can re-capture some of those elements, though, by taking a bit of a world-building page from 1e and BEMCI.
If wizard spells exist in the world, then there is someone out there who knows them, or knew of them. If fighter moves exist as things you can pick up in your travels, then someone already knows them, or can impart them. The existence of these abilities implies organizations and individuals who hone them.
Because there is no class, these organizations don’t need to be quite so class-based as the cited examples. Assassins’ guilds and thieves’ guilds can be the same guild; paladins and clerics can belong to the same organization. Perhaps there are specialties within each group: in the church, perhaps orders of paladins defend the ranks of the clerics. And even the clerics may learn some arcane magic for dealing with fiends and scribing abjurations.
That is, these organizations become potentially much more about their thematic trappings than about the specific class.
So, say you’re a young adventurer who wants to learn a lot of skullduggery. Hang out in the underbelly of the city, and you’re likely to find abilities like Hide in Shadows and Disarm Traps there. You may also discover abilities like Invisibility, or like Fly, too: things useful to rogues and thieves. The College of Magic, meanwhile, probably teaches a lot of runes and item creation abilities. The town guard might help you learn some organization, some leadership, and some brawling (along with, likely, some Zone of Truth and some Cure Wounds).
Because I want to link these abilities to actual quests in the world, I now have organizations that can hand out those quests to interested parties. Want to learn Hide in Shadows? Well it just so happens that the thieves’ guild needs some stuff fenced – they’ll teach you how, if you do it for them.
This helps anchor a PC in the world. You can gain the abilities that Merlin or Bilbo might have by acting like those characters, or by pursuing those powers in the world itself. Knowledge of how to change shape doesn’t come automatically at Level X – but it can be learned, by talking to someone who already knows how to do it, and maybe doing them a favor.
Discrete Packages
Because there’s no class, abilities need to be designed to be self-contained and self-sufficient. Hide in Shadows isn’t going to be an ability that stays with you and grows over time as a part of a broader package of rogue skills, so it may be better off being conceived of as more like a wizard spell: something that the rogue declares and that just happens. It’s not going to be able to reference skill ranks or percentages or other sub-systems, because characters might not have those abilities. Each ability the PC’s gain needs to be as self-contained as a single wizard spell, or a single magic item: something that exists without a lot of extraneous reference points.
Because each ability needs to be self-contained, we’re also going to need a way to handle the day-in, day-out mischief of adventurers. We don’t want to require a character to have Hide in Shadows to attempt to, er, hide in the shadows, because hiding in the shadows is something anyone could do, while Hide in Shadows is a special ability (that a character may or may not possess).
Thankfully, 5e gives us a pretty coherent model for that: ability scores. Anyone can roll a Dexterity check to try to hide in the shadows. Maybe one of the rewards a PC can gain is a bonus to that check. Maybe at some later point, or with a more difficult challenge, they can gain a HIGHER bonus to that check.
Of course, we don’t need to limit it to checks and bonuses. Perhaps, taking a cue from spells, we change things like Hide in Shadows to something with a more specific effect: Use it, and you become hidden. Automatically. No opposed roll. Perhaps, to keep it from being a universal trump card, we mandate that if you do anything else while hidden, you stop being hidden after you take that action, and that an enemy that searches the area gets an opposed roll to try and find you.
Now, we’re starting to get into territory that, format-wise at least, closely resembles 4e’s powers. This isn’t a coincidence – 4e’s discrete, self-contained powers are really good for this kind of game, and we could probably crib our favorite 4e powers and just plop them right into this game, with only mild adjustments to the maths.
In fact, the potential abilities are probably limitless. The list of 4e’s powers, every spell from each edition of D&D (including rituals, why not), each class feature or proficiency…clearly, some editing should be done up front. Typically, D&D organizes these abilities by class level or spell level (and the corresponding class level to access that spell), so we’ll use that as a sort of guidepost for power level. As for which specific abilities might be included, that’s a little secondary. Since I’d just make this for my own table, I could only really bother including first-level abilities that the players in my group would be interested in, if I can gauge that in advance. If I must start in a vacuum, I can think of the Core Four D&D archetypal classes (Fighters, Wizards, Clerics, and Rogues) and perhaps gather a handful of iconic abilities from each class, and we’ve likely got the major bases covered.
After determining what abilities are going to be used, the next major step is to insert them into those organizations I mentioned up above. It’s pretty easy to map a given power onto a given organizations, or even individual NPC’s. Which leads us to the next big point.
Hook, Challenge, and Reward
The real magic of this kind of game to me is the possibility to use character abilities as motives for characters to engage with the world that they exist in. If a player is interested in a certain kind of character, they will look for NPC’s that might offer that character what they want. Those NPC’s can then offer them any sort of mission, and, as a reward for performing it, training in that new ability. Go and get this MacGuffin, and I’ll teach you how to sneak around or toss magic. It also works really well for particular NPC’s: go seek out the swordmaster on the mountain, for he can teach you the art of killin’ things good. And, of course, you can have scrolls, or manuals, that can teach you the secrets of the universe.
It also creates a different relationship between the player and her character. She’s not a set of static abilities waiting to be charged up by XP, she’s a dynamic character, created through actual play, with her abilities reading like a chronology of her adventures.
I’m basically out of word count at this point, but since the idea is so primordial, I’m interested in seeing what the braintrust of ENWorld can add to the idea. Share your thoughts on this, and what you might want to do with it, in the comments!
I’ve since been looking at two features of early D&D that have fallen by the wayside in more recent editions (with the possible exception of the edition yet-to-be-released): random magic items, and wizards adding found spells to their spellbooks.
In 4e D&D, and to a significant extent in 3e D&D, magic items are part and parcel of your character’s powers and abilities. Through wishlists and character wealth by level guidelines, the game encourages you to get your hands on exactly the kind of magic items you want or need. Individual DMs tweak this, of course, but the general rule is clear: your headband of intellect and your +2 implement are part of what the game assumes for you, and without it (or some equivalent), you suffer.
3e has an additional quirk with regards to this: it assumes the same thing about wizard and cleric spells. 4e assumes you have those, too, but in 4e, the spells are largely powered down or "ritualized" from their previous-edition versions. So, in 3e, the game encourages you to take into account effects like Scry and Teleport; in 4e, the game instead tries to nerf those effects so that the DM isn't jerked around too much by them: they don’t do much that a party without those effects couldn’t also do (even if it might take that party longer).
Before 3e, spells and magic items both occupied a very different place: they were based on luck, severely curtailed, and ultimately given out by a DM only when the DM was being generous. This created a much different relationship between a spellcaster and their spells, and a fighter and his magic sword, than the more recent editions would create. Rather than an element of your character build, these things were only gained through luck, as a reward, not part and parcel of your character build (less so for Clerics than for Wizards, but the early D&D books are peppered with advice that permits a DM to withhold any cleric spell they want, too). They were more unpredictable elements.
This unpredictability has consequences for things like the balance between classes and even the comparative balance of each spell, but the element of that randomness that I’m interested in today is this: to a large degree, spells and magic items in early D&D were things you had to go get, not mostly things that you automatically got. In each case, it is an instance of a transaction, not between the player and the game rules, but between the people playing the game (lumping the DM in as “a player of D&D,”).
That is, they existed outside of the rules, in the world itself. There was a reason for the Wizard looking for spells or the Fighter looking for a vorpal blade to delve into the world itself, seeking this item or this ability, and extracting it from somewhere the DM had embedded it.
I started wondering…what would a game look like if you did that for 100%, or even 90%, of a character’s abilities? What if Fighters needed to find trainers and magic armors to enable their fighting powers, and wizards needed to find sages and magic scrolls? How might such a game be organized?
So this article is a first-thought kind of article, and I invite you to join me in discussing this idea in the comments.
A Man With No Class
The first thing that jumps out at me when I think about this kind of game is that it probably should abandon the idea of the character class. Classes serve a lot of interesting purposes in game design, but they don’t seem an appropriate tool to use, if all of your character abilities are out there as rewards. There's no reason to list out the rewards that you're predetermined to get (that'd remove half the fun!). Additionally, if there exists out there in some ruin the possibility for you to learn a wizard spell or use a magic suit of plate mail, I’m not going to want to stop a character from pursuing that just because they didn’t check the right box at character creation.
Here I encounter my first design challenge with this. Setting balance math aside for the moment and just looking at what a game design element does to the player, getting rid of classes is problematic. If part of the fun of a game like D&D is pretending to be Merlin or Conan or Bilbo, then going classless limits the ability to express that. You can’t very well pretend to be Merlin if you’re not sure if you’ll wind up knowing mostly fighting and archery moves and maybe no spells. Arguably, this is why 3e and 4e moved away from random spells in the first place: to help empower players to play the kind of spellcasters they want to play, rather than what they randomly get. Same reason they moved away from rolling 3d6 in order for ability scores: to help players make the characters they want.
I can re-capture some of those elements, though, by taking a bit of a world-building page from 1e and BEMCI.
If wizard spells exist in the world, then there is someone out there who knows them, or knew of them. If fighter moves exist as things you can pick up in your travels, then someone already knows them, or can impart them. The existence of these abilities implies organizations and individuals who hone them.
Because there is no class, these organizations don’t need to be quite so class-based as the cited examples. Assassins’ guilds and thieves’ guilds can be the same guild; paladins and clerics can belong to the same organization. Perhaps there are specialties within each group: in the church, perhaps orders of paladins defend the ranks of the clerics. And even the clerics may learn some arcane magic for dealing with fiends and scribing abjurations.
That is, these organizations become potentially much more about their thematic trappings than about the specific class.
So, say you’re a young adventurer who wants to learn a lot of skullduggery. Hang out in the underbelly of the city, and you’re likely to find abilities like Hide in Shadows and Disarm Traps there. You may also discover abilities like Invisibility, or like Fly, too: things useful to rogues and thieves. The College of Magic, meanwhile, probably teaches a lot of runes and item creation abilities. The town guard might help you learn some organization, some leadership, and some brawling (along with, likely, some Zone of Truth and some Cure Wounds).
Because I want to link these abilities to actual quests in the world, I now have organizations that can hand out those quests to interested parties. Want to learn Hide in Shadows? Well it just so happens that the thieves’ guild needs some stuff fenced – they’ll teach you how, if you do it for them.
This helps anchor a PC in the world. You can gain the abilities that Merlin or Bilbo might have by acting like those characters, or by pursuing those powers in the world itself. Knowledge of how to change shape doesn’t come automatically at Level X – but it can be learned, by talking to someone who already knows how to do it, and maybe doing them a favor.
Discrete Packages
Because there’s no class, abilities need to be designed to be self-contained and self-sufficient. Hide in Shadows isn’t going to be an ability that stays with you and grows over time as a part of a broader package of rogue skills, so it may be better off being conceived of as more like a wizard spell: something that the rogue declares and that just happens. It’s not going to be able to reference skill ranks or percentages or other sub-systems, because characters might not have those abilities. Each ability the PC’s gain needs to be as self-contained as a single wizard spell, or a single magic item: something that exists without a lot of extraneous reference points.
Because each ability needs to be self-contained, we’re also going to need a way to handle the day-in, day-out mischief of adventurers. We don’t want to require a character to have Hide in Shadows to attempt to, er, hide in the shadows, because hiding in the shadows is something anyone could do, while Hide in Shadows is a special ability (that a character may or may not possess).
Thankfully, 5e gives us a pretty coherent model for that: ability scores. Anyone can roll a Dexterity check to try to hide in the shadows. Maybe one of the rewards a PC can gain is a bonus to that check. Maybe at some later point, or with a more difficult challenge, they can gain a HIGHER bonus to that check.
Of course, we don’t need to limit it to checks and bonuses. Perhaps, taking a cue from spells, we change things like Hide in Shadows to something with a more specific effect: Use it, and you become hidden. Automatically. No opposed roll. Perhaps, to keep it from being a universal trump card, we mandate that if you do anything else while hidden, you stop being hidden after you take that action, and that an enemy that searches the area gets an opposed roll to try and find you.
Now, we’re starting to get into territory that, format-wise at least, closely resembles 4e’s powers. This isn’t a coincidence – 4e’s discrete, self-contained powers are really good for this kind of game, and we could probably crib our favorite 4e powers and just plop them right into this game, with only mild adjustments to the maths.
In fact, the potential abilities are probably limitless. The list of 4e’s powers, every spell from each edition of D&D (including rituals, why not), each class feature or proficiency…clearly, some editing should be done up front. Typically, D&D organizes these abilities by class level or spell level (and the corresponding class level to access that spell), so we’ll use that as a sort of guidepost for power level. As for which specific abilities might be included, that’s a little secondary. Since I’d just make this for my own table, I could only really bother including first-level abilities that the players in my group would be interested in, if I can gauge that in advance. If I must start in a vacuum, I can think of the Core Four D&D archetypal classes (Fighters, Wizards, Clerics, and Rogues) and perhaps gather a handful of iconic abilities from each class, and we’ve likely got the major bases covered.
After determining what abilities are going to be used, the next major step is to insert them into those organizations I mentioned up above. It’s pretty easy to map a given power onto a given organizations, or even individual NPC’s. Which leads us to the next big point.
Hook, Challenge, and Reward
The real magic of this kind of game to me is the possibility to use character abilities as motives for characters to engage with the world that they exist in. If a player is interested in a certain kind of character, they will look for NPC’s that might offer that character what they want. Those NPC’s can then offer them any sort of mission, and, as a reward for performing it, training in that new ability. Go and get this MacGuffin, and I’ll teach you how to sneak around or toss magic. It also works really well for particular NPC’s: go seek out the swordmaster on the mountain, for he can teach you the art of killin’ things good. And, of course, you can have scrolls, or manuals, that can teach you the secrets of the universe.
It also creates a different relationship between the player and her character. She’s not a set of static abilities waiting to be charged up by XP, she’s a dynamic character, created through actual play, with her abilities reading like a chronology of her adventures.
I’m basically out of word count at this point, but since the idea is so primordial, I’m interested in seeing what the braintrust of ENWorld can add to the idea. Share your thoughts on this, and what you might want to do with it, in the comments!
