Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5695334" data-attributes="member: 54877">There are more than a few days when I get this unshakeable hunch that D&D would be well served to dust off some of the Dragon Quest class division ideas. I say this in full awareness of some of the drawbacks to going that way. In DQ, classes are called "professions", but then magic (spells in schools) and weapon ability is bought separately, through something closer to skills. However, unlike a skill-based or point-based game, almost everything you buy is treated like a class track. Some are broad and some are narrow. When you buy broadsword skill ranks, you do in a narrow track that applies to ... broadsword skill use. When you buy ranger skill ranks, you get several thematically related abilities in that profession. XP is spent on these things, and they get progressively more expensive the better they get. So I can envision a version of D&D where you spend XP in such tracks, separately. If you want to be a 10th level ranger with 2nd level broadsword ranks, you can.  The obvious objection to that is one that can be easily answered. We are so used to the cherry picking in skill-based or point-based games, that the DQ solution gets short thrift: Make XP award partially contingent upon broadening your character. I forget the exact details, but DQ RAW had three sizably different XP tiers, and you had to get 8-12 professions, skills, or schools to set ranks to qualify for the tier. Once you made it, you got enough XP to make creditable gains in those tiers. If you over-specialized, you can get rank 10 broadsword use very early--but you are seriously hurt elsewhere (and it matters, even for fighting). OTOH, If you spread out too much, it takes forever to get that last rank in the 8-12 skills.  In DQ, it was hard-coded. But DQ is a very old game. It would be interesting in D&D to have such tracks for advancement, but then have multiple recommendations for how to structure the tier thresholds to get the kind of game you want. For example, if you want something akin to 4E, where every character has to work hard to not be about equally good in combat, you simply set up the tier requirements to require a certain amount of combat ability. If you want a lot of slowly developing generalists, akin to say, GURPS, you relax the requirements severely. If you want some specialization, but not too much overt power-gaming, you go for something more middle of the road. Another nice thing about this structure is that you need not fill out every track equally. You can lop off tracks for thematic, simulation, or gameplay reasons. If you don't want 20th level cake bakers, then you don't let the track with baking skills go very far. Edit: Yep, WotC does have the DQ license.  TSR got it from SPI, put out DQ 3rd ed., and then sat on it.  WotC got it when they bought out TSR.</blockquote>

Verification