Supplemental Classes

[Solomoriah]

Supplemental Classes

The Basic Fantasy Project has a lot of game supplements. For a, well, Basic game, that's understandable... I deliberately kept the game simple, so there is a lot of room for expansion. In this essay I'm going to discuss how classes are created, and how they can go wrong.

Creating a class always seems easy at first... the game designer envisions a character of some specific type not exactly covered by the rules, and decides a class is needed; the class is sketched out, probably in terms of that model character; somewhere along the line (if not at the start), a name is assigned to the class, and that name informs other decisions; and finally, the game designer sets out to write rules for the class.

The very first pitfall has already been exposed... what if you (as the game designer) envision the class differently than others, particularly your own players? Take for instance the Ranger, a class commonly added to Basic Fantasy (and to other "basic" old-school games). Some consider the Ranger class to be expert archers; some imagine Rangers wielding two melee weapons at once; others consider woodcraft their defining feature, and give few or no combat bonuses. Surely these can't all be the same class? In fact, there were at one time four different Rangers posted in one form or another on the Basic Fantasy website, though one was renamed the Scout after some discussion.

This makes designing "official" classes difficult. After all this time, most of us understand what is meant by a Fighter, or a Cleric, or a Magic-User, or a Thief. These other classes can be more difficult to nail down.

Let's consider how classes are created. A subclass will inherit some or all of the abilities of the parent class, and will have additional abilities besides. For purposes of game balance, limitations will usually be assigned. But how do you balance a class?

It turns out that there are two distinct "modes" of game balance that we must consider. For this discussion, I'll call them "individual" and "global" balance. "Individual" balance means that characters of the new class, at a given XP level, should be about matched with the parent class in terms of overall power. "Global" balance means that, on the average for a given campaign world, the subclass is about equal to the class in "value" or "power."

That latter is a bit hard to understand without an example. In a certain old-school game, several of the subclasses of the Fighter class were notably tougher than the basic Fighter at most XP levels, and particularly at lower levels. Rather than applying significant limitations to achieve individual balance, "barriers to entry" were applied to make the subclass characters rarer than the parent. Requiring higher ability scores is one way of doing this; limiting the races or alignments allowed to the subclass is another.

So, global balance means making the subclass rarer than the class. But I submit that these "barriers to entry" are really not enough. Given the existence of a subclass, a player who really wants to play a character of that subclass will find a way to do so, even if he must lie, cheat, or wheedle. So, it is important to at least attempt individual balance with any subclass, even if barriers to entry are applied to make the subclass rare.

There are two main means of achieving individual balance: mechanical and non-mechanical. A mechanical limitation is one built into the rules of the game in a hard-and-fast manner. For instance, the Cleric doesn't fight as well as the Fighter because the Cleric's attack bonus doesn't advance as fast. It's true, on the average at low levels the Cleric can hold his own, but it doesn't take many levels of experience for the Fighter to leap out in front. This is a mechanical limitation: it's written in the numbers of the game.

A non-mechanical limitation might go like this: Your holy warrior (i.e. Paladin) character may not associate with evil creatures or criminals. This would preclude the Paladin in a party with a Thief in most cases. Sounds like a good limitation... but suppose you have one player who has begged (see above) to play a Paladin, and another playing a Thief. There might be intra-party fighting, but probably not; rather, the Paladin will play dumb, acting like he does not know he's in a party with a Thief. "Oh, I thought he was just an archer," he might say if called on it.

In the Core Rules there is a section titled "Dealing with Players." In it, I lay out means by which the GM might handle players who want to ignore the limitations of their character class. The methods I describe there are meant to apply to core classes, but a good rule of thumb for class design is to think: Could those methods be applied to my class successfully? If you have applied limitations that you can't enforce, they aren't really limitations.

Class design starts out fun. If you don't actually seriously playtest a class, it may seem fun all the way through. But nothing can screw up your game faster than a badly designed class.

Think about it. You design an overly powerful magic item, and it falls into the hands of a player character, and the game begins to suffer as that character steals the spotlight from everyone else. So you, as the GM, decide that the item actually had charges, and they have just run out. Problem solved. Or the item has some other serious defect. It's easy to remove a bad magic item. Most other things you might add to your game from one supplement or another are similarly easy to remove.

But not classes. Imagine that you allow a player to play that cool new Megakiller class. He plays his shiny new character for a couple of sessions, and it becomes obvious the class is overpowered. Certainly, you have the means to kill the character (you are the GM after all)... but if you do it arbitrarily, the player will surely resent it. Taking away his fancy magic item isn't taking away his imagined identity, but taking away the character certainly is.

Be careful with supplemental classes. Even the oldest and most playtested of them may not work in your game. Be really careful if you are creating your own classes, and make sure your players understand that you may have to change or remove any characters of such classes if they cause problems in the game.

Creating classes is a lot of fun, until someone gets hurt.

[SmootRK]

Although I am one who loves to utilize various ideas into my own game (including a variety of classes), I agree with this. Making a new class in a willy-nilly fashion will result in many unforeseen consequences... just look at how wonky certain classes have made the AD&D game such as Barbarian, Cavalier (Cavalier-Paladin too), Thief-Acrobat, etc. I won't even go into how crazy the 3.x versions get especially once one takes into account the free-form multi-classing and endless supply of 'prestige classes'.

That said, I really do like a good class design, but more so when it addresses some fundamental lack in the game. For instance, when one needs a Fighter type that is not the standard sword/board in platemail. The basic game design heavily favors that sort of fighter, and making a lightly armoured archer/woodsy sort just does not work without doing something to tweak the rules; otherwise you just have a sub-standard fighter (mechanically anyhow). The same goes with some other archetypes or for options that one wants to use for NPCs that serve special purposes (especially for Bad Guys).

I do not encourage any sort of free-for-all approach to campaigns. I have designed a number of class and class-like options, but even I do not use them all... or at least not all of the options that I designed have found a place. I think many can find a place, but I even house-rule my own designs to more closely fit my campaign. They are written originally to fit more easily into the core rules, but need further work in my personal game.

So, I will echo Solomoriah some, in saying that one should be very stingy with class options (or other options in general), evaluating each small addition to one's game to make sure it will work. Just because there are many varieties of options, including multiple versions of any particular topic, does not mean that one needs to bring them directly into their own game. They were all created by individuals to fill a certain gap in their own game, and they were simply shared with the community... this does not make them "cannon" game material just because they might get posted up on the main web-site or featured in discussions here.

Consider all Game Supplements as a grab-bag of different options to individualize your personal Campaigns.