Talking about Character Class    

Let's take a break from heritage and race for a bit, and talk about class.  Class is another word that has a very different meaning in D&D than it typically does in the real world!  (It is hard for me to imagine being someone who has never been exposed to roleplaying games, but I can only wonder what such a person might think about our fantasy game where "race" and "class" are the way you describe your character.)  Character class serves the purpose of giving each character a specific set of skills and a role on the team.  Some versions of D&D, notably Fourth Edition, focus more on the role that your character serves from a tactics point of view.  Some versions are more concerned with the skills that your character has, such as fighting, spellcasting, healing, and finding traps.  Almost all fantasy RPGs attempt to "balance" classes, so let's first talk about what that means.

Balance is an elusive concept.  We can talk about mathematical balance:  If you and I have identical characters, but your character has much higher bonuses on their die rolls than I do, then you might say that our characters are imbalanced.  Of course, in all the systems that have individual random ability score generation, this is likely to be the case.  We can talk about balance in terms of challenge.  One of the guiding principles of D&D is that adventures should be dangerous and challenging, but that the players should often succeed in their goals.  Creating and maintaining that level of challenge, over the course of an epic tale, is probably the cornerstone of D&D's game design.  If I have a 4th level character for whom 4th level adventures are no longer challenging at all, then that character is not well-balanced.  Lastly, we can talk about balance in terms of "spotlight" time.  In early editions of D&D, my 1st level magic user had one spell.  When I cast it, I was (briefly) a rock star.  Once it was cast, however, it was gone for the day.  I was pretty much useless for the rest of the adventure.  In the meantime, the fighters and thieves were still busy doing things, since their abilities could be reused as often as they'd like.  That's one way to measure a "spotlight" time imbalance.

However, the way that it often gets measured is:  can my fighter beat up your wizard?  To me, this is the least interesting way of talking about character balance.  It requires a game designer to ignore what actually will happen in a typical fantasy game (the players working together to defeat a common foe), and design for a scenario that does nothing to contribute to the story (two players, on a desolate plain, a short distance apart, try to kill each other with all of the resources they have).

Instead, my rules of character balance are:

• Does every character have a variety of interesting choices to make during the course of a typical adventure?
• Are characters different enough that each has a relatively unique role to play, or are they interchangeable?
• Will a team of characters of a given level be challenged, but often successful, in a typical adventure of that same level?

Lessons Learned from Skills & Powers

Player's Option:  Skills & Powers was a rules supplement for Second Edition D&D.  It appeared about halfway between the release dates of Second Edition (in 1989) and Third Edition (in 2000).  The changes to the rules were fairly simple, but so impactful that it was almost like a "2.5 Edition" for D&D.  Second Edition had allowed for very little customization of character classes.  You could take a kit, which gave you a few bonuses and maybe a special ability.  Kits were directly tied to particular classes.  So you randomly rolled ability scores, chose a race, a class, and a kit, and that was pretty much it.  Skills & Powers not only introduced a point-buy system for ability scores, it also allowed you to use the same sort of system to custom build races and classes.  Finally, it allowed you to customize ability scores so that you could tailor the bonuses to optimize your character.  For example, you could lower the "Endurance" part of your Strength score (carrying heavy things over long distances), in order to increase the "Muscle" part of your Strength score (bonuses to hit and damage with weapons).  You could reduce bonuses that were hardly ever used in the game (such as System Shock), and increase bonuses that were used constantly (such as Hit Points).

Some players loved Skills & Powers.  It let them build and customize their characters outside of the rigid class system.  Some players felt that Skills & Powers was too unbalanced.  It allowed players to make characters who were significantly stronger than the original Second Edition system had allowed.  D&D Third Edition attempted to strike a balance between rigid classes and unlimited character customization, while still maintaining "balance" between the classes.  What I will try to do, in the next few posts, is set out a way to be even more flexible, without drowning the player in class archetypes and options.

 

A Note About Balance and Player Restraint

One issue that often arises when we talk about system balance is: do we really need system balance at all, so long as we have "good" players?  This approach says that our problems with game balance are due to a certain kind of player, a "munchkin," who "min-maxes" the system in order to optimize their character.  They are "roll-players" and not "role-players" because they are only interested in dice rolling and combat and winning and magic items, and are not interested in making a story and an interesting character.  They are the "Mary Sue" of their fantasy game, good at everything, with no real flaws, other than perhaps a tendency to be a loner and not work well with others (Charisma is their dump stat).  And they don't need to work well with others, because they can already do everything themselves.  What we need, it is argued, are"good" players who are going to make characters that are interesting first, and competent second.  Who realize that the system can be abused, and choose not to abuse it.

I have always been adamantly opposed to this type of thinking.  First of all, it is often used as an excuse for poor game design.  And second, it demonizes people who want to play the dice rolling game that underlies the storytelling game, by telling them that they cannot do both.  If they are interested in optimizing game mechanics, they must not be interested in the story or in roleplaying or in teamwork. 

On the other side of things, there are people who revel in the "munchkin" label, who enjoy being "better" at the game than anyone else, and who place no value on whether the other players are having fun or whether an interesting story is being told.  This, to me, is just as bad.  It devalues people who enjoy story and roleplaying, telling them that they are avoiding the complex rules system because they are not capable of understanding it.  Again, it places a false dichotomy between story and game.

It will not come as a huge surprise that these differing points of view are often described as gendered.  I cannot count the number of people I have spoken with who believe that women like story and roleplaying, but don't like math and combat.  Whereas men like competition and rules mechanics, but aren't as good at emotionally evocative storytelling.  This is all bullshit gender essentialism.  And, just as it supports a view of gender that is binary and inflexible, it also supports a view of gaming that is binary and inflexible.  You can have both good storytelling and good system mechanics.  Well written game design requires it.

This blog is funded by my Patreon! All proceeds are donated toward making gaming a more fun and more diverse place! Thank you so much to all my Patrons! https://www.patreon.com/openhouserules

So, What is a Roleplaying Game?   

Many RPG books start with this question.  They may compare roleplaying to when we played "make-believe" as children, or to improvisational theater, or to the collaboration between the director and actors in a movie.  We all know how to roleplay and we all know how to tell stories.  Some roleplaying games are as simple as those two things:  Tell a story.  Roleplay one of the characters in the story while you are telling it.  And then there is Dungeons & Dragons...

Dungeons & Dragons, as many people now know, started out as a tabletop war game, to which roleplaying was added.  Over time, through generations of D&D and spin-off games such as the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, roleplaying was defined as something you do on top of playing another game.  Later innovations in roleplaying flipped that on its head:  Let's roleplay first, they suggested, and then maybe add some game elements on top of it to make it more interesting.

As a game designer, I like to keep both things in mind.  The storytelling that is "make-believe" and the game that is rolling dice and making moves.  Here's how I think about that.

You have a character, an imaginary person that you have made up.  And you are interacting with the imaginary characters that the other players have made up, as well as the imaginary world that one or more of the players has made up.  You have some goals, set by the players together, based on the kind of story you want to tell.  Let's say in this game, your goal is to cross a dangerous mountain pass to see what is on the other side.

Anything that you want your character to do:  "I put on my boots and start walking," "I find a map of the pass so that we don't get lost," up to "I cast a teleportation spell so that I instantly appear on the other side of the mountains" or "I decide that crossing through the dangerous pass is too hard, so instead I open a bed and breakfast on this side of the mountain" is limited by two things:

Story limitations:  The goal is to tell a good story.  Is your character's action making the story better?

Game limitations:  The goal is to play a game.  Does your character's action follow the rules of the game?

A well-designed roleplaying game makes those two things mesh together seamlessly.  When you follow the rules of the game, you are more likely to tell a good story.  When you tell a good story, you are helped, not hindered, by the rules of the game.

What you want, and what I want, in a story and in a game, may be different.  This is why we have so many excellent roleplaying games to choose from.  By deciding that we are all going to play a particular game, we can all have the same expectations about what is going to be fun for all of us.

Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder

I've played a lot of roleplaying games, but for me, Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition, and subsequently Pathfinder, hit the sweet spot for what I want in a story and what I want in a game.  I like fantasy stories.  I like heroism.  I like players working together toward a common goal, one that often involves a lot of sword-fighting.  Those are the kinds of stories that I like to tell.  I also like complicated games, with dice and math.  I like building a character in a way that expresses a three-dimensional personality while, at the same time, being incredibly deadly with sword or a spell.  I like putting together a strategy and then seeing if it works.  I like starting out as the lowly underdog, and then growing in power until I become a legend.  And I'm certainly not the only one, given the popularity of these games.

However, Dungeons & Dragons has moved away from some of the things that I really loved about Third Edition.  Character building options have become more limited.  The game doesn't seem to change as much between the beginning and the end of a long campaign.  Fifth Edition is certainly simpler to play, but it doesn't speak to me like Third did.  It's not what I love.

Pathfinder was designed for folks who still loved Third Edition, while realizing that the publishers of D&D had moved on to other ideas.  Pathfinder has two amazing things going for it, in addition to being built on the rule structure of D&D: 

First, it is built with the Open Game License, which means that anyone can design for it.  Second, Paizo, Pathfinder's publisher, creates a treasure-trove of content in the form of Adventure Paths.  Pathfinder is certainly the game that I have played the most of for the past five years, and I suspect will continue to be for the next.

Open House Rules

This blog will contain my house rules for Pathfinder, which have evolved into their own game entirely.  Everything here will be designed to be compatible with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.  And everything will be modular, meaning that you can take what you like, and leave behind what you don't.

Here are some things I'd like to include:

• Replacement systems for discrete parts of the game, such as the alignment system or the hit point and recovery system.
• Tools to manage the enormous bulk of rules that are now contained in the Pathfinder System Reference Document.
• Individual feats, monsters, spells, and items that are easy to add into your Pathfinder campaign.
• Packages of material for running a particular adventure or genre of adventure.
• Adventure ideas, seeds, non-player characters, and other helpful items for a gamemaster.
• Thoughts on game design and why things work the way that they do, and how they might work better a different way.
• Ways to mitigate and eliminate some of the unfortunate detritus of a game system that has not aged well with respect to how it handles issues of gender and race, among other things.
• Advice for particular problems that players and gamemasters may encounter.

Everything here is free for you to use in your own personal game.  I retain the copyright to anything on this blog that exists outside of the Open Game License.

This blog is funded by Patreon.  100% of the proceeds from this blog will be donated toward the goal of increasing diversity and fun in the roleplaying community.  Thank you so much for your kind support.

And to everyone, welcome to my blog!  Thank you so much for reading!

Some Disclaimers

Paizo Publishing, LLC does not guarantee compatibility with any content appearing in, and does not endorse, this blog.  Pathfinder is a registered trademark of Paizo Publishing, LLC.  All materials published through this blog are my own copyright, with the exception of any materials that may be considered to be covered under the Open Game License, which are declared Open Game Content as described in Section 1(d) of the Open Game License Version 1.0a.  A copy of the Open Game License and collected copyright information is available here.