There Is Only the Adventurer Class

[Mask_De_H]

After reading through some old stuff about 4e, I was wondering why we never expanded upon the idea of there only being the "humanoid adventurer" class in your fantasy heartbreaker of choice. The things D&D and friends assume are class specific are really just roles for a party that aren't enforced or even necessary outside of easy understanding. Several point buy systems attempt a fantasy game, but it's never the main focus and/or has issues germane to their universality.

The idea could play out in several ways: a Shadowrun style system where there are opposing bits of phlebotinum that differentiate characters, a Black Forest system where the role protection is something that is expected to be shared to some degree with the party (via other players being able to pick up tricks from their party members) or a FFT system where the class distinction is descriptive instead of prescriptive: you get a bunch of abilities and they determine what class hat you get to wear.

So what would need to be done in order to make a game concept like this work when common knowledge is a fantasy heartbreaker needs classes?

[Voss]

It needs to not suck, which is pretty much what everyone consistently trips over when they gush about how great an idea this is.

The output is consistently jack-of-all-trades starts that turn into specialists in whatever wins the system.

[Harshax]

The system needs to have investments in roles that produce unique abilities at every tier of adventurer, but it needs to avoid the equivalence of level dipping in other classes. I've seen some examples that grant special features for investing in X number of build points into skills, but I think the problem with that approach is that you aren't representative of the class your trying to play until you have reached a certain level of investment or worse anyone can come along and beeline the same class feature later and possibly easier at a later level. If you need X skill points in Endurance to get bonus hit die, it's still better to be a crafter who specializes in stat boosting gear, so that later levels your bonuses to skill points is so high that you lap everyone that took a different route.

So I think doling out the specialty benefits should come first, with the build coming second. You get X number of abilities per tier and you build the larger number of minor choices in terms of equipment, skills and feats around the smaller number of major character features. If you pick Sneak Attack as a major feature, it follows that you should pick skills and feats that makes the most use of that feature.

I also think there should only be X total amount of skill points, feats and major features based on levels and no way to game the system as described previously. In other words, no extra skill points from Int.

Lastly, there has to be retraining rules that only cost game time and here is where every session you get to swap out a percentage of skills and feats and then you get to drop a major feature for a new one. Major features taken at the heroic tier require less reshuffling than later ones and if this system has Feature Chains, then dependent Features have to be swapped out first.

[Username17]

Even after you come to terms with the fact that swinging a sword or casting a spell is not a protectable role and you do away with stupid classes like Fighter and Wizard, you're still going to have to come to grips with the fact that people very much want to have their own stuff. People want to be able to say "I'm going to play an X" and have that be the equivalent of pissing on a tree as far as letting the other players know what kinds of key abilities they are going to be bringing to the group that other people can fucking avoid taking for their own characters.

Yes, we realize that stabbing people with a sword is not a thing you can call dibs on in a fantasy game. Similarly, you can't call dibs on "all of magic." It's a Sword and Sorcery game. Everyone's gonna use swords. And sorcery. But if you're the "turning into a living shadow guy," you're still well within your rights to get pissed off if one of the other players turns up with shadow body on their ability list.

How you divide things up is really up to you, the designer. There's no right way to do it. You could easily skip out on "classes" altogether. But you're still gonna want Chrono-Trigger style personal elements or After Sundown style magic skill synergies or something. Something that will let a player call dibs on some portion of the color pie.

-Username17

[Mask_De_H]

So there still need to be meta roles, which can be arbitrary as long as it is still possible to contribute in the important parts of the game within those roles, right?

How do pure universal systems manage, then? Gentlemen's agreement?

[Username17]

So there still need to be meta roles, which can be arbitrary as long as it is still possible to contribute in the important parts of the game within those roles, right?

Yes. You can have there be more meta-roles than expected players with each player expecting to deliver on more than one. Shadowrun, for example, has a lot of fungible expectations like "face," "driver," and "joint caser" that might plausibly fit along side other core competencies.

But regardless of how many meta roles you establish and how many core competencies you expect each character to cover, you are going to need something along those lines or everything is going to suck monkey butt.

How do pure universal systems manage, then? Gentlemen's agreement?

• 1. Generally quite badly.
  
  2. With lots and lots and lots of pre-game discussion between each of the players and the GM and between each of the players and all the other players.
  
  3. Even then, generally quite badly.

As we mentioned in the OSSR of GURPS Cyberpunk, universal systems have a huge problem generating groups of PCs that are willing and able to meaningfully contribute to the same group adventures.

The book rattles off various character concepts you might have for a cyberpunk genre game. This is... puzzling, but fairly par for the course in GURPS land. How might a “Maverick Cop”, a “Corporate Bodyguard”, a “Mafia Lieutenant”, and a “Drifter” meaningfully adventure together? Who fucking cares! This is GURPS, and figuring out how to get characters with wildly different backgrounds and life goals to work together in a story is 1) kind of the point, and 2) your fucking problem. GURPS is basically They Fight Crime! at the best of times, and the suggested character archetypes here don't really change that.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

Role protection is a storm in a tea cup. Only panty twisting wankers give a shit if two players in even a class based game turn up to the same table both with wizards or even both with evokers. It's ok you can stop hyperventilating people are allowed to just do that it works out fine.

The specialist and jack of all trades issues however ARE a potential problem, not even a problem perhaps more a systematic weakness, the trade off cost that you pay in return for a more customizable system.

Points based or classless systems can work out fine, never perfect and their imperfections will weight towards different flaws than a harsh narrow classed based system. However ultimately there are just plain less "traditional" TTRPGs that go with the classless option, because grognards and sacred cows and everything has to be )D&D and no other reason. It's been done less, and when it has been done has typically been done just as sloppily as class based systems are usually done. From my own work I'd say you can do it better than a typical points based system like, lets say, BESM by just giving it a go and actually trying not to produce something completely ass.

[momothefiddler]

As someone who's played a lot of GURPS (4th Edition) and whose favorite system may well still be GURPS...

How do pure universal systems manage, then? Gentlemen's agreement?

• 1. Generally quite badly.
  
  2. With lots and lots and lots of pre-game discussion between each of the players and the GM and between each of the players and all the other players.
  
  3. Even then, generally quite badly.

This.

Much like GURPS expects the MC to build the universe out of pieces, it also expects the MC to make a clear set of expectations for characters and the players to spend a fuckton of time working together to make those characters mesh into a reasonable party. That's a process I personally enjoy, but it's not really optional. I've been in some games where people expected the system to do that for them and built characters separately from each other and from the MC and... it's bad.

Essentially, roles and interactions and not being a jackass to other players still need to get carved out. It just gives you both the ability and the responsibility to do it yourself.

[deaddmwalking]

Role protection is a storm in a tea cup. Only panty twisting wankers give a shit if two players in even a class based game turn up to the same table both with wizards or even both with evokers. It's ok you can stop hyperventilating people are allowed to just do that it works out fine.

I don't think this is true. The reason why people were so reluctant to accept that clerics were so vastly superior to fighters was because they generally saw them in different roles - comparing the efficacy of two classes that engaged the game in different ways is difficult. Cleric Archer, showing that the cleric can do the SAME ROLE as the Fighter, and do it better, and still do more on top of that is where people began to accept that fighters really couldn't pull their weight. And even then, some people still maintain that it is because of 'persistent spell cheese' and that the fighter can 'swing a sword all day'.

Ultimately, when someone engages the game in a different way than your character does, it's usually fine as long as you feel you're making a contribution. If another character does everything you can do - or can handle everything without your contribution, then you really don't have any reason to be there.

The game works best as a cooperative storytelling game when everyone feels that they're making a significant contribution to the story. One of the easiest ways to help ensure that happens is some form of 'role protection'.

[PhoneLobster]

the cleric can do the SAME ROLE as the Fighter, and do it better

And that has zero to do with the fact that you can bring 2 Fighters or 2 Clerics to the same party and everything is fine, no one needed their role protected from the ultimate stepping on toes it's OK you do NOT have to, or even get off trying to design your RPG with a hard rule "no one may play the same class as someone else at the table!".

A situation where something is broken and inequitable is fucking NOTHING to do with role protection bullshit and it's offensive that you should present it as an argument for why we can't have two party members or a WHOLE party that all happen to be wizards in a class system or all happen to select a minor teleporting mobility option or something in a classless system.

Most players are not in fact whiny baby manchildren who chuck a tantrum because someone else in the party was also permitted to learn god damn shocking grasp. Oh, it can happen, but when it does your problem was NOT the rules system permitting a second player to select the same "role protected" option by class or classless mechanics.

[momothefiddler]

Wait, so PL, to confirm: your stance is that some people do have less fun when someone else in the party can do all the same things their character can do, but fuck those people, because Grownups have just as much fun when everyone has the same build as when they're the only one who does the thing they do?

[Whipstitch]

I've found that complaints and heavy chargen collaboration mostly comes up with utility skills in point buy games, not with abilities that can be defensive and/or collaborative like combat, stealth and perception powers--you have to be pretty damn petty to feel miffed that your Shadowrun teammates scraped together enough dice to avoid being murdered by Yakuza assassins, for example. Likewise people are often quick to realize that it's easier to talk people into daring night raids when everyone on the team can see in the dark and hold their own in a fight. On the other hand, when you have people doubling up on the Armorer skill that can lead to some mild buyer's remorse because there's little benefit for multiple contributors and because the whole lure of point buy is the idea that everything on your sheet is something that you genuinely wanted to have whereas D&D characters routinely end up with some class feature tchotchke that they picked up for free en route to the shit they actually cared about.

With all of that said, I consider the problem to be pretty small potatoes. You can seriously collaborate most of the "waste" away at chargen and it is in nowhere near as bad as the cleric vs. fighter situation where one guy can do everything the other guy can do, only better, and with angelic guardians.

[Kaelik]

Wait, so PL, to confirm: your stance is that some people do have less fun when someone else in the party can do all the same things their character can do, but fuck those people, because Grownups have just as much fun when everyone has the same build as when they're the only one who does the thing they do?

His position is that he already wrote Mousetrap, and the only possibly correct rule set ever is Mousetrap, so to the extent that any idea deviates from Mousetrap in any way ever (Such as having classes), it is objectively wrong.

[PhoneLobster]

Wait, so PL, to confirm

First lets confirm YOUR stance.

Because unless your stance is "New Rule: No player may select a class or other option that another player has already selected" then you haven't done fucking diddly squat in the way of role protection compared to a classless system, indeed in some respects a class system lacking that rule is worse from a "role protection" standpoint than a classless system lacking that rule.

Now lets confirm my stance.

MY stance is old rule no players choices of classes or other options should limit another players choices of classes or other options. The byproduct of that is overlapping class and option selections in one party because players want the choice they want MORE than they want to be the only one who made that choice. And if they as a group want to make diversity a priority ahead of their personal choices then they certainly can and we don't need a rule for that and shouldn't design a system that breaks if they do not make that rather unusual decision.

[OgreBattle]

At this poing we've talked a lot about the failing points of various point buy/level/hybrid systems, so you might as well just do what personally makes you feel good and work for at least the point where you're stabbing goblins up to stabbing wyverns.

So systems I'm curious to design are...

* 5 level tiers, open multiclassing within tiers. You have 4-8 classes per tier.
* Something like FFXI's or FFT's Main/Sub job system, your main job gives you A+B+C, your subjob gives you C only.

There's also a question of different power schedules in a point buy to multi classing system.

[Jason]

Role protection is a storm in a tea cup. Only panty twisting wankers give a shit if two players in even a class based game turn up to the same table both with wizards or even both with evokers. It's ok you can stop hyperventilating people are allowed to just do that it works out fine.

Thing is: that's not how most People work. Most rpg players want to play a particular concept of a role and they want their shining moment. They want their unique feat to matter. If, especially in a class based game, another player happens to be able to do the exact same thing, then there is nothing distinct for the player to do and that is boring to most players.

Role protection is not a matter of hard rules, not even of soft rules, but of the social contract. Sure, some groups can handle without, but most can't. Even in a Group of all rogues, you'd still want distinction. One might be the sneaky staby type, one the pilfering, conniving type, one the acrobaty burglary type, etc. But they will want to have specific abilities that differentiate them from the rest. A unique role to fulfill.

[PhoneLobster]

Thing is: that's not how most People work.

Just. No.

Human psychology and group behaviour is complex and often silly but lets be clear headed and rational about analyzing it.

The priority for functional adult non-dickwad gamers at a TTRPG table is that they get to make the choices they want to make, and that they get to be rewarded for those choices. The need for those choices to be in ANY way shape or form "unique" is of such low priority it barely registers as worth a mention. Indeed the MUCH higher secondary priority for most gamers is that the OTHER players at the table ALSO HAVE FUN, by means of also being allowed to make the choices they want to make and then being rewarded for that.

Just about no one wants to be told "fuck you tear up your character sheet Mike chose wizard before you", they also do not even want to be told and do not gain anything but guilt and bad feelings from "You getting to play a wizard has deprived so much as one other player at the table from enjoying the game as much as they could have".

As for the rest of your post.

You mistake Social Contract for Gentleman's Agreement for Adhering to Unquestioned Tradition.

No, it IS about actual hard rules, because the discussion is about hard rules and role protection has repeatedly been used (often erroneously) as justification for certain choices of hard rules.

No, your "diverse rogues" example is not an example of avoiding a breach of role protection, it is just an example of a breach of role protection. A breach that was totally fine and playable, and in part rendered such by hard mechanics like a classless system or a soft hybrid class/classless system that enabled both the overlap and the customized variations you seem to think make the rather grievous primary breach of role protection ok. But that customizability is exactly what so called "role protection" adherents argue against when they pull out role protection as an argument for design level mechanical choices.

[Username17]

I'm not gonna try to engage with PL's latest hobby horse that players don't want their characters to be special. It's so weirdly at odds with his earlier position that players deserve to have their characters be special so hard that asking players to stick to character races that existed in the campaign world or which were capable of climbing ladders was completely unreasonable that I just can't engage anymore. PL's position isn't coherent and I don't give a shit anymore.

At this poing we've talked a lot about the failing points of various point buy/level/hybrid systems, so you might as well just do what personally makes you feel good and work for at least the point where you're stabbing goblins up to stabbing wyverns.

So systems I'm curious to design are...

* 5 level tiers, open multiclassing within tiers. You have 4-8 classes per tier.
* Something like FFXI's or FFT's Main/Sub job system, your main job gives you A+B+C, your subjob gives you C only.

There's also a question of different power schedules in a point buy to multi classing system.

That sounds like kind of a mess. If you only take five selections in a tier, why split them into 4-8 trees that are five selections long? The fifth available selection in each tree is going to come up basically never. If you're going to be bailing out of the entire tier in five levels, mixing and matching your class each level out of bits and bobs is a giant waste of time. You might as well just have slightly more available level packages and cover whatever the fuck it is that you think hybridization is supposed to bring to the table. If you're going to do short classes and open multiclassing, how about having no classes and just a list of potential options for shit you could get for going up a level within each tier?

So sorta like the old Ultima model, where you can go up in level in Honesty to be a better Mage or level up in Valor to be a better Fighter. Though hopefully not as obviously broken as the Ultima Virtues wherein Spirituality is the pwns.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

No, it IS about actual hard rules, because the discussion is about hard rules and role protection has repeatedly been used (often erroneously) as justification for certain choices of hard rules.

It's clearly a spectrum. If everyone plays the same class, people are still going to want ways to distinguish their characters. How different is going to be a matter of taste. For one pair of players, the fact that one wizard wears a red cloak and the other wears a magenta cloak might be enough; for another pair of players it might be that one uses ice magic and another uses fire spells; for still another it's not going to work at all so one of the players chooses to be a different class.

Generally, if you create a combination of options that is supposed to be a 'specialist', you want to avoid another combination of options that is clearly superior in that role as well as having another. For example, if the 'Shadow Rogue' is 'best at sneaking' but you make an 'Assassin' which is supposed to be best at killing things, the 'Shadow Rogue' player is going to be upset if the Assassin is better at killing things and sneaking. But that's largely because the Shadow Rogue was duped.

'Hard Classes' without any optional customization isn't a good option, even if you have thousands of them. First of all, having too many options to consider simultaneously is awfully hard; secondly since the options are presented to all characters you very well may have two that want to be exactly the same thing. If you allow customization, two players can create a different experience of the same character and contribute in different ways. Again, the number of choices may vary between what two players find acceptable - most players are probably okay with an 'all cleric party', but there are some that aren't. Among those that are, it's going to be pretty common to all choose different deities, different domains, and different feats. Part of it is simple optimization - having four characters with exactly the same abilities limits the number of threats you can respond to. Having a wide variety of abilities makes you more likely to have a 'solution', but also makes it less likely that you have multiple instances of the 'optimal solution'.

Of course, the more customization you have (for example: races, classes, backgrounds, feats, skills, archetypes, equipment, spell selection, etc) the more complex the game will be. Breaking down those options into digestible chunks is important as well as making sure they interact appropriately.

[MGuy]

Having Role Protection doesn't prevent other people from simply choosing to play the same role. You can have an entire table of people with crowd control. I'm not sure what PL is even ranting about.

[momothefiddler]

Wait, so PL, to confirm

First lets confirm YOUR stance.

Because unless your stance is "New Rule: No player may select a class or other option that another player has already selected" then you haven't done fucking diddly squat in the way of role protection compared to a classless system, indeed in some respects a class system lacking that rule is worse from a "role protection" standpoint than a classless system lacking that rule.

Okay, yeah, forgot how defensive you got about your shitty-ass claims. Shouldn't have bothered attempting good faith here.

functional adult non-dickwad gamers

Cool, so I was right.

What's also cool is that functional adult non-dickwad gamers don't even need rules since they're so good at knowing what everyone wants and so chill about making sure everyone else has fun that they'd all rather just go freeform, because rules might theoretically force them into a situation where someone isn't having fun (like a class-based system theoretically could!), and nobody wants that.

---

EDIT:

Having Role Protection doesn't prevent other people from simply choosing to play the same role. You can have an entire table of people with crowd control. I'm not sure what PL is even ranting about.

True! It just makes it easier for people to know what roles have already been chosen via "I'm playing a Crusader" and easier for people to call each other out as intentional jackasses when they show up as also a Crusader.

And it's that sort of ease that makes people look at me funny when I suggest a character creation session (which is important in GURPS, for instance, where it takes a lot more effort to not step on each others' toes)

[Kaelik]

I'm pretty sure 1000000% of functional adult non-dickwad gamers play Mousetrap and only Mousetrap, because the mere act of playing any other game automatically transforms you into a non-function child dickwad non-gamer.

[Mechalich]

Perhaps it is useful to break down role projection into two components: cosmetic and mechanical.

A game system may have various coded mechanical demands that every party must met in order to remain functional. Standard MMOs do this most obviously by demanding DPS, Tank, and Healer for all groups, to the point that automated group assembler programs won't even let you make a group that doesn't meet those requirements. However, within those three mechanically coded roles there's usually a lot of variation that is mostly cosmetic. So two MMO healers, even if of different classes, will primarily provide the same function and will even be balanced to provide the same numeric output at equivalent levels. Sure there will be differences that become apparent at high levels of system mastery, but if the game is decently designed all classes assigned to a role will be able to perform that role effectively.

Obviously TTRPG classes aren't anywhere near as hard-coded as the average MMO, but they still have mechanical variation in capabilities that leads to them favoring certain roles. Classes are supposed to be a system that channels players towards builds that function in the relevant roles. That's useful because discrete roles, especially in combat, allow for tactical complexity. If there is no mechanical differentiation and all roles are purely cosmetic, then your systems degenerate. Witness GW2, which has no defined roles and party organization degenerates into 'zerg rush!' most of the time.

Classless systems are okay if you don't expect your game to have high tactical complexity, and are down with most problems being solved by one player at a time. All non-combat challenges tend to go to whoever has the best skill for X, and combat is simply 'spam your best attack' over and over. That works fine for some games, but it doesn't provide the classic dungeon crawl experience.

[Username17]

Having Role Protection doesn't prevent other people from simply choosing to play the same role. You can have an entire table of people with crowd control.

This is true. If you have hard classes with genuinely protected roles, there is nothing stopping two or three or all the players from playing the same class if that is what they want to do.

In the much more likely scenario where everyone wants to be bringing something unique to the table, the ability to carve out a potential space with a single sentence is valuable. That is, saying "I'm playing an Orcish Paladin" is something you can say in less than ten seconds and if that is enough information to let them know that from your perspective they'd still be bringing some unique talents to the table with either a Goblin Druid or a Drow Necromancer, then they can can get all the information they need from everyone at the table in about a single minute.

On the flip side, if you're playing a skill-based game like Vampire the Masquerade, getting that information out of the other players takes a lot more time. Finding out that one of the other players is playing a Ventrue Lawyer doesn't tell you one way or the other whether you'd be bringing unique talents to the table by having a lot of Subterfuge or Politics. You'd have to grill them on what all of their skill dots actually were to find out whether your hypothetical character would be the goto guy for anything in particular. That's a much longer conversation, and one which each player is going to have to have with each other player. And lord help you if you find that your proposed character's core competencies are all covered by other proposed characters and now you want to figure out a brand new character whose total skill set adds up to having at least one competency the team would rely on in some circumstance. The time adds up, and it really can take a whole session.

Compared to AD&D where everyone says what they want to play going around the table and then a minute later you realize that no one was playing a Cleric so you rock paper scissors and the loser has to make a Cleric named Carlos.

There are certainly disadvantages of class based systems. But the advantage of giving everyone a feeling of unique individual worth with minimal effort is definitely real.

I'm not sure what PL is even ranting about.

Uh... I'm not sure PL knows what he is ranting about.

-Username17

[Mechalich]

And lord help you if you find that your proposed character's core competencies are all covered by other proposed characters and now you want to figure out a brand new character whose total skill set adds up to having at least one competency the team would rely on in some circumstance. The time adds up, and it really can take a whole session.

Also lord help you if the party as a whole is missing one of the core competencies necessary to functioning within the playspace. If you're playing Mage: the Ascension for instance, someone in the party has to take Life 3. Otherwise there's no healing available and anytime someone gets shot they're out for weeks of hospital time. This is additional burden on the GM, who has to monitor that party a lot more closely to make sure it can function. In D&D it basically boils down to 'okay, who's going to play the cleric' and once that's done you can work around whatever else turns up.

Classes reduce the system mastery burden on the GM to ensure characters are viable (at least if the classes are decently balanced 3.X D&D has some issues in this sphere). Compare that to something like Exalted, where high system mastery is required just to figure out what a viable build even is, never mind to actually make a party composed of relevant and functional characters.