classes and niche protection

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When I started with D&D, classes worked fine. If there was a class that didn’t fit, there were 100 different ones in Dragon to choose from. Multiclassing wasn’t “dipping” into anything, it was a career changer, and a big pain in the ass to do. Proficiencies gave each class “wiggle room” and even kits were just more subclasses.

Then I played a whole lot of MERP/Rolemaster, and Shadowrun. I never looked at classes the same again.
 
Umm... according to urban dictionary... HE IS GOING TO WHAT?

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I always liked how StarWars and 1st/2nd ed Shadowrun handled "classes" as setting archetypes that a new player could take and customize slightly so they could just jump into playing.

I don't think either of those games epitomizes "niche protection" though
 
I always liked how StarWars and 1st/2nd ed Shadowrun handled "classes" as setting archetypes that a new player could take and customize slightly so they could just jump into playing.

I don't think either of those games epitomizes "niche protection" though

agreed. I like “examples from a point buy system” or “we bundled some skills up but didn’t really put many powers in here“. I think those are useful. I think those help folks without a clear idea.
 
My own system was going the route of sandbox but I ended up veering to a hybrid class system. You can still sandbox it and come up with a viable character, but the classes allow you to fulfill roles without making a useless character.

What I did was split the character creation into 3 parts with the idea that your starting character was already going to be half as good as your end game character... not 1/20th as good. So you went through a life path for your early years to give you your hobbies and social skills, a career path for what you did before you chose your character path. and finally a two part character path.

The main character path gave you an assortment of open ended choices for designing your character. all choices resulted in a viable build so that you could fulfill your role. The last part was if you wanted to specialize your role or multiclass. You got to choose a secondary class that was either a focus of your primary one or a selection of skills and abilities from another class altogether.
Once your character was good to go, all choices in game were yours to make as a sandbox style. You had to buy into abilities from other classes that would significantly benefit your character build, but could still take them.

It was all a build point setup with choices that gave points, cost points or were the neutral free choice. So... if you selected attributes, the median attribute was 3 (Average human) that cost 0. If you wanted 4 or 5, it cost from your build points. if you wanted 2, you gained. If you wanted to focus on a career path over your early life, you could allocate points to it, so basic education may be free, but medical school costs points. Or, you could ramp up your social skills and become the face. This was all secondary character roles, so if you wanted to be the dashing fighter ala Errol Flynn, you could without having to sacrifice combat ability.

In the end I was aiming to make a build point system that still protected niches for starting characters and prevented the type of min maxxing that results in a character that has no skills and only knows how to do one thing really really well..
 
I hope that was supposed to be "thread".
Hehe, yes!


These are all respectable preferences which don't need to be called "dissociated" or some other word.
Ok. I was just chiming in, and trying to stay out of that argument. Not my word or theory, though I think I probably get what they're talking about in general.

Gamers tend to frame their ideas and tastes in such personal and different ways, it can be hard to fully understand each other, let alone agree.
 
But I think it's still a reasonable explanation of "why can't the receivers do this every time?"
This loops back to my suggestion for gating things via different mechanisms, and how my players experienced that in GURPS.

The most associative / easily justified way of handling these kind of exceptional results is to factor in a big ‘skill penalty’, however your game-of-choice handles that. So, that athletic one-handed catch might be a DC30 in D&D‘s recent skill paradigms. This has a couple of implications. First, if your character’s bonus isn’t at least
+10 they have no chance of success. Second, if your character did have +10 they would only succeed 5% of the time, making pulling it off when you needed it almost impossible. Finally, these kind of mechanics reward ‘safe’ play over ‘cool’ play. Why risk doing something cool when you can go with the vanilla option and have more chance of success?

Conversely, making one-handed catch a power where you can only attempt it once per day retains an acceptance that this event is highly unlikely, whilst making it something you can reasonably attempt when it will make the difference.

If you want a game that is more ‘heroic’ then the martial-powers thing does contribute to that, in my opinion. But it is undoubtedly ‘fantasy super heroes’ by this point which isn’t what you want in every game. One of the best analogies I came up with at the time was that the ‘at will / encounter / daily’ paradigm neatly explains why the Power Rangers don’t use their Uber-power to take out every opponent in every fight. They save it for when they really need it.
 
My point was that both editions were adapted into video games.

I knew that. But you asked what mine was, so I explained why i said what I said. Further, DDO was adapting a system to a video game, whereas 4E just felt like it belonged there, in part because “I use Tide or Iron” felt like something I’d do by mashing a button. Speaking for myself only, of course.
 
I like nifty special abilities.
Classes is an easier way of allowing that to happen without having to work for millennia on the dreaded balance issue.

I also like High Fantasy way way more than low fantasy.

I like the archetype approach to class and level. Take a 20 level game and you choose archetype every 4 levels. That is gold to me. You get a couple special abilities with an archetype and then player choice for the other stuff...I'll need some tissues and a moment alone.
 
How classes work is based on what you make it of it. Use it one way it is something fantastic only loosely connected with reality. Use it another way it just as grounded as skilled based system focused on realism.

With the bare bone nature of OD&D this is even more so. Which is why the system is amicable to different play styles. I have found that more details one throws into a class the harder the less flexible it is to adapt to different settings. Particularly classes that incorporate extraordinary abilities like magic.

In the end the makeup of the classes should reflect one's view of the setting. For many the traditional four (or three): cleric, fighter, magic-user, and thief is sufficient. For others it wasn't, like myself.
 
I am quite partial to how Rolemaster did classes and levels. They basically had four functions:
  • Your class governed which spell lists you had ready access to (and most classes had some magic in RM)
  • Your class governed the cost of increasing a given skill (e.g. fighters pay 1 or 2 points to increase combat skills, more like 20 to buy spells. Mages are converse to this)
  • In combination with your level, they placed a cap on your maximum skill. By default, you could only buy one level in a skill per level of class. If your class was expert at something, you could buy two or more levels of skill per class level. This meant that, for example, even if a mage chose to buy skill with a weapon every level the fighter could be buying two levels of skill for each class level and keep ahead
  • Your class gave you some free bonuses to iconic skills, which could be +1 to +3 per class level.
This is a nice mid-point between fully class based and fully points based in my experience. It causes people to build thematic characters, rather than everyone evolving into a Jack-of-all-trades. It limits people’s propensity to buy up one skill to ridiculous levels whilst ignoring everything else. It gives the GM a bit more to work with when trying to decide how challenging a given encounter would be for their PCs.

You could still choose to be a fighter with no combat skills, a mage with no spells and so on if you really wanted to, but it certainly curbed some excess and provided a good framework for players to build within.
 
I am quite partial to how Rolemaster did classes and levels. They basically had four functions:
  • Your class governed which spell lists you had ready access to (and most classes had some magic in RM)
  • Your class governed the cost of increasing a given skill (e.g. fighters pay 1 or 2 points to increase combat skills, more like 20 to buy spells. Mages are converse to this)
  • In combination with your level, they placed a cap on your maximum skill. By default, you could only buy one level in a skill per level of class. If your class was expert at something, you could buy two or more levels of skill per class level. This meant that, for example, even if a mage chose to buy skill with a weapon every level the fighter could be buying two levels of skill for each class level and keep ahead
  • Your class gave you some free bonuses to iconic skills, which could be +1 to +3 per class level.
This is a nice mid-point between fully class based and fully points based in my experience. It causes people to build thematic characters, rather than everyone evolving into a Jack-of-all-trades. It limits people’s propensity to buy up one skill to ridiculous levels whilst ignoring everything else. It gives the GM a bit more to work with when trying to decide how challenging a given encounter would be for their PCs.

You could still choose to be a fighter with no combat skills, a mage with no spells and so on if you really wanted to, but it certainly curbed some excess and provided a good framework for players to build within.
Agreed, it was a good system, and worked well. Still one of my favorites.
 
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Niche protection is important. There's nothing quite as annoying as everyone being functionally identical and equally gimped outside a narrow set of circumstances.

But classes are often a straitjacket. As others have mentioned, it's always a compromise trying to get the character you want when classes are strongly defined and have lots of mechanical detail. BECMI D&D with the skill rules is a great compromise. Want a particular flavour of Fighter, Thief or whatever, you can just tune your skill choice and gear loadout and declare yourself a Ranger or whatever.
 
While I appreciate no one posting drama from other forums here, I also think calling someone out based on unrelated moderation really is a low tactic. And CKR is not at the heart of what happened here in this thread.

The relevant information from the post I linked was "CRKrueger, you've been at the heart of a lot of flames recently", and that post was easy to find by searching "CRKrueger threadbanned". I didn't think that it would require more detail to make clear, and the pattern may depend on looking at a sequence of posts.

So, in the past month we've seen CRKrueger asserting that if "you're not roleplaying [the way CRKrueger does] then you're not roleplaying", people who use X-Cards are doing so from an ulterior motive of spoiling the game, modern players are broken by video games, AL players are the worst of the worst. (The search is longer but still easy because you just have to look at the threads that got locked.) The unifying theme is that people who don't play like CRKrueger are bad, broken or inferior. Called on it, he backs up, but is always back testing the boundaries in another thread. Or the same thread.
 
Multiclassing wasn’t “dipping” into anything, it was a career changer, and a big pain in the ass to do.

True! In D&D, it was slow advancement back in the day (for MC). And dual classing, man...you had to want it. I don't know that that's any "better" per se, but then I've been either using systems that have inherent niche protection (DW=by RAW, one class represented in the party at any given time), or no classes (FATE).
 
I really felt it when I ran a short Savage Worlds spaghetti western style Star Wars session a while back. I told the party to make Han Solo types, rogues and thieves who were basically decent at heart.

We went through character creation too quickly because we were eager to get started.

It turned out we had a whole party all with basically the same skillset.
 
True! In D&D, it was slow advancement back in the day (for MC). And dual classing, man...you had to want it. I don't know that that's any "better" per se, but then I've been either using systems that have inherent niche protection (DW=by RAW, one class represented in the party at any given time), or no classes (FATE).
There's a blog post by Vincent Baker where he explains that the "one of each playbook" in Apocalypse World was to make it easier for MC's, because they would know exactly how many to bring to a new game (ie, 1). And then other designers ran with it, and playbooks took off as a thing people liked...
 
I really felt it when I ran a short Savage Worlds spaghetti western style Star Wars session a while back. I told the party to make Han Solo types, rogues and thieves who were basically decent at heart.

We went through character creation too quickly because we were eager to get started.

It turned out we had a whole party all with basically the same skillset.
I ran a Savage Worlds one-shot with pre-gens that all had identical stats to see if anyone noticed. Nobody did.

I think a party of all roguish types actually works better than having one guy who does it, at least in Savage Worlds.
 
I really felt it when I ran a short Savage Worlds spaghetti western style Star Wars session a while back. I told the party to make Han Solo types, rogues and thieves who were basically decent at heart.

We went through character creation too quickly because we were eager to get started.

It turned out we had a whole party all with basically the same skillset.
The problem is that skills aren't what differentiate characters in Savage Worlds, it's the Edges and Hindrances that do so.
 
I ran a Savage Worlds one-shot with pre-gens that all had identical stats to see if anyone noticed. Nobody did.

I think a party of all roguish types actually works better than having one guy who does it, at least in Savage Worlds.
The problem is that skills aren't what differentiate characters in Savage Worlds, it's the Edges and Hindrances that do so.
Yeah but some of them had the same edges as well.

Part of the issue was they fell in to the typical rpg player habit from other systems of overspecialising. So they bought Agility up to unnecessary levels and only went for a small range of skills. (I did warn them).

The problem was perhaps less with everyone having the same niche as it was with the whole party clustered around a similar overly small skillset.

It wasn't actually a major issue - it was still a fun game.
 
Part of the issue was they fell in to the typical rpg player habit from other systems of overspecialising. So they bought Agility up to unnecessary levels and only went for a small range of skills. (I did warn them).
There's logic to this approach, though; in many systems, "a few" points in many skills winds up being not much use at all when you get to the game mechanics, and as a starting character you don't have enough of whatever resource gets you skills to have sensible levels in everything a person would be expected to have in the setting to do their job.

So players are effectively trained to specialize; even if the system is technically classless, you'll get a "better" starting character (eg. one who is more effective at what you want them to do in the game) by focusing on what you really want and then you're basically back to classes again; the character will branch out as they advance, but they'll start reasonably limited.

Conceptually, I really like classless character gen, but I think it's a thing that should be "advanced" character gen and not the standard system.
 
There's logic to this approach, though; in many systems, "a few" points in many skills winds up being not much use at all when you get to the game mechanics, and as a starting character you don't have enough of whatever resource gets you skills to have sensible levels in everything a person would be expected to have in the setting to do their job.

So players are effectively trained to specialize; even if the system is technically classless, you'll get a "better" starting character (eg. one who is more effective at what you want them to do in the game) by focusing on what you really want and then you're basically back to classes again; the character will branch out as they advance, but they'll start reasonably limited.

Conceptually, I really like classless character gen, but I think it's a thing that should be "advanced" character gen and not the standard system.
Yeah that’s a hard habit to get players to break in a pure skill system. Lifepath chargen helps, especially if you have various options based on species, culture, social class, etc. that don’t necessarily let them stack magic or weapon use before their character could actually learn them.
 
There's logic to this approach, though; in many systems, "a few" points in many skills winds up being not much use at all when you get to the game mechanics, and as a starting character you don't have enough of whatever resource gets you skills to have sensible levels in everything a person would be expected to have in the setting to do their job.

So players are effectively trained to specialize; even if the system is technically classless, you'll get a "better" starting character (eg. one who is more effective at what you want them to do in the game) by focusing on what you really want and then you're basically back to classes again; the character will branch out as they advance, but they'll start reasonably limited.

Conceptually, I really like classless character gen, but I think it's a thing that should be "advanced" character gen and not the standard system.
Yes. Of course. I'm sure, as experienced role-players that's why they did it. I've done it many times. Plus it saves time on character creation too which was probably a factor (I probably should have made pre-gens for the game).

It's just that Savage Worlds doesn't really work that way. If you want to specialise you're better of doing so by buying edges that help out where you want them and give static bonuses. Increasing your die type improves your chance of success by relatively little, but jumping from not having a skill at all and therefore rolling a D4-2 to having the D4 is a big jump (especially when the effect of the wild die is factored in).
 
There's logic to this approach, though; in many systems, "a few" points in many skills winds up being not much use at all when you get to the game mechanics, and as a starting character you don't have enough of whatever resource gets you skills to have sensible levels in everything a person would be expected to have in the setting to do their job.

So players are effectively trained to specialize; even if the system is technically classless, you'll get a "better" starting character (eg. one who is more effective at what you want them to do in the game) by focusing on what you really want and then you're basically back to classes again; the character will branch out as they advance, but they'll start reasonably limited.

Conceptually, I really like classless character gen, but I think it's a thing that should be "advanced" character gen and not the standard system.
That's, like, so far from my experience with classless systems in general and Savage Worlds in particular, I don't even know where to start for a rebuttal... :shock:
 
That's, like, so far from my experience with classless systems in general and Savage Worlds in particular, I don't even know where to start for a rebuttal... :shock:
Anecdotes are not facts. I've seen what Ladybird Ladybird is talking about, it's happened quite a few times over the 30+ years of gaming I've done. It's common enough, but I wouldn't say it's 'normal' either, as I've had people play the more generalist type of characters as well with Classless systems.
 
The problem is that skills aren't what differentiate characters in Savage Worlds, it's the Edges and Hindrances that do so.
And even then, combat provides a lot of in-game choices, not just choices about how you will fight that were made during character generation. With the same stats, one guy might be reckless and go for Wild Attacks while another relies on Tricks to set up the other players.
Yes. Of course. I'm sure, as experienced role-players that's why they did it. I've done it many times. Plus it saves time on character creation too which was probably a factor (I probably should have made pre-gens for the game).

It's just that Savage Worlds doesn't really work that way. If you want to specialise you're better of doing so by buying edges that help out where you want them and give static bonuses. Increasing your die type improves your chance of success by relatively little, but jumping from not having a skill at all and therefore rolling a D4-2 to having the D4 is a big jump (especially when the effect of the wild die is factored in).
Yes, with the Wild Die factored in, you don't need to spend a lot of points for broad, basic competence. It's why it works well for setting like Star Wars, where the characters are generally capable.
 
That's, like, so far from my experience with classless systems in general and Savage Worlds in particular, I don't even know where to start for a rebuttal... :shock:
There are certainly systems out there where you need to focus your skill points to be capable of anything. It's just that Savage Worlds isn't one of those. I think the key is for players to know what various skill ranks are actually going to mean at the table before spending points on them. A Savage Worlds character with d4 in every single skill isn't going to be great, but they wouldn't be that terrible either, especially with a couple of Edges that made them shine in a couple of areas. They'd at least be superior to an all-d6 Extra.

On the other hand, if you made a BRP character with 20% in everything, you'd have a sorry character.
 
we tried savage worlds in our group. I think I had the most negative reaction to it. In many ways, it felt like I was sort of along for the ride. It might have been the character I wanted to do (I wanted a wizard, damnit) and I didn't understand the system, it might have been the exploding dice (I am generally not a fan, they make the game unpredictable in ways I don't like). It sort of felt like I was going to draw a picture on a whiteboard and I was lacking enough different colors of markers for what I wanted to draw.

I dunno. Maybe I'll try it again with a different character.
 
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