Dissecting Classes

[dbb]

I'm working up some concepts to use (eventually) in an FTF game using the D20 mechanics with considerable modification -- without going into too much detail, especially considering a lot of things are still in flux, the system is meant to reflect the same basic conceits as D&D does, but with a much simplified class system involving selectable character abilities rather than a fixed progression, and somewhat more freeform mechanics. So, in reading, bear in mind that a lot of things are going to look funny (spells and items that give +X to things rather than having abilities will probably simply not exist, save DCs will not scale up with the level of the spell, saving throw progression will be static and mostly equal, etc., etc.) and will probably not behave in quite the same way they do in standard 3.x.

One of the things involved in doing this is, essentially, to take apart all the various classes and see what each of them actually does, the better to know what the system needs to do in order to accomplish the goal of being able to reproduce existing D&D characters without being restricted to those characters.

For example, the Barbarian, as has been said here before, really has only about five or six actual class features. He has Rage, Uncanny Dodge, Trap Sense, Fast Movement, Damage Reduction, and Indomitable Will -- and some other stuff that amounts to being just upgrades to these abilities. He also has Martial Weapon Proficiency, Light and Medium Armor Proficiency, and Shield Proficiency. And he has a set of skills that in general are oriented toward making him something like a wilderness warrior -- Climb, Jump, Survival, Listen (although not Spot), Handle Animal, and Intimidate.

Rage is essentially a combat buff that the Barbarian only gets to use on himself. As a class feature, that's fine; it will need to be generalized away from its current flavor, and it needs to scale more smoothly up to higher levels. I envision a scheme where, when you take this ability, you select a certain set of things it improves (two stats, one save) and on the basis of what you don't select, you get something lowered -- so, for instance, you could get your Strength and Con raised at the cost of an AC penalty; or you could raise your Con and Dex and take a penalty to hit -- and so on. Probably you will need to take this ability a second time if you want a different set of buffs, and the mechanic and bonuses will need to be phrased so that you can only make use of one set at a time.

Fast Movement is the other ability Barbarians get at first level. It's mechanically straightforward, but it needs to improve steadily throughout the character's career rather than remaining static. This improvement would probably be numerical (eventually, you get to move 50, 60, 70 feet -- this would allow me to unify the mechanics for this and the Monk's fast movement ability). Other forms of movement, like flight or leaping great distances or running on air, need to be available, but not at first level and probably as separate abilities.

Uncanny Dodge comes at second level. I don't see that it would be particularly unbalancing for a character to be able to have it at first level, though; all it does is let you keep your existing bonuses, rather than giving you a new one. It doesn't seem to "scale" at first, but if you keep accumulating defensive bonuses, being allowed to have them always on does scale, in its way. Eventually, you get the Improved upgrade, and can no longer be flanked. Compared to Rage and Fast Movement, this seems maybe a little weak. Possibly, when you have this ability, it should come with a general defensive bonus as well, or perhaps it could be combined with the Monk's virtual armor bonuses in some way -- when you first have the ability, you treat armor as one step better (light as medium, medium as heavy), and it gradually upgrades over your career so that eventually you're treated as having heavy armor even when you have no armor at all.

Trap Sense is an out of combat ability that honestly doesn't do a whole lot. I would be more inclined to say that this should go into the skill system somehow rather than be purchased as a class feature.

Damage Reduction arrives at 7th level, but I'm really not at all sure that it couldn't just be a first level ability if someone wants it. 1/whatever or even 1/- is pretty small even at low levels. Possibly you should have to select a kryptonite from a table of some sort when you pick the ability, and gradually you get less and less vulnerable until it ends up being X/-, but I'm not really sure it even needs that.

Indomitable Will is just a Will save bonus. This is easy to simulate as a class ability or feat. There will need to be some kind of balance among this ability and the paladin's "Have Wicked Awesome Saves" ability; if you spend an ability slot on being good at Will saves specifically, you need to be better at it than someone who spent a slot on just "resisting stuff". Probably there should be a generalized ability where you can select one save, two saves, or three saves to be super awesome at, and depending on which you choose, you get more or less benefits. Possibly, being good at just one should carry with it a special bonus like Evasion or Slippery Mind.

Weapon and Armor Proficiencies are something I talked about a different way of doing a while ago, and something like that system will probably be in use, where you gain bonuses and abilities on the basis of how much of your class features have been invested in being good with them, rather than particular weapons and armor granting static bonuses regardless of who uses them.

More later.

--d.

[dbb]

Okay, the Bard.

Bards get Bardic Music, of course. They get a decent weapon selection and light armor, and they get the ability to ignore spell failure. They also get a quasi-divinatory ability to learn about things in a way that's sometimes worse than Identify or Legend Lore and sometimes better. And they have a large skill set subsuming the "Sneak" subset, the "Persuade" subset, the "Acrobatics" subset, and the "Thief/Spy" subset.

They also get spellcasting, and I am going to skip over the spellcasting part for the moment because it's knotty and and unpleasant and I'd rather deal with spellcasting mechanics all at once instead of class-by-class. This is going to make the dissection of the Sorcerer and the Wizard pretty dull.

Bardic Music is really just a form of spellcasting. In fact -- having just said I don't want to discuss spellcasting now -- I will go as far as saying that the way bardic music works is kind of the way I want spellcasting to work. You pick an area in which you specialize (charm/persuasion) and you get gradually scaling abilities starting with Fascinate and running on up to Mass Suggestion. So while there won't be a "bardic music" ability per se, there will be a spellcasting option that allows you to have the same kind of abilities, and then you can just declare that your casting flavor text involves playing music and singing or whatever.

Bardic Knowledge is strictly a noncombat ability. As you're probably guessing from my invocation of Legend Lore and Identify, there's not really any reason why this can't also be a "spellcasting" ability, although either it needs to be something that also has a combat application, or else it needs to not prevent you from picking up something that does.

Ignoring Spell Failure is likely to be meaningless, since I will probably not bother with spell failure chances at all.

Skills are a much bigger part of the Bard than they are the Barbarian. "Acrobat" and "Sneak" are skill sets with combat applications, and they will probably be made into class features. "Persuade" and "Thief/Spy" are generally noncombat skill blocs, and will probably remain as skills.

--d.

[Username17]

The d20 system is about falling behind much more than it is about pulling ahead. As your level rises, the challenges you face become more powerful, so you don't actually make any progress in whatever you do well.

Meanwhile, the discrepency between what you do well and what you do poorly increases, which means that really you are losing relative ability in a general sense. At first level, everyone can beat any monster, and the DCs for any task are low enough that PCs can make the check untrained. At 10th level, every monster has a "you must be this tall to participate" button on in every category, and the DCs are so high that only people specializing for ten character levels have a chance.

So d20 progression is about losing areas of competitiveness, not about gaining abilities.

At 3rd level, the Barbarian can't hurt incorporeal foes, but she does have martial weapons (allowing her to hurt them half the time if she has a magic sword). At 6th level, the Barbarian can't fly. At 10th level, the Barbarian has no way to teleport. At 12th level, the Barbarian has no meaningful ranged attack. At 15th level, the Barbarian can't penetrate Epic DR. On the skills front, at 2nd level, the Barbarian doesn't get synergy bonuses to Diplomacy. At 4th level, the Barbarian is no longer capable of sneaking past enemies...

And so on.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

First, about the barbarian. He shouldn't even exist. It's a class where they wrote 5 levels of abilities then just gave up. You'd be better off just making rage, fast movement and uncanny dodge into feats, and then forgetting the barbarian ever existed. Give his d12 hit dice to the fighter, so the fighter can suck less.

1120678782[/unixtime]]The d20 system is about falling behind much more than it is about pulling ahead. As your level rises, the challenges you face become more powerful, so you don't actually make any progress in whatever you do well.

While most of this is true, I wouldn't say that you can't pull ahead. You can get some sick combos to be really good at one thing, especialyl with how D&D's "collect em all" bonus whoring system works. If you design a character right you really can pull ahead and do something better, too well in fact. This is pretty evident by the fact that you can get charge builds that do over 1000 damage and other assorted stuff. You most definitely can pull ahead of what you 'should' be doing at that level.

The main thing that D&D does poorly though is allowing people to do more than one thing well. You can be a damage specialist, an AC specialist or any number of other things, but the moment you try to do other stuff that doesn't have to do with your specialization, your specialization suffers and you start to suck altogether.

D20 just offers far too much of an advantage to characters who specialize and kicks any kind of generalist in the balls. It's actually where monsters really end up losing, since they tend to lack the specialization at high levels. A specialized charge build can tear through monsters easy, and a specialized AC build becomes unhittable except on a natural 20.

And of course bards, whose concept is to be a generalist, really suffer badly.

[dbb]

I am not planning to have all the existing D&D classes available -- I just want to look at what the existing classes can do. What will probably end up happening is that there will be about three classes, if not less, and someone who wants to reproduce the barbarian just takes the appropriate class features.

I am still a little uncertain as to which way I'm going in terms of progression.

One way is the way D&D is right now, where you stay relatively the same in everything you invest in and fall crazily far behind in everything else. That's not likely.

Another way is where the numbers never actually change, you just accumulate more and more piles of abilities instead of more and bigger bonuses. This means you never fall any further behind than you are at 1st level -- because you still /are/ first level. That's a little more likely.

Still another way is where the numbers increase, but remain constant relative to each other for everything -- that is, even if the Barbarian never ever invests any of his class features in Diplomacy, he has as good a chance at succeeding in a diplomacy task at 10th level as he does at 1st. This is kinda like the above, because it doesn't really matter whether you're rolling 1d20+5 against DC 15, or 1d20+25 against DC 35, but players do like larger numbers.

--d.

[Username17]

Imagine if everything worked like Weapon Proficiency and Skill Focus.

So without investing any character abilities in something, you roll adding Level Minus Four when attempting a task. Invest an ability in proficiency, and you roll a d20 + Level. Invest an ability in Focus, an you perform that ability at d20 + Level + Two.

Ta-daah!

-Username17

[dbb]

That's tidy. It's sort of like option 2, although technically you do get to accumulate more bonuses -- but you never get to accumulate more of a bonus to any one task than you could have had at 1st level, so you don't really care.

Onward!

The Cleric is mostly defined by its spellcasting features, so this should be quick. Its nonspellcasting features are its weapon and armor proficienies (and I'm just going to ignore these from here on, unless there is something really special about them), its ability to turn and rebuke undead, its two selectable class features and spell lists at 1st level, and its spontaneous casting ability. The Cleric also has the "Spellcaster" skill set as well as the "Healer" and "Diplomatist"; most of the things that the former does should just be level-based checks if you are a spellcaster, and probably will not remain separate abilities at all.

Since you can turn and rebuke things as a domain granted power, and since domain granted powers are also supposed to be equal to feats, I'm going to guess that turning and rebuking undead should probably just be a selectable ability, rather than a benefit for being a particular class. This might lead to some weird conceptual things where Rogues get to turn undead, but as long as they have a reason for being able to do so, good for them.

Domains are a good idea, sort of. The idea of having a spell list unified by what the character does, rather than by what class he belongs to, is right and proper. And many of the abilities provided as granted powers will just be things you can take whether you're a cleric or not. I will probably limit turning and rebuking of things to Undead, Extraplanar things, and possibly things with the Good and Evil tags, as this fits with how it works conceptually in my campaign world, but there's no real reason it has to be this way.

Finally, spontaneous casting is a good idea that didn't go far enough. More on this when I get around to spellcasting.

Everyone's favorite broken class is of course the Druid. Druids have the Spellcaster, Healer, Survivalist, and Diplomatist skill sets. They also have Wild Empathy, Nature Sense, Animal Companion, Woodland Stride, Trackless Step, Wild Shape, Venom Immunity, Resist Nature's Lure, Thousand Faces, and Timeless Body.

Animal Empathy can just be available to people as part of the Diplomatist skill set; one of the options you get can just be the ability to diplomacize animals (or Magical Beasts, or Vermin, or Outsiders, or whatever).

Nature Sense is just one of those dumb +2 to two skills feats dressed up as a class feature. "Be Extra Good At Whatever I Already Do" is perfectly all right, just like the Barbarian getting Rage or whatever, as long as there aren't enough bonuses that you can stack them all in a pile and climb up into crazy town.

I'm going to do Animal Companion last, because it's irritating me.

Woodland Stride is a very mild ability at best and should just be part of the Wilderness Survival skill set. Similarly with Trackless Step.

Venom Immunity is problematic because of its absolute nature. There need to be abilities that let you reduce the effect of some kinds of attack, like Damage Reduction and Energy Resistance, but these should not be in the form of outright immunities. A revised form will probably be available that lets you take less damage from one of a set of various forms of attack including poison, possibly as part of a unified mechanic with DR.

Resist Nature's Lure is identical to Indomitable Will, except that the circumstances it occurs under are even rarer. I doubt that the system will let players get that specific about things.

Timeless Body is barely an ability at all, and if someone wanted it for some reason, I would be inclined to give it out as part of some other, better ability package.

The real problems are Thousand Faces/Wild Shape and Animal Companion. I don't want to deal with these right now, because my work day is almost over and I'd like to go home, but:

Animal Companion is the specific instance of the "Control More Than One Character At A Time" ability also granted by Leadership, Animate Dead, Familiar Bonding, Paladin Mount, and so on. Problem: having extra actions is really awesome in D&D as it's currently written, which means this ability is really awesome. It is entirely possible, though I'm not really sure yet, that creatures like this will end up just acting as a set of modifiers to the other skills possessed by you, the character, rather than an independent creature at all.

Polymorphing is a pain in many, many ways, and the associated abilities may end up being much the same -- if you buy the ability to polymorph into combat creatures, that's a separate power from buying the ability to turn into things that can fly, which in turn is different from the Thousand Faces ability to look like anyone you feel like. I'm really not sure yet, and I need to have a good hard think about how various implementations will end up interacting with various types of mechanics.

--d.

[RandomCasualty]

RPG progressions are rather odd and difficult to set up.

In a numeric progression, like D&D, you have to constantly invest in upkeep for the abilities you already have. In the long run it means that you've got a divergent system where you can never learn anything you aren't specialized in, because every point you fall behind is a permanent disadvnatage that never goes away. The problem here is that specialization is mandatory. This is both a disadvantage and an advantage. The advantage of it is that it keeps people in their niche. So if done right you dont' have to worry about archetype theft. The disadvantage is of course that anyone trying to not be a specialist gets screwed over.

In an ability game, the situation changes. Assuming you don't have some crazy rear loaded classes, people are much more encouraged to generalize. In fact, it tends to be harder to keep them specialized. At high levels, it tends to look like Final Fantsy 3 where everyone has pretty much the same abilities. Characters are more vulnerable to archetype theft, as there are fewer controls to keep characters unique. In an ability based game, the primary threat is that every character can do everything and you run out of worthwhile abilities to take. And it can be a very difficult job offering characters more stuff they can use.

[dbb]

And now back to work.

The Fighter gets the Athletics (or perhaps Explorer?) skill set, and ... he gets to select a bunch of class features. And that's really it. That's actually good, because selecting a bunch of class features is really what we're all about here, though (a) the Fighter will have to get more of them and (b) the ones the Fighter can get will have to get better.

The Monk has an inordinate and confusing number of class features. Many of them, however, can be boiled down to their essentials. As far as skills, they actually get a lot -- the Sneak, Acrobatics, Athletics, Diplomatist, Scout, and even a limited subset of the Sage skills. They don't really get the skill points to be any good at all of them, though.

Monk AC Bonus is just ... it's really just a way to get the effect of wearing armor without wearing any. Since this is also incredibly key to the "Swashbuckler" fighter archetype, some ability of this sort will just be available to characters. Unarmed Strike, being just the same thing but for weapons, will follow a similar path.

Flurry of Blows offers a way for the Monk to increase his overall damage potential at the cost of making each individual attack less likely to connect. That sounds a lot like Power Attack to me, and doing this via Power Attack instead of additional "actual" attacks has the advantages of making mobility more useful (since you don't need a full attack action) and avoiding a situation where people can stack huge number of static damage bonuses onto their attacks and thus get a much bigger benefit. Most abilities that give "extra attacks" will probably go away in this revision for these reasons, also, with the possible exception of Combat Reflexes.

Bonus Feats: See "Fighter".

Evasion is a way to avoid taking damage from some spells. Critters with Evasion and high Reflex saves make Evokers cry, and Evasion is much, much more common than Slippery Mind or Mettle. While there will still be some ability that has a similar effect (possibly, as mentioned above, as part of the package you get when you buy the "Good Reflex Saves" ability), it is unlikely that it will permit you to negate all damage -- since this ability will be much more widely available, that would make for a pretty crazy Evoker nerf. What this means for Improved Evasion remains to be seen.

Fast Movement is covered under "Barbarian".

Still Mind is also covered under "Indomitable Will" for Barbarians.

Ki Strike extends the above thing of fighting without a weapon. However, if this ability is to be available, either it needs to have additional abilities that warrant continued investment, besides keeping up with magic weapons -- or there needs to be some way for the Unarmed Fighter to make use of magic weapons (my suggestion: once he "studies" them for a sufficient time, destroying the weapons, he can mystically enhance his own blows with their special qualities).

Slow Fall is just a kick in the teeth. Feather Fall is a first level spell, and it still sucks most of the time. If you really want this ability, you will be able to get it free with something that's actually worth your time.

Purity of Body is problematic for reasons similar to the Druid's Venom Immunity. A similar ability will exist, but it needs to be nonabsolute. Diamond Body shares the same problems and likely solutions.

Wholeness of Body is likely to be subsumed by the noncombat healing ability.

Abundant Step is an enhanced-movement ability, like Fast Movement, but of course better because it's the first (or maybe second, depending on how you count Blink) ability in the Teleport chain, rather than being part of the basic Enhanced Movement chain. But will this kind of ability be available to a nonspellcaster? In short, yes. It will have different special effects if a nonspellcaster takes it -- but the ability to freely shift your placement on the battlefield in a Dimension-Door-ish way will be perfectly acceptable. Similarly for Empty Body.

Diamond Soul of course offers spell resistance. I am concerned about the fact that letting people buy "spell resistance" with a single ability purchase will make it much too cheap and effective, and I may eliminate the ability for PCs entirely. If it does exist, it will probably (a) be split into pieces -- enchantment resistance, transmutation resistance, etc. -- and (b) be based off character level rather than class level.

Quivering Palm is very similar to Slay Living in mechanics and effect. Fighters will get an opportunity to inflict status effects on people with their attacks, even if "instant death" may not be one of them (and if it isn't, it won't be for spellcasters, either).

Timeless Body and Tongue of the Sun and Moon are discussed under Druid.

The only thing Perfect Self does that you really want is to give you Damage Reduction, and, since you will actually be able to just buy Damage Reduction, there isn't going to be much need for it.

Gah, that was aggravating. I hate classes with tons of individual fiddly little abilities. So you can tell how thrilled I'm going to be when I get to the Ranger.

--d.

[RandomCasualty]

The monk is tough, because he has a very difficult class feature, namely which is "gets a weapon". WotC has never really been good at balancing out weapons as class features, as evident by similar classes like the soulknife.

The best way to handle it is quite possibly just dumping the weird dice progression to damage, and have it behave like a normal weapon of its size. So your fists could be dealing 1d8/19-20 at 1st level (like a long sword), and then get enhancement bonuses along the way. Ideally you can just have the monk pay for his enhancement bonuses as though he were enchanting a normal weapon, that way you don't have to worry about balancing out the ability much. The max enhancement bonus he gets is based on his character level.

Trying to do what WotC wants to do with weird dice progressions for unarmed combat just doesn't make any sense.

[dbb]

The Paladin gets nearly all of her abilities in the first few levels, so there aren't very many.

Detect Evil is basically a noncombat divination ability, and can become part of the "information gathering" speciality that things like Bardic Knowledge also relate to.

Smite Evil is an interesting case, being a bit like Rage but being much worse at low levels and probably about even at high. It would seem to fit very nicely in with the Ranger's Favored Enemy abilities. It may actually get subsumed by that, and turned into "Smite Favored Enemy" as something you automatically get just for having a favored enemy at all. If so, it either needs to be much better than Rage -- since you can use Rage against anyone -- or it needs to happen every time you attack the people you totally hate, rather than being limited to X times per day.

Divine Grace was discussed previously; getting a bonus to all your saves will be available as an ability that balances against getting bonuses to some or just one of them.

Lay on Hands and Divine Health are discussed in the Monk section.

Aura of Courage also needs to become a "resistance" rather than an "immunity". And, really, as an ability, it's quite narrow; it might be worth expanding it to allow some resistance to all mind-affecting spells, for instance.

Turn Undead is discussed in the Cleric section, and Special Mount is, like Animal Companion, a subset of Leadership.

Remove Disease will need to be one of the available "Healer" skillset abilities, but it has little combat use.


For the last few classes, I'm not going to bother with all the stuff they do -- just things that are different.

Two-Weapon Fighting, as implied in the discussion of the Monk's Flurry of Blows, is likely to become a possible bonus you can apply or not apply when fighting in combat, rather than an extra attack. In the same vein, Two-Handed Fighting and Sword and Board Fighting will probably be handled abstractly, as styles of fighting, rather than on the basis of particular weapons.

Favored Enemy is a good idea that's a little too dependent on the DM to place appropriate monsters. While we could offer the option to just reset the favored enemy every so often, this would permit people with Favored Enemy and good scouting to get the bonus all the time, and that's also not a good idea.

Track is an out-of-combat divination skill, as with Bardic Knowledge.

Most of the Rogue's stuff has been dealt with, but Trapfinding is another out of combat skill, and Sneak Attack is just a circumstantial damage bonus; it makes much more sense to allow fighters to buy something like this, as well.

The sorcerer and wizard are just big piles of spellcasting, and I still haven't gotten to that. Oh, well.

--d.

[Crissa]

Honestly, it sounds like you want the BESM d20 book, dbb.

(Though Frank's ideas are always golden. If he published, he'd have his rent covered.)

-Crissa

[Murtak]

Though Frank's ideas are always golden. If he published, he'd have his rent covered.

I doubt it. There is no mass market for "keep it simple, that way it works instead of breaking apart at the edges". Far too many people want weird stuff that breaks the game, they want their fireballs to work differently than a whirlwind attack and they want exploitable and/or overpowered abilities in their games, no matter how much they complain about them.

It is the same with pretty much every extensible game I played. Very few are content with a balanced game that simply works. No, they flock to the games with the power combos, they rush to buy the newest abusable expansion and then they complain about it. People are weird.

[PhoneLobster]

sounds like you want the BESM d20 book, dbb.

A free SRD version of which (along with related materials) is available on the guardians of order web site

here

Just in case it helps to mention that.

[RandomCasualty]

1121512730[/unixtime]]
I doubt it. There is no mass market for "keep it simple, that way it works instead of breaking apart at the edges". Far too many people want weird stuff that breaks the game, they want their fireballs to work differently than a whirlwind attack and they want exploitable and/or overpowered abilities in their games, no matter how much they complain about them.

It is the same with pretty much every extensible game I played.

This is more based on the fact that nobody has yet actually put a balanced game into print. I don't know of any published games with any kind of innate balancing paradigms like some that Frank is proposing. Thus I don't think we can even know what would happen if it were published, becuase such a thing has never actually happened.

One thing is for sure, and that's that balance (or at the very least the illusion of balance) is a major emphasis on RPGs today, much more so than it was back then. Back in the dawning of RPGs it was an accepted balance mechanism to say that 1st level wizards suck and are counterbalanced by the fact that they're gods at 15th level. We were taught it's ok to have parties of vastly different levels. I remember so many DMs who would have you start at 1st level in a 10th level game, it was sad.

The main problem I see with a balanced RPG is that you cannot simply get any hack to write stuff for it. The guy writing supplements has to know what he's doing or he throws the whole game into chaos. With D&D, since the initial system isn't balanced to begin with, they can really go out and get any dumbass to write supplements. Because it's hard to accuse anything of being unbalanced or balanced when you've got such a power difference between a fighter and a druid in core.

It is much harder to reasonably extend SAME than it is to extend D&D. For that reason I tihnk that companies are reluctant to publish a balanced game, and instead would prefer a game where they can always produce something bigger and badder, so as to market to players. A balanced game is really a way to market to DMs and roleplayers (as opposed to powergamers). The problem is that most roleplayers couldn't be bothered to deal with mechanics, and DMs are a minority in the world.

Though assuming if you could ever get a company to publish it, I think SAME would be a popular system. The big problem is that beyond the core it probably wouldn't be a very profitable system. You just can't churn out a new SAME book like they churn out D&D based garbage.

[dbb]

1121505506[/unixtime]]Honestly, it sounds like you want the BESM d20 book, dbb.

It could be! I'll look. Thanks for the link, PL.

--d.

[Aycarus]

1121541375[/unixtime]]Though assuming if you could ever get a company to publish it, I think SAME would be a popular system. The big problem is that beyond the core it probably wouldn't be a very profitable system. You just can't churn out a new SAME book like they churn out D&D based garbage.

There's no reason that you would want to publish it at all in any standard fashion. Ultimately, the only way to handle that kind of material is to publish it to the Internet and allow anybody to download a PDF copy of the rule system. You'd further want to make it so that people could order printed and bound copies of the core rules at minimal profit to the (volunteer) distributor. Sure, it reaches a smaller audience, but it can survive exclusively on word-of-mouth since any recommendations to its usefulness can be substantiated with a copy of the rules itself.