Class Packages Independent of Level

[the_taken]

It started off with me trying to come up with a better multi-classing paradigm that would let people have exactly the class combinations they wanted, but without the crappy limitation that dual spell casters fall behind spectacularly. From the AD&D books I have, it looks like the multi-classing and dual-classing rules beat the D&D3 multi-classing rules hands down, since a measure of a character's power was their experience point total, not their level total. However, AD&D still had people forced to pick a class combo at character creation and get stuck with it, or stop advancing in their current class forever to take up another.

For me, that doesn't go far enough. I want system that allows players to create any combination of character classes to create the exact character concept they have in mind. If someone wants to be a Ranger/Wizard/Theif, they should be able to have the abilities associated, and not be behind on the power at from the Paladin/Monk or straight up Witch.

Concepts to drop:

• Encounter Level, Character Level and Challenge Rating - Since a character's measure of power is no longer based on a single numeric value, having everything else still work that way is equally dumb.
• Class Level gives the Complete Package - Allowing players to take a class level that grants them a full suite of bonuses to BAB, Casting, Saves and HP is just asking for dipping abuse. So it is going to stop.
• All Classes are Equal - It's pretty clear that the various classes in D&D3 are quite varying in power and effectiveness. And while the classes in 4e are close to the same in power, they're also far too similar. In this system, we will accept that the various classes will have differing power levels, though we will try to keep them near each other, especially at the first level.
• Bases Classes Last Forever - As characters rise in power, some character concepts simply do not work. While Batman can help Superman in various ways, punching Doomsday's teeth in so that Supe can testify against Luthor in a court of law is not one of them. Bats has to either transform into a world smashing superpower himself, or stay in Gotham fighting gangsters and the criminally insane.
• No Standard Progressions - Since character level is thrown out, the standard progressions for BAB and Saves is thrown out.

Concepts to work with:

• Taking a Class costs XP - A Measure of a character's power is to be based on their XP total, and XP is spent acquiring class packages. The idea is that class packages will be worth
• Many Classes are Very Short - Twenty Levels of Monk is criminal. It just that the class is bad from the beginning, it's that the class is the same all the way from beginning to end. Being a naked dude punching other dudes stops being cool around the time the other dudes start carrying flamethrowers and poisoned swords. It's not that you can't make it believable that you Water Dancing Boxer can out fight fully trained and equipped soldiers, it's just that his training has unlocked magical martial-arts at that point.
• Classes Belong to a Tier of Power - Following up from the last point of the dropped concepts, the character classes need to be assigned to a tier of power accordingly. Getting into the higher tier classes should require a character to qualify for them, like prestige classes did. On another note, to keep everyone in the same tier of gamplay, perhaps higher tiered classes should require a different currency to purchase? Tier 2 XP? Epic XP?

So what does all this mean? Well for starters, classes start to look like this:

Soldier 1
Cost: 500xp
Benefits: +4hp, Proficiency with Martial Weapons, Proficiency in Light Armor, Medium Armor and Shields, choose a special ability from the Martial Abilities list
Special Ability: Power Charge - When charging, the character may take a -4 penalty to AC to deal an additional 4 damage with their attack.

Soldier 2
Cost: 1000xp
Benefits: +2hp, +2 AB with Martial Weapons, +2 AC Bonus with Shields, +4 Spot and Listen skills, choose a special ability from the Martial Abilities list
Special Ability: Living Wall - As a move action the character may take a defensive stance, gaining a +2 bonus to AC. Attacking the character provokes an attack of opportunity. the defensive stance lasts a single round, unless the character moves.

Soldier 3
Cost: 1000xp
Benefits: +2hp, +2 STR, +2 damage with Martial Weapons, Proficiency with heavy armor, increase damage reduction by 2 while wearing heavy armor, choose two special abilities from the Martial Abilities list

For reference, I'm thinking of having every player roll 1d6 and add their CON mod to determine starting HP

[Swordslinger]

If you want to make multiclassing spellcasters not so bad, the first thing you want to do is get rid of spell levels.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Well, right away it seems like a problem that a character taking only 1st levels will have massively inflated hit points but no damage or attack bonus.

For example, give people 2500xp. The first person goes with Soldier 1, 2, and 3. This gives them the following:
[*] +8hp
[*] +3 AB
[*] +3 damage
[*] +4 Spot and Listen

Another goes with Soldier 1, 2, and 'soldier equivalent' 2.
[*] +8hp
[*] +4 AB
[*] +0 damage
[*] +8 Spot and Listen

Another goes with Soldier 1, 'soldier equivalent 1' 1, 'soldier equivalent 2' 1, 'soldier equivalent 3' 1, and 'soldier equivalent 4' 1.
[*] +20 hp
[*] +0 AB
[*] +0 damage
[*] +0 Spot and Listen

This is extremely divergent.

[hogarth]

Personally, if I wanted to play a point buy version of D&D, I would probably start building it off of Mutants & Masterminds instead of using 3.X D&D as a base.

[Ravengm]

Catharz, what if you couldn't purchase the same class level more than once?

[hyzmarca]

Just go totally classless. Use XP to buy bonuses and features directly, instead.

[Josh_Kablack]

It started off with me trying to come up with a better multi-classing paradigm that would let people have exactly the class combinations they wanted, but without the crappy limitation that dual spell casters fall behind spectacularly. From the AD&D books I have, it looks like the multi-classing and dual-classing rules beat the D&D3 multi-classing rules hands down,

Spoken like someone who never actually played 2e.

The 2e dual classing rules said that you advanced to an Nth level thief, then started over as a 1st level wizard, keeping your HP, and getting no XP at all for adventures wherein you had to use backstab or thief skills until your wizard level caught up to N. You paid for changing your mind by a period of reduced effectiveness in gameplay.

Anyone who reads post here should know how this works out and why it's garbage, but:

The 2e dual classing rules meant, that you could not dual class and continue to be effective if you took the level reverseion in actual game play, but you totally could walk in to any game that started past 1st level with a pile of out-of-class HP, and one of {spellcasting, skills or specialization} that was at worst 2 levels behind someone who was single classed, and due to the wonky XP curves, often only 1 or a fraction level behind in their class abilities, despite you having better HP.

Multiclassing was a little better, but it involved averaging hit dice and other math that in practice served primarily to hide fudged rules and similar cheats.

Concepts to drop:

Your list was garbage. Here's a better one:

• Pre-4th ed style "More and Better and More Better" spell progressions
• Powers dependent on class level instead of character level
• Blank levels
• Status ailments that require PCs to be higher than 1st level to ever cure
• Multiclassing penalties (arguably including BAB and save rounding)

If you drop the wizard, cleric, druid and their ilk from a 3e style game and make everything run like the Firemage or Snowscaper, and rewrite their Firebolt and Ice Blast to be 1d6 per Character level instead of per Class level then you can be a Firemage 5 who gets 5d6 Firebolts and Mindfire or you can be a Firemage 4/Snowscaper 1 who gets 5d6 Firebolts and instead of Mindfire gets a 5d6 Ice Blast. By taking the 5th level as the 1st level of a different class, a PC still gets a level appropriate ability just a *different* level appropriate ability. This contrasts sharply with the default 3e assumption, where taking the 1st level of a spellcasting class only gives you 1st level abilities regardless of your actual character level.

Of course, implementing this means that every level of every class has to give at least one ability that can be appropriate at nearly all levels and no class should ever have levels that are objectively inferior to the first level of any other class. You have to ditch purge with fire and jello the mentality of "suck now for power later" "capstone abilities" from your entire game group. You cannot have blank levels, because players will never take them and will move on to levels from other classes.

The only other issue is that D&D contains crap like Poison, Disease, Curse, Insanity, Death, Disintegration, Energy Drain, Ability Drain Imprisonment, Petrify and (worst of all) Stun -- which have traditionally required spells of at least Nth level for PCs to be able to cure. Much like Vancian casting, this is an asstastic holdover from Gygax's days that serves little purpose but to terrify PCs and force someone to play a single-classed healbot. While you could maintain the Gygaxian hosery by having wounds that "can only be healed of by healers with character level of N" instead of class level, I say, "fuck that noise." When it comes right down to it, status ailments are just action denial and debuffs, so you can totally generate the same dramatic tension and difficult tactical choices just by all status ailments on a time-based instead of level-based axis. Something like "can be healed in combat / out of combat / not until you get back to town / not until you complete a sidequest / never " works better for any situation I can think of than "requires Break Enchantment.

Double-especially because the sort of shit that "requires Break Enchantment tends to show up a few levels before the PCs can even have Break Enchantment - which is just a coded way of saying "if you don't kill this critter fast enough, you're trekking back to town and throwing gold to the temple unless Joe wants to spend the rest of the dungeon having a 20% chance to act normally."

[tzor]

The biggest problem with level based multiclassing is that by definition they require balance across both dimensions; in other words it is not just enough that the classes balance in power, every level has to balance in power. That is to say.

You are level X in class 1. You can do one of the following
Go to level X+1 in class 1.
Go to level 1 in class 2.
These both have to balance. Otherwise one sucks.
Good luck.

Experience based multiclassing requires exerience charts for every class to balance according to the relative power increase for each level. Whether or not 1E did this is debateable, although each class did have their own experience chart.

You're going to have one problem with the 1E as written, 1st level is ZERO experience. You could say that you have a -1 level penalty for all classes not primary, so the exp for 2nd level become the amount of experience you need to get the class.

In this midel experience accumulates in your "slop bucket" and get transferred to your class when you have enough to make a level. Thus the question of either X+1 or a new 1 is moot, if you have enough exp in the slop busket for the new level, you probably don't have enough for X+1 in the old level.

This might work. Emphasis on the might.

[MGuy]

Just go totally classless. Use XP to buy bonuses and features directly, instead.

You might as well. It seems you want people to almost freely just get abilities from different "classes" anyway. You might as ell just say fuck it with classes and have a classless system.

[Stubbazubba]

I agree; assign XP costs to HP, AC, AB, and Dmg bonuses, Spells known, spells/day, and all feats, and then just have them be purchased a la carte. Your game would still get better if you balanced every feat or made them scale with total XP earned similar to RoW feats.

[the_taken]

I'm thinking feats are to have increasing benefits with each tier, as opposed to at arbitrary character points. Remember that I'm doing away with character levels as well as monster levels, letting players stay in the bottom tier forever, gaining little bonuses to get a little bit better, but staying relevantly in danger to dire rats... unless they get all of the class levels, sheesh!

Another concept I've been thinking about was kicking the spellcaster classes out of the bottom tier altogether. The idea is that bottom tier is filled with all the mundane and near mundane heroes, while everything that's overtly magical will start showing up in the second tier. And really, is it fair for a dude to spend his whole childhood learning how to stab in face, while his sister just had make sure she looked pretty to be able to fart lightning? That's not to say that the bottom class won't have magic classes, it's just that the bottom classes will be more subtle things like alchemist, diviner, or tea ceremony enthusiast.

One thing I know I'll be doing is dropping the generalist, and thus all powerful spell lists. So you won't see something like the Wizard or Cleric Spell lists, where the casters have access to most of the good spell to cherry pick from.

[Ravengm]

I agree; assign XP costs to HP, AC, AB, and Dmg bonuses, Spells known, spells/day, and all feats, and then just have them be purchased a la carte. Your game would still get better if you balanced every feat or made them scale with total XP earned similar to RoW feats.

At some point that really, really encourages dumpster diving if you're using the standard D&D system. Even if all the options are balanced across each other, that's still probably close to a few hundred to a thousand options every time you want to purchase something. You can narrow the choices down if you have a character concept in mind, but trying to grow a character bottom-up (i.e. mechanics-first) is an exercise in hours of cross-reference and number crunching. Putting xp rewards in relevant packages reduces that significantly, just by virtue of making some choices for the character.

Plus, there's not quite such a large amount of granularity in character design. Some traits of a soldier would be extra attack accuracy, power, and defense, so why not just lump them together?

If you went with a classsplosion like 4e should have, you could even cater to most archetypes people would want to play, or launch the "make your own class" package in a splatbook later or something.

[Ravengm]

tea ceremony enthusiast.

Now this needs to happen.

[Stubbazubba]

I agree; assign XP costs to HP, AC, AB, and Dmg bonuses, Spells known, spells/day, and all feats, and then just have them be purchased a la carte. Your game would still get better if you balanced every feat or made them scale with total XP earned similar to RoW feats.

At some point that really, really encourages dumpster diving if you're using the standard D&D system. Even if all the options are balanced across each other, that's still probably close to a few hundred to a thousand options every time you want to purchase something. You can narrow the choices down if you have a character concept in mind, but trying to grow a character bottom-up (i.e. mechanics-first) is an exercise in hours of cross-reference and number crunching. Putting xp rewards in relevant packages reduces that significantly, just by virtue of making some choices for the character.

Plus, there's not quite such a large amount of granularity in character design. Some traits of a soldier would be extra attack accuracy, power, and defense, so why not just lump them together?

If you went with a classsplosion like 4e should have, you could even cater to most archetypes people would want to play, or launch the "make your own class" package in a splatbook later or something.

Nothing saying you can't have it both ways; a la carte and pre-packaged concepts. This way people who are hardcore optimizers can dumpster dive and crunch numbers to their hearts delight (because the character optimization mini-game is a big draw to some), while those who aren't quite so committed to optimization can take pre-packaged bundles that are already optimized to a degree.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Catharz, what if you couldn't purchase the same class level more than once?

My point wasn't that purchasing a class's first level more than once was broken or not; it was that barbarian 1/soldier 1/ranger 1/sorcerer 1/druid 1 would give numbers massively divergent from any 3rd level single-classed character, despite having the same xp. Even more divergent than 3e.

[Kaelik]

Catharz, what if you couldn't purchase the same class level more than once?

My point wasn't that purchasing a class's first level more than once was broken or not; it was that barbarian 1/soldier 1/ranger 1/sorcerer 1/druid 1 would give numbers massively divergent from any 3rd level single-classed character, despite having the same xp. Even more divergent than 3e.

Star Wars Saga defense bonuses/Defense bonuses UA/save bonuses using hybrid rules. It's not actually hard to word that so it doesn't happen.

[the_taken]

Catharz, what if you couldn't purchase the same class level more than once?

My point wasn't that purchasing a class's first level more than once was broken or not; it was that barbarian 1/soldier 1/ranger 1/sorcerer 1/druid 1 would give numbers massively divergent from any 3rd level single-classed character, despite having the same xp. Even more divergent than 3e.

Ok, so the random samples that I came up with while I was writing the post are an example of bad implementation. Properly managing the XP costs of the differing levels of the class is going to be a big part of the job. The examples above exclusively encourages multi-classing, which isn't the intention. The point is to make multi-classing take advantage of diversity, while single-classing takes advantage of focus, though that's not to say that there shouldn't be any synergy between classes.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Why bother with variable XP amounts? Wouldn't it be easier to make one level worth 'one level', and make any one level in a base class roughly equivalent to any one level in another?

---

Or, to take a different tact, drop the idea of classes and give people 'attributes', 'backgrounds', 'powers', and 'levels'.

[*]Attributes are a way to describe a character in a word or two. Like 'strong' or 'fast' or 'stoic' or 'scary' or 'friendly' or 'sharp-eyed'.
[*]Backgrounds are basically, in D&D parlance, bundles of skills. Like 'noble' or 'blacksmith' or 'herdswoman' or 'alchemist' or 'seawoman' or 'elf'.
[*]Powers are what you'd expect, primarily increasing combat versatility but also probably adding some out-of-combat utility too.
[*]Levels are the boring raw numbers: attack bonuses, defense bonuses, maybe even background bonuses. But they all scale together, even though they are subject to non-scaling modifications from the above.

You can add in tiers and shit to all of the above, so an adventurer can be 'strong' and an epic hero can be 'Mighty as Herakles', and an adventurer can know 'fireball' when an epic hero knows 'earthquake'.

[Stubbazubba]

Or, to take a different tact, drop the idea of classes and give people 'attributes', 'backgrounds', 'powers', and 'levels'.

[*]Attributes are a way to describe a character in a word or two. Like 'strong' or 'fast' or 'stoic' or 'scary' or 'friendly' or 'sharp-eyed'.
[*]Backgrounds are basically, in D&D parlance, bundles of skills. Like 'noble' or 'blacksmith' or 'herdswoman' or 'alchemist' or 'seawoman' or 'elf'.
[*]Powers are what you'd expect, primarily increasing combat versatility but also probably adding some out-of-combat utility too.
[*]Levels are the boring raw numbers: attack bonuses, defense bonuses, maybe even background bonuses. But they all scale together, even though they are subject to non-scaling modifications from the above.

You can add in tiers and shit to all of the above, so an adventurer can be 'strong' and an epic hero can be 'Mighty as Herakles', and an adventurer can know 'fireball' when an epic hero knows 'earthquake'.

If bonuses, etc. all scale together, then why have them scale at all? Besides the satisfaction of having a +16 to attack instead of +6, since defense bonuses also went up at an equal rate, any level-appropriate encounter will have the exact same chance of success/failure. Am I reading this correctly or did I overlook something?

I actually like the whole concept, though, it's something I'm tinkering with right now.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Or, to take a different tact, drop the idea of classes and give people 'attributes', 'backgrounds', 'powers', and 'levels'.

[*]Attributes are a way to describe a character in a word or two. Like 'strong' or 'fast' or 'stoic' or 'scary' or 'friendly' or 'sharp-eyed'.
[*]Backgrounds are basically, in D&D parlance, bundles of skills. Like 'noble' or 'blacksmith' or 'herdswoman' or 'alchemist' or 'seawoman' or 'elf'.
[*]Powers are what you'd expect, primarily increasing combat versatility but also probably adding some out-of-combat utility too.
[*]Levels are the boring raw numbers: attack bonuses, defense bonuses, maybe even background bonuses. But they all scale together, even though they are subject to non-scaling modifications from the above.

You can add in tiers and shit to all of the above, so an adventurer can be 'strong' and an epic hero can be 'Mighty as Herakles', and an adventurer can know 'fireball' when an epic hero knows 'earthquake'.

If bonuses, etc. all scale together, then why have them scale at all? Besides the satisfaction of having a +16 to attack instead of +6, since defense bonuses also went up at an equal rate, any level-appropriate encounter will have the exact same chance of success/failure. Am I reading this correctly or did I overlook something?

Someday the players might want to consider a bear to be nothing but a speedbump, and an arch-demon to be a worthy foe. The monsters' numbers should not be scaling with the players'.

[hyzmarca]

Or, to take a different tact, drop the idea of classes and give people 'attributes', 'backgrounds', 'powers', and 'levels'.

[*]Attributes are a way to describe a character in a word or two. Like 'strong' or 'fast' or 'stoic' or 'scary' or 'friendly' or 'sharp-eyed'.
[*]Backgrounds are basically, in D&D parlance, bundles of skills. Like 'noble' or 'blacksmith' or 'herdswoman' or 'alchemist' or 'seawoman' or 'elf'.
[*]Powers are what you'd expect, primarily increasing combat versatility but also probably adding some out-of-combat utility too.
[*]Levels are the boring raw numbers: attack bonuses, defense bonuses, maybe even background bonuses. But they all scale together, even though they are subject to non-scaling modifications from the above.

You can add in tiers and shit to all of the above, so an adventurer can be 'strong' and an epic hero can be 'Mighty as Herakles', and an adventurer can know 'fireball' when an epic hero knows 'earthquake'.

If bonuses, etc. all scale together, then why have them scale at all? Besides the satisfaction of having a +16 to attack instead of +6, since defense bonuses also went up at an equal rate, any level-appropriate encounter will have the exact same chance of success/failure. Am I reading this correctly or did I overlook something?

Someday the players might want to consider a bear to be nothing but a speedbump, and an arch-demon to be a worthy foe. The monsters' numbers should not be scaling with the players'.

You don't need bigger numbers to do that, though. It can be accomplished with bigger powers, instead.

Instead of the Paladin going "I hit the Bear with my sword" at level 1, "I hit the Bear harder with my sword" at level 10 and "I hit the Archdemon with my sword" at level 20 you can have him go "I hit the Bear with my sword" at level 1", "I calm the Bear with my holy aura" at 10, and "I smite the Archdemon and every other evil thing within a mile with divine atomic bomb" at level 20.

The only disadvantage to this approach is that it can render early powers obsolete if you don't design the powersets carefully.


But I'm of the opinion that if you're at the level where challenging an Archdemon is a plausible scenario then your dumb-ass melee fighter should be able to cut mountains in half.

That's better represented using powers than it is using raw numbers.

[Chamomile]

"I smite the Archdemon and every other evil thing within a mile with divine atomic bomb"

[Stubbazubba]

Someday the players might want to consider a bear to be nothing but a speedbump, and an arch-demon to be a worthy foe. The monsters' numbers should not be scaling with the players'.

That's really just fluff, and has nothing to do with numbers, though. In fact, as has been pointed out, that distinct of a power divide really necessitates something besides the size of numbers to be different. In which case the size of numbers isn't all that relevant and can stay more or less the same, or at least in the same order of magnitude.

When you're building a system from the ground up, there's nothing that says an archdemon has to be on a whole different order of magnitude of power than a bear. A bear has +1 to attack and +3 damage, can sprint short distances, but tires quickly, and has some kind of Rage ability. The archdemon has +7 to attack and +6 damage, but can also teleport short distances in combat, can attempt to Dominate weak-willed creatures, has the ability to shoot demonic fire at you, attacks with two weapons, and gets more attacks per round. Assuming the players haven't almost tripled their abilities, this guy is still many times a greater threat than the bear. But the players have gained the ability to dispel magic (like the fire), and the ability to bless their weapons so as to drain the archdemon's power upon contact (less teleporting/dominating), and the mage has some way to slow the archdemon down, putting the fighter on an equal footing.

Now, this may not be the game you want to play; you may rather go up to the archdemon's power level instead of bringing him down to yours, and that's totally cool, but is best represented by something other than die roll modifiers just getting higher.

[CatharzGodfoot]

That's really just fluff, and has nothing to do with numbers, though.

Now that you understand that the numbers in a game are have nothing to do with being numbers and everything to do with fluff, you are enlightened. Go forth and make good games that don't suffer from Oberoni's Fallacy.

---

For those not yet so enlightened, it's true that an arch-demon can have the same numbers as a bear (but different capabilities). The names, however, are irrelevant. In most games one wants to have something like bunnies (which are barely a challenge), dogs (which are a bit of a challenge, especially in packs), and bears (which are a significant challenge).

As Stubbazubba Bodhisattva pointed out, the difference in the numbers of a bunny and a bear is just fluff, but they're the fluff that the game relies on to tell a compelling tale.

In some games (D&D being an outstanding example), another piece of fluff is that over time, even bears stop being a threat to an experienced adventurer. Although it is possible to model this by giving every adventurer the 'I win against bears' ability at some point, the classical method is to simply increase the adventurer's numbers.