d20 Build Your-Own-Class Variant

[Ancient History]

Been meditating on a d20 variant that verges on heartbreaker territory. Very conceptual, but needs a sanity check.

The basic concept is applying Mutants & Masterminds-style character gen with standard d20 feats and class abilities. That is, you would start off at, say, level 3 and with 45 character points, which are used to buy feats, skills, ability score increases, and class abilities - the latter being the tricky bit.

You'd need to be able to distinguish between "one-off" abilities (i.e. Evasion, Fast Movement, Familiar, Favored Enemy) and those which have a distinct rank (i.e. mainly spellcasting, psionics, etc.). Rank-based abilities would be purchased by rank, capped at character level.

The purpose of all this mess? Basically, a quicker way to build your own class, including things like double-dipping into different styles of spellcasting or gaining access to some cool prestige class features at start-of-game without going through the shenanigans of fucking about with prerequisites. Character advancement would go more horizontal than vertical - i.e. you can spend XP on increasing your level or buying more abilities at your current level, without limit; increasing your level has various benefits as far as increasing the cap for rank-based abilities, but is more expensive, while things like feats should be hella cheap.

The effect is that I would hope to have a much broader low-to-mid range game, where fighters can buy entire feat chains while wizards, sorcerers, etc. gain raw cosmic power at a much slower rate, but also have an easier time fiddling about with metamagic feats, item creation feats, etc.

But I have slept maybe eight hours in the last forty-eight, so I may not be thinking straight. Sanity check, please?

[RelentlessImp]

The idea is okay, but you have the nightmare of pricing things correctly, relative to each other. In base M&M 3E you can have straight up Justice League level heroes off one power that is relatively inexpensive (Create Object with numerous modifiers that turn it into a one-stop-shop of problem solving) while in a similar pricing manner you can have Captain Hobo for around the same point cost.

[spongeknight]

Well, you just made the Mutants and Masterminds game in a different setting, with all the benefits and problems that entails. Namely you have to sit down with your MC and talk out how powerful he's going to let you be in certain areas before bringing down the banhammer, and what powers/combos he has personal problems with. Also you have the "speedster with super vision and perception range attacks" problem where power sets that would have been appropriate on their own have absolutely no place being allowed together.

[Shady314]

The idea is okay, but you have the nightmare of pricing things correctly, relative to each other.

That was my first thought too. It will take a lot of playtesting.

[Prak]

Yeah, the problem with M&M is that it's perhaps too versatile. The killer apps are mostly Create Object, Summon Minion, and Transform, but anything that is a container for powers, like Device, is also pretty powerful. All these things have a lot of knobs and buttons that allow a player to do things like drop adamantine cubes on enemies, summon anything to solve anything, and always have the perfect solution. But you can also abuse the action economy with speedsters despite a "one attack only, final destination!" model. Traps are meaningless if the speedster buys the action for searching and disabling down to nothing.

That said, this isn't a bad idea. M&M just leans very hard on the DM's judgement for what is and isn't abusive.

[OgreBattle]

i.e. you can spend XP on increasing your level or buying more abilities at your current leve

Wouldn't you run into the 'versatile bard' vs 'cosmic power wizard' problem with this? How will you handle item creation and minionmancy with this point buy system?

This kind of reminds me of E6 where after you hit level 6 you can gain new feats but not more levels. It works for people who like level6 play and don't want to reach level 7 or higher.

[erik]

The idea *seems* okay, but it comes out rather flat.

Making fully customizable classes seems like the logical extension of 3.x, but it's wrong. Some things synergize, some things don't and the math will never add up. Yeah, you can bundle feat chains to pack synergy together, but that only goes so far.

Freeform class building is way more complicated that picking out a predesigned class. So the game only has some draw if your target audience already has system mastery. Possible if you use d20 or something else well known and popular, but still, a lot of people think they have system mastery and just don't.

What you gain in giving people what they want, you lose in giving people what they want. So many people want things that are terrible.

The worst sin is that it's not nearly as interesting or compelling as having solid single-class options. I think while multiclassing was an admirable attempt in 3e, it was doomed to failure. I recall making my own classless 3e back in 2005/2006, and I'm sure I could do a better job of it now, but the designs that take my interest are making single-class options that are delicious from beginning to end. Incidentally, when I ran my 3.erik adventure the party consisted of an off the RNG hide in plain sight ninja, a supreme cleave whirlwind attack polearm pirate, an evoker, a jack of all trades who was good at nothing, and one more that I don't even remember. a samurai or something who was more focused on high damage vs single targets.

[edit: I now vaguely remember the last character]

[Username17]

Spending XP on non-level power has pretty much never worked.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

Making fully customizable classes seems like the logical extension of 3.x

See, now even as someone who prefers a free form classless system, and basically went there fairly directly from 3.x+Junk...

...I don't see precisely why it would be the logical extension of 3.x

3.x just wasn't going there, it wasn't pointing 4.x there, and you would have to gut so much out of 3.x to make it go there that it wouldn't look anything like a successor to 3.x

[erik]

I say it seems like a logical extension as the game is riddled with modularity, trading one class feature for another, even trading one class level for another.

It isn't much of a leap that if you can trade class features then there must be a way to assign related values to class features, and then you can create new classes that are in theory balanced with each other upon those values.

[PhoneLobster]

A mostly failed attempt to improve legacy multi-classing and feats, essentially a parallel level advancement resource system that exists as much to wall off "modularity" or character customization without effecting the class system isn't exactly a system "riddled" with borderline custom class modularity.

I think in a lot of ways it was a system "riddled" with, or at least with the modest but notable presence of, highly limited and carefully segregated modular options that existed largely to protect and promote a fairly limited class system in an era when players might well have expected something more flexible.

Doing so by permitting just enough wiggle room within what was still a significantly limited class system to try and satisfy both fans that would have preferred a classless system while also, and by a significantly larger margin, satisfying fans of one of D&D's biggest fattest sacred cows.

[Shady314]

The worst sin is that it's not nearly as interesting or compelling as having solid single-class options.

Gotta disagree there . Everytime I get excited about some character idea I want to try and pull off in 3.x DND or Pathfinder I quickly end up discouraged or losing interest within a day since it always ends up unworkable or not coming online until a level I know the campaign won't reach. Or it requires a week of work where I look up every possible class, race, feat, spell etc. to figure out if it is possible.
Your solid single-class options will never cover every concept/background I come up with which quickly squashes my interest.

I agree it is much better for new players and those without system mastery but you can solve that with pre-packaged classes for quick play.

[Prak]

Honestly, M&M's flexibility is it's biggest advantage. If I want to play a vampire, I don't have to wait until the party is level 9 or get the GM to approve a third party homebrew LA 0 vampire race. If I want to play a plant mage a la Poison Ivy, I don't have to run druid, hunt down and get approved a bunch of variants and ACFs and toss 70% of my class spell list. M&M has definite break points, but I agree with Shady that it is much more concept friendly, even if part of that comes from the "Intentionally bland! Just add flavor!" nature of some abilities.

[Ancient History]

And that's sort of the approach I was going for; starting off as an Arcane Archer at 1st level and not having to buy any shitty abilities from that class you might not actually want.

That said, as I mentioned it verges on heartbreaker territory just for the amount of work you'd have to put in for the pricing - and if you're going to go that far, you can totally break down a lot of class abilities as more-or-less generic or variants of each other, and then you can jettison D&D classes directly and give a list of class abilities with costs and options that affect the cost, and then you can fiddle with the feats...and by the time you're done, you're playing an M&M flavored Superdungeon.

[JonSetanta]

I tried point buy D&D multiple times in the last decade. The material I wrote could fill a whole book if you add it up.

It doesn't work. Ever.

[Prak]

You'd be a lot better off just porting D&D into M&M by writing up Smite Evil and such as powers, moving over whatever feats aren't already there, and so on.

One thing with M&M is that per day abilities don't really exist. 5 uses and it's gone until you recharge is a thing, but even that's vague, and you need to figure out something more solid, or at least define what you do to recharge.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

A Superdungeon flavored M&M would be more straightforward, since there's already at least an attempt made at pricing. Putting aside spot-conversions of feats into advantages or low-cost effects/modifiers, the main issues would be in how item creation affects character point totals/subdividing the M&M advantages Inventor and Artificer into D&D style item creation feats, and handling magic.

Choosing to not have items' cost reflected in a characters PP total would among other things help offset stats starting at 0(10). It would also help with the stated focus on horizontal power over vertical, by limiting item strength to PL. That said, it's essentially an additional PP pool with the Removable flaw, so if one wants a D&D style Christmas tree an argument could be made for a smaller character PP pool.

Magic could be done as a Power with multiple D/AE, or perhaps simply an expensive Variable with multiple Descriptors, e.g. Magic/Fire for a Pyromancer. The use of flaws should be limited so as to prevent nickle-and-dime bullshit, with multiple Power Loss Complications used instead. That still leaves one the issue of non-magicusers thematically perhaps having less access to broad-spectrum effects.

[Prak]

Yeah, and that's how Magic was written up in 2e, where you had a base effect that mimicked something else, and then however many alternates. I think if I were writing things up there would be pre-generated Grimoires that were thematic groups of spells, and would probably be mostly split between offense and defense, since having offense and defense in the same dynamic alternate effect ray is a pain unless you actually want to model something like a laser that lowers the shield power when you use it.


Edit: started building D&D races in M&M 3rd, and, well, it turns out how it usually does when you try to point buy D&D races. Elves are cheap (6pts), Dwarves are roughly on par (7pts) and Gnomes are worth an entire power level (16pts).

[violence in the media]

Could powers be priced effectively if you abandoned the idea that this had to be doable by hand, on paper? If you committed to the idea that a character generator was a requirement, would it then be possible to create a pricing scheme that charged variable prices depending on what other abilities were already on the sheet? With an app for character creation, you could also collect data on what powers were chosen by characters and use that as a sort of "stock market" to adjust and refine power costs. I don't think you'd want to do that daily or continuously, but you could probably work up a scheme that would result in you accurately pricing something like Divine Power relative to Great Cleave.

[Shady314]

Edit: started building D&D races in M&M 3rd, and, well, it turns out how it usually does when you try to point buy D&D races. Elves are cheap (6pts), Dwarves are roughly on par (7pts) and Gnomes are worth an entire power level (16pts).

What made them so expensive? It wasn't shrinking was it? They shouldn't have shrinking. Size 0 covers 3-6 feet. That's enough for halflings and gnomes. PHB says Halflings are 3 feet and Gnomes 3 to 3 1/2 feet. I know it feels like they should have shrinking.

A lot of DnD to MnM type conversions have been done. Here's one of the comprehensive ones. Im most impressed by the work they put into the spells.
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthre ... ing-3-5-PF

They also gave gnomes shrinking but again I don't feel that is necessary.

Shitloads of monsters and some classes and things
http://www.atomicthinktank.com/viewtopi ... 14&t=43595

Another take on some more monsters.
http://www.atomicthinktank.com/viewtopi ... 14&t=37318

Some 3.5 Pathfinder and 4e conversions
http://www.atomicthinktank.com/viewtopi ... 14&t=38513

There are a few ways I can think of to do vancian type casting. My first thought is an array with unreliable (5 uses) and a quirk or limitation that the unreliability applies to everything within the array. So it isn't 5 uses for each power in the array but the array as a whole.

You could limit magic outside of the array by disallowing spells from outside of the array. So wizards still want to spend the PP for a permanent protection spell that boosts their stamina/toughness but it obviously gets outrageously expensive to have all their spells running outside an array. Or magic outside of the spellsource (spellbook, holy focus etc.) requires devices.

Which could explain why wizards want to use a removable device like a staff/wand/rod to cast their offensive magics. Or why they enchant their clothing to protect them. They don't have to but it's more efficient.

And/or you'd want to limit spell availability based on PL and maybe specialization and not allow players to create their own without GM approval.

With predefined spells you could say for example cantrips can be arrayed freely outside of the spellsource and so minor magical tricks are casters bread and butter which they can do all day long but the big acts of magic are a few times a day.

Speaking of which here are cantrips. http://www.atomicthinktank.com/viewtopi ... 10&t=46941

EDIT:

the main issues would be in how item creation affects character point totals/subdividing the M&M advantages Inventor and Artificer into D&D style item creation feats

I don't see why you would. The best conversions get the spirit of things not mimic every last technical detail. If you invent/craft magical shit you take one or both advantages and you explain how you make your gear or your teams gear during downtime and occasionally whip out your crazy creations to save the day. Its just good flavor and a justification for where your teams stuff comes from. Has anyone ever defined their character by the fact they craft rings? Im honestly asking.

Maybe you could give your team access to equipment above the norm? So instead of bows your team can have bows with scopes for equipment? Or alchemical equivalents to grenades and flashbangs not usually available for purchase. At least not legally.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

Has anyone ever defined their character by the fact they craft rings?

Alberich and Sauron come to mind. The notion of dividing Artificer into multiple advantages was more to play to the original notion of making 3E material work as a point buy, and was intended as secondary to the notion of permanent magic items being an additional PP pool. Perhaps a better way to encourage horizontal development would be to just overpoint characters.

[Prak]

Edit: started building D&D races in M&M 3rd, and, well, it turns out how it usually does when you try to point buy D&D races. Elves are cheap (6pts), Dwarves are roughly on par (7pts) and Gnomes are worth an entire power level (16pts).

What made them so expensive? It wasn't shrinking was it? They shouldn't have shrinking. Size 0 covers 3-6 feet. That's enough for halflings and gnomes. PHB says Halflings are 3 feet and Gnomes 3 to 3 1/2 feet. I know it feels like they should have shrinking.

Shrinking was actually only about half of it. The problem is that Shrinking isn't just "I smol," it's also the source of size based benefits. Which I suppose you could do away with. Hell, looking at Features it probably wouldn't be too out there to just give them a 1 or 2 point Feature of "easy to miss" which gives them a bonus on hide and defense, at the disadvantage of needing special equipment. If you're doing D&D with M&M rules you want to make equipment matter more anyway.

This is what I worked up last night:

Dwarf

• 1 Sta/-1 Pre (0pt)
• Reduced Speed: 15 ft (-1)
• Darkvision (2pt)
• Stonecunning: May make an immediate Investigation (search) check to recognize unusual stone when within 10' of it, even if not actively looking. Gain +2 to this roll, observing usual power limits. Technology checks made to create or appraise stone or metal goods are made at +2 (ie, Technology [Limited: Stone and Metal, Craft or Appraise] 2r) (1pt)
• Close Combat: Dwarf Weapons 2r (1pt)
• Dwarven Combat Training (Enhanced Fighting [Limited: Goblinoids] 2r; Enhanced Defense [Limited: vs. Bullrush/Trip, when on ground] 3r, [Limited: Giants, Power Loss- Flatfooted] 3r) (3pt)
• Dwarven Resilience (Enhanced Defense [Limited: Magic, Poison] 2r) (1 pt)
• 7 pts

Elf

• 1 Agi/-1 Sta (0pt)
• Immune to Sleep (Limited: Magic descriptor) 1 r, Enhanced Defense (Limited: Enchantment) 2r (1pt)
• Low Light Vision (1pt)
• Perception 2r (1pt)
• Sense Secret Door (1pt)
• Close Combat: Elven Weapons 2r (1pt)
• Ranged Combat: Elven Weapons 2r (1pt)
• 6 pts

Gnome

• 1 Sta (1pt)
• Small (Shrinking [Continuous, Permanent, Innate] 4r) [7pt]
• Reduced Speed: 15 ft (-1pt)
• Close Combat: Gnome Weapons 2r (1pt)
• Enhanced Defense (Limited: Illusions) 2r (1pt)
• Gnomish Combat Training (Enhanced Fighting [Limited: Goblinoids] 2r; Enhanced Defense [Limited: Giants, Power Loss- Flatfooted] 3r) (2pt)
• Gnomish Senses (Low Light Vision, Enhanced Perception [Limited: Listen] 2r, Enhanced Technology [Limited: Alchemy] 2r) (2pt)
• Speak with Burrowers (Comprehend Animals [Limited: burrowing mammals] 2r) (1pt)
• Gnomish Tricks (Illusion [sight or sound, Limited: ghost sound, dancing lights] 2r; Prestidigitation [see below]) (2pt)
• 16 pts

note- I'm using 3e M&M

[Ancient History]

Could powers be priced effectively if you abandoned the idea that this had to be doable by hand, on paper?

There's literally no benefit to be had from that, even if you were math-nerd enough to attempt it. The problem with D&D classes as they stand isn't that you might happen across a broken combination of class abilities. The problem is twofold: 1) linear warriors and quadratic wizards, and 2) being able to play what you really want. The second doesn't have anything to do with power costs, except insofar as d20 is currently structured you can't really start out playing the prestige class of your choice. The first bit needs some thought.



There's just a really limited period in D&D where fighters and spellcasters can play at the same level, because at the higher levels the 'casters really can do everything that you do (except better) and more. So the ideal of any system is to expand the playspace, because the fighter-type getting just one feat every couple of levels is just not going to cut it.

[hyzmarca]

And that's sort of the approach I was going for; starting off as an Arcane Archer at 1st level and not having to buy any shitty abilities from that class you might not actually want.

That said, as I mentioned it verges on heartbreaker territory just for the amount of work you'd have to put in for the pricing - and if you're going to go that far, you can totally break down a lot of class abilities as more-or-less generic or variants of each other, and then you can jettison D&D classes directly and give a list of class abilities with costs and options that affect the cost, and then you can fiddle with the feats...and by the time you're done, you're playing an M&M flavored Superdungeon.

The simplest way to do that, I think, would be to to rule that you don't have tio start a class at level 1, but instead start it at your character level, but don't get any powers from class levels you skip.

This can be modled by having a number of class level slots equal to a characters' character level.

So, if you've taken 5 levels of fighter and decided it sucks, you can take level 6 of Wizard the next time you level up. Or instead you could take 3 wizard 3 and rogue 3 together, since it's a level 6 slot.

[Prak]

That would need a lot of playtesting and I've mulled over that idea before and it's always received as a fairly terrible idea. It could be doable, but honestly, it'd be simpler to just port a bunch of shit over to M&M.

And this is to say nothing of people hopping back and forth between classes with alternating dead (or near dead) levels, like, say, going fighter1, 2, Wiz3, Ftr4, Wiz5, so you're only losing number of spells and piling up bonus feats. I'm not contending this is in any way powerful, or even good, but it is a thing people would do. Or jumping between odd rogue and even wizard.