FFT-style tiered class/prestige class advancement?

[TavishArtair]

Let's get back to arguing fantasy games, shall we? They're much more fun arguments because we get people arguing about whether they can snort powdered rock and get high off of it. As in elevation. Though I doubt this will be one of those, sadly.

So something that strikes me about D&D's 3rd and 4th edition, is that people want to play FFT. Or perhaps Tactics Ogre. That is, they want a character who starts out as say, a reasonably heroic Squire or a gun-toting Chemist, and then progresses to Knight, then Samurai, then Thunder God Cid. And they don't want to just change what they're called, they often want a new set of abilities to go with it. People like the idea of attaining the "capstone" of a 10 level prestige class, or 20 level base, but in many cases we don't actually want to wait 20 levels, and sometimes not even 10. We want a fundamental change to happen at a reasonably smooth pace such that we can see a few over our character's lifespan assuming we play him through the levels. Waiting for a 20 level capstone ability is terribly annoying, often enough, and you often only get to use it once, because congratulations, it's the end of the campaign!

But we don't want it to be so predictable that everyone goes the same path. Maybe we want some guys to go Knight and then Lancer and then Dancer for all it matters, whereas others are Holy Knights. So we need some choices at each step. Heck, in this case FFT or Tactics Ogre is actually a bad example, since at the very first step there are only two options... we want to have a reasonably large amount of choices at the first step such that people can feel distinct even then. But at the end you could be a samurai or a ninja or an angel knight or a lich or whatever, and now after progressing through four or five different classes no one has any real resemblance to anyone else, unless they really tried hard at it.

This suggests a design for a game with numerous but relatively short classes, such that options are readily distinguishable from each other and rapidly fill out into their intended competencies, arranged into tiers of fundamentally different function. Both 4th Edition and 3rd Edition have developed some strong ideas here, but their failure to deliver on everything else, either in balance or flavor, consistent writing or even just general interest provocation, means both have failed at this goal.

Some general assumptions we can make are probably that a certain amount of niche protection is good, since each class needs to feel distinct, and that there are at least a few levels, at least virtually speaking with the "tiers," there may or may not be a few levels within each class to distinguish advancement. Interestingly, FFT does some interesting things with making characters feel more unique by forcing them to select their active abilities from a narrower palette than what they can ultimately draw, meaning that two characters with similar classes mastered may well play differently anyways. And if one returns to the source and goes whole-hog on the "tactical" feel, characters may well need to be leader of men as tiers advance, which demands a system by which we may subtly incorporate a henchman or minions into the assets of a character without notably bogging play.

[Username17]

This suggests a design for a game with numerous but relatively short classes, such that options are readily distinguishable from each other and rapidly fill out into their intended competencies, arranged into tiers of fundamentally different function.

I would say yes. What people seem to want from a classed system is the benefits of rails (fast chargen, balanced and complete options) without actually feeling constrained by the rails for very long. Therefore class jumping is a virtual prerequisite. People want the big pile of classes and the feeling of unlocking potentials from FFT or Disgaea, but they are only playing one character so the grind requirements have to be a lot less.

So here's an idea of how to implement that:

• Character classes are in general 3 levels long. Once you start one, you can't leave until you finish it.
• After finishing a class, you can start another class. Any other class in your tier, no restrictions.
• Once you've finished three classes in your tier, you can take a "Capstone" class that is a single level PrC that gives you some sort of signature awesome ability.
• If you continue moving on, you take the first level of a character class from the next power tier up.
• Keep writing until you get bored.

Because yeah, people want to finish up being a Galactic Hero and then take the Demigod Capstone class and then move on to taking the Wargod class in the Demigod tier.

-Username17

[Thymos]

This sounds decent with me, but you'll have to be very careful with stat bonuses in order to not have there be obviously better classes.

If you want people to go mageblade as well then your going to have to invent some kind of synergy, that class is rarely chosen even in video games.

Do you think the advanced classes should have requirements of specific base classes (or types of base classes), or should they simply be available at a certain level?

[Username17]

I think that stats probably shouldn't exist for such a setup.
Stats mostly exist as an additional rail to restrict what players can ever be good at. Since you're defining abilities rigidly within the myriad classes, you don't need or even want additional layers of soft restrictions.

Simply put: the character is able to lift big things because they have taken the Berserker class that has "lift big things" as a minor ability. If they then jump out to Necromancer, that's fine.

-Username17

[Koumei]

Generally I like it. This could be a great way to go about it, really, and ditching the stats altogether wouldn't hurt when doing it this way. With plenty of tiers to actually differentiate the power levels.

[Username17]

The question then comes up how one would go about multiclassing similar classes. I mean, it's all very good to take 3 levels of Berserker (getting "lift heavy things," "expound about spirits," and "break down doors" as minor abilities) and then hop into Necromancer for three levels (where you get "taxidermy," "forensics," and "act spooky" as minor abilities), but what if you didn't want to run off and be a Necromancer? What if you wanted to stay in theme and become a Pit Fighter? Wouldn't you expect to get "lift heavy things" out of Pit Fighter?

A limited solution would be to hand out minor abilities in a list format. Berserkers get lift heavy things and expound about spirits on their list; Necromancers get expound about spirits and taxidermy on their list; Pit Fighters get lift heavy things and evaluate architecture on their list. I say this is a limited solution, because it is a decided step towards a point-based system and potentially makes character generation more difficult and time consuming.

Like all Feat based systems it runs into power equivalence problems. Is being able to lift heavy objects really worth being able to stuff a dead raccoon? And it has to be strictly controlled to keep abilities from synergizing too well - certainly none of the minor abilities could ever be formulated as a bonus to much of anything lest someone play Pokemon and push the RNG off a cliff. But beyond that there is a certain amount of synergy between abilities that will exist beyond any numerics. The ability to butt into a conversation and get people to listen to you is going to be a lot more useful if you have the ability to make a convincing tirade or baffling argument once you do.

Now as long as it doesn't get out of hand, I am actually happy when people can put together combos that are more than the sum of their parts. It makes system mastery mean something and rewards skill. A person with eclectic minor abilities needs to be able to contribute to the overall story fairly effectively even when he's standing next to extremely well chosen synergy boy, but beyond that it's genuinely OK for there to be some flop. Especially since these abilities are defined as "minor" - which means that they trigger in areas that are not expected to be major aspects of the cooperative storytelling experience.

Now what's a minor ability? That is entirely dependent upon your expected genre. If you live in the Trekverse, your ability to fight in hand to hand combat is in fact a minor ability because 90% of all problems are solved with technobabble or interpersonal skills. On the other hand, your ability to design engines, then that's your major skill that makes you a named character. On the other hand, if you live in Eberron you become a named character because you can beat people up in hand to hand combat with a wrench, and the fact that you can also use that wrench to make a steam engine is just a minor ability that gets passing mention in down time.

So the nature of the classes is highly dependent on the storytelling structure. But here is what they basically look like:

• Major Shtick: The core of a class is a three level railed track that covers a series of invokable abilities and passive attributes that collectively produce the ability to interact helpfully and completely with the major aspects of the storytelling convention of the game (whatever that is). You might want people to select minor variant packages like 4e's Grind and Tron Paladins, or you might not.
• Minor Ability Lists: Each class also has a list of potential minor abilities. Think "Fighter Bonus Feat List" here. Each level you would be allowed to make a number of selections off that list. These selections need not be made all at once, and indeed I could easily see character advancement being rationed in terms of these bad boys (ex.: each adventure you get to pull out one new minor ability and when you've gotten the level's worth you advance to the next level).

I kind of like the idea of giving characters the ability to announce their minor abilities by using them. That is, during an adventure you get to pick a minor ability - but you actually pick it during the adventure when it would be useful. Like any other retroactive training sequence from any adventure series.

-Username17

[Murtak]

I kind of like the idea of giving characters the ability to announce their minor abilities by using them. That is, during an adventure you get to pick a minor ability - but you actually pick it during the adventure when it would be useful. Like any other retroactive training sequence from any adventure series.

I like it. This should work very well with your proposed major/minor format in that players get to pick their character but don't have to worry about the details until needed.

[ckafrica]

I could get behind this. I loved FFT the first time I played it, but I couldn't get over having to go through the grind again when I tried FFTA.

By keeping to short classes, you'd circumvent my main problem with classes. If I really want to be a mix of class A & B, I'd rather do it right away but I could settle for in a few levels.

I'd definitely concur on the no attributes. All cool things that is normally represented by attributes (outside of the normal combat stuff) could easily be part of individual skills/abilities. Perhaps these minor powers would be group lists depending on the class type so that "lift big things" is a warrior power and available from barbarians and guards. Make them so none of them are really iconic to a particular class, that what major powers are for.

My question is how do we scale all class abilities within a tier so that it doesn't matter whether I taking the L1 ability from the Barbarian at 1st or 7th? One solution might be to make the power differential really appear going to between tiers rather than the levels within the tiers.

Edit: Crap frank posted again while I was typing.

On the minor powers list frank just said, I could see some being class exclusive and other available from multiple classes

[Amra]

I kind of like the idea of giving characters the ability to announce their minor abilities by using them. That is, during an adventure you get to pick a minor ability - but you actually pick it during the adventure when it would be useful. Like any other retroactive training sequence from any adventure series.

-Username17

Funnily enough, I'm more-or-less trying this now. I'm running a new campaign for our once-per-month group where we've got a complete novice at the table: not just at D&D, but any system. The method we're trying is for people to think of what *type* of character they want to be, and saying what they do. If that's "cast a spell to stop the bad guys in their tracks", it's a spellcasting progression and the only thing left to do is work out whether that's a full caster, secondary caster, arcane or divine track they're going down. If they want to spring athletically off a table, grab a chandelier and kick some guy in the head it's assumed that they can do that and we're picking Jump and Tumble as class skills. Once they've used up the usual allotment of "attributes" for a level, they can only re-use those tricks they've already pulled, or those which rely on the same traits.

I'm working on the basis of "the first thing your character instinctively does in a situation is the thing they're best at/most invested in". I'm also asking players whether or not they'd consider their character likely to succeed to get a feel for how intensively they've invested in that skill or trait. The hope is that they'll have fully statted-out characters by about 3rd level and will advance their abilities normally, with a bit of quid-pro-quo as to how much stuff they can keep in the new 'class', for want of a better term. Yeah, until then we're playing half-rules-half-Magical-Princess-Tea-Party, but D&D doesn't get legs under it properly until then *anyway* and in the meantime it's keeping the new player interested whilst gradually introducing them to the concept.

It's completely experimental at this stage so I don't know how well the "free hybridisation of abilities" thing will fly - particularly in a D&D context - but it'll be interesting to see how it works out.

Ramble over; we now return you to your normal programming.

[MartinHarper]

This also fits the concept that "Fighter" or "Horserider" is a class that only exists at Heroic (or whatever) tier.

I wonder though - when you have a party move from level X to level X+1, they all suddenly change all their abilities, simultaneously. The fighter is now a necromancer, the wizard is now a bard, the priest is now a paladin, and the spearman is now a general. Changing shtick ought to be a dramatic moment that focuses the spotlight on one PC for that session - if everyone is being dramatic all at once, it's just confusing.

[violence in the media]

This also fits the concept that "Fighter" or "Horserider" is a class that only exists at Heroic (or whatever) tier.

I wonder though - when you have a party move from level X to level X+1, they all suddenly change all their abilities, simultaneously. The fighter is now a necromancer, the wizard is now a bard, the priest is now a paladin, and the spearman is now a general. Changing shtick ought to be a dramatic moment that focuses the spotlight on one PC for that session - if everyone is being dramatic all at once, it's just confusing.

Wait? I thought the whole point of all these micro classes is that changing between them isn't a big, or even particularly noteworthy, deal?

What I've been envisioning is this: you have your Fighter and your Wizard do their 3 level progression and now they both decide to become Necromancers. That's totally cool. The fighter is still this heavily armored guy that can pick up heavy objects, it's just that now he can create and command skeletons as well. The wizard, on the other hand, still has his familiar and can shoot fire bolts, and he can create and command skeletons as well.

As far as stats go, wouldn't we still have them, even if they're not the traditional D&D ones? We'd have Attacks, Defenses, and HP at least, and those would probably all be level-derived.

How off the RNG would we imagine a level 1 character to be in relation to a level 10 character? A level 20? Level 30?

[TavishArtair]

So are tiers expressed in base 10, or base 12? What I'm reading here, is that you either take 3 levels of 3 classes and then a single level of a transformative class that would basically be the "10th level" of a 10 level prestige class. Variantly, the transformative class is 3 entire levels, which means tiers are expressed in base 12. I think I like the first expression better. It would handle well things which just kind of... happen all at once, like becoming a demigod or a vampire.

Also, the problem of "everyone being dramatic all at once" is an issue that always comes up in cooperative games. A lot of steps in D&D can result in basically everyone changing class into a bigger thing all at the same time, or acquiring their 10th level all at the same time, et cetera. Basically there's no smooth way to handle this, from a system perspective, as far as I can tell, although the fact of the matter is, that people's "new class" will only become important to their character when each actually uses a new ability, which may well be at different times.


The Boring Level 1 vs. the Paralyzing Level 30

Here's a main problem with the 1st level in... many games. Essentially, it's boring. We need a way to figure out how to make that not happen, while not overloading our characters with abilities. Do we just assume characters start with an entire class or even tier filled out already? This would assume, basically, that abilities always are on your character sheet and as you advance in tiers you will acquire an increasingly broader set of abilities, such that truly powerful characters are godlike quintuple-threats even when they try to stay on a relatively focused path. This has the advantage of a consistent character that really does feel majestic, but might have so many options no one really wants to think about them.

Or do we give classes a number of abilities but force characters, like in FFT, to create their actual character from a restricted palette... you only get a certain number of A-Abilities, a certain number of S-Abilities, a Reaction, a Move, et cetera, even though your classes give you lots of these as options? That results in a certain amount of obsolescence of earlier tiers, which might actually be good... if you can create a character of a certain level by only really worrying about the last tier, that's fast chargen at high level, which is a good design goal. This does however reduce the consistency of the character somewhat, making it likely that a total career shift might happen over time, leading one to wonder where his earlier sword-skills went, for instance, if your demigod is now a staff-and-spell dude.

[violence in the media]

Regarding your Level 1 vs. Level 30 issue, why can't we start "competent" adventurers (or professionals of any stripe) at level 3 or 5? That would give us some design space below the assumed minimum competency. Additionally, you could start PCs off at level 1 and have the first three levels be "Pageboy" or "Apprentice Magician". This would also give players a pool of abilities to start with that would help dispel the tedium of early levels.

[TavishArtair]

Well, that was actually part of my incoherent rambling. That we assume that they start out with a class under their belt, which would be a certain amount of competency. The question is how much each class will add, and how much classes will obsolete other classes.

[zeruslord]

I think I would prefer to keep low-level classes relevant somehow. I don't think that the bottom-tier active abilities are going to see much use by demigods, but passive or stacking abilities would remain useful even at the highest tier.

My other idea is that your class picks at tier 1 influence your available choices at higher levels. Any heroic class can get into a lord of the undead class at name tier, but if you go Black Knight/Reaver/Dragoon, then you have Champion of Death open, while a Black Knight/Courtier/Duelist has Vampire Count, and a Necromancer/Initiate of the Tower/Transmuter has Lich King. Heck, somebody sufficiently crazy could go Black Knight/ Necromancer/Courtier and pick up all three.

[Orion]

Why not let abilities go obsolete? It happens in fiction that people advance and stop using their old abilities almost entirely.

[TavishArtair]

Because we can assume that the interesting thing to add to this game would be classes, any sort of prerequisite structure would have to be fairly open, such that you could readily incorporate it into the game. In short, just like in 3e, prestige classes should not demand a certain amount of class levels and rarely even a class feature per se, but rather a trait that could be imaginably fulfilled in multiple different ways. This, also, is a failing of 4e, by allowing "paragon paths" and suchlike which are overly restrictive, even when they would make sense for multiple base classes, something which becomes increasingly true as time grows on and those classes grow in number.

[Anguirus]

How would racial abilities, ECL and the like interact with a tiered system like this?

[ckafrica]

I think race you just provide you with a choice minor ability and/or major ability. If you felt that a certain race is supposed to be so powerful that it needs to be bigger, just make it be a class.

[Username17]

In order to do Race in a D&D fashion you'd replace a lower tier with a different set of assumptions.

That is, the system can scale down as far as you want by going back to previous tiers like "childhood" where you take classes like nerd and get a capstone of puberty. If you wanted to have people walk in with different childhood based abilities, you'd give them different childhood classes. And if you wanted to make swineherd an Orc-only class in your setting, you'd just do that. If you wanted to have powerful races, you'd give out race-only classes in higher tiers. All Titans are demigods, so you'd just put out a couple of classes like bronze gargant that only Titans can take.

Where this gets difficult is in micromanagement for high level character creation. I honestly don't really care that much if the demigod who took War God and Patron of Song grew up planting corn or fishing. The childhood based abilities don't really seem like they'd matter much. So it's entirely possible that you might want to have abilities from say two tiers down simply expire. It wouldn't be totally unreasonable for the Lich King to go back and realize that he's no longer able to remember which of the little flowers you're supposed to trim to make the flax grow long. That seems like a decent enough roleplaying opportunity.

The other thing is that lower tier abilities aren't really going to matter much, so spending a long time fussing over them is a pain in the ass. Therefore, classes should have pre-selected minor abilities for when you're playing beyond that level.

-Username17

[Thymos]

I don't think the players need to forget.

If your old abilities become trivial, then it doesn't matter if you have them or not. So let them keep the abilities.

What bout this?

When statting something up only stat up the 2 (or whatever you want) most recent tiers (or highest).

When leveling someone they gain the new abilities, but don't forget the old. The only difference here is that they just aren't erasing their old abilities, they're keeping them.

I know this can lead to some characters having more abilities than others, but like I said, if the old abilities like flower picking are trivial, then it doesn't really hurt to let them keep the abilities.

[Username17]

Idea: Tier Minimum Nonconsensual Templates.

The idea is that if you get bitten by a werewolf, you have to take levels in Werewolf. And those are Heroic Tier levels. If you're already Heroic Tier, you swap some levels out and move on with your life as a wolf man champion. If you are not Heroic Tier, you get bumped up to Heroic Tier and become a spawn monster.

---

I think this could actually work pretty well in a Black Forest setting where players literally were expected to spend some time playing as actual children.

-Username17

[violence in the media]

Idea: Tier Minimum Nonconsensual Templates.

The idea is that if you get bitten by a werewolf, you have to take levels in Werewolf. And those are Heroic Tier levels. If you're already Heroic Tier, you swap some levels out and move on with your life as a wolf man champion. If you are not Heroic Tier, you get bumped up to Heroic Tier and become a spawn monster.

---

I think this could actually work pretty well in a Black Forest setting where players literally were expected to spend some time playing as actual children.

-Username17

I don't get what you mean in the bolded part. Did you mean if you're already past Heroic tier?

[IGTN]

I think this could actually work pretty well in a Black Forest setting where players literally were expected to spend some time playing as actual children.

-Username17

Yeah, reading this thread I came up with the idea for a game system using this where the PCs start off as war orphans fending for themselves and go from there.

[violence in the media]

Ok, so how are we setting this up? Are we using 30 levels base and subdividing them into Heroic, Paragon, and Demigod tiers like in 4e?

Is each class going to be just 3 levels long?

Will there be a single-level tier-capstone class at levels 10, 20, and 30?

What level are starting PCs? Level 1? Level 3? Level 5?

If we start at level 5, should there be an Apprentice tier from levels 1-4? (Level 1 is basic creature abilities. Levels 2, 3, and 4 comprise the 3 level apprentice class). Thus, a 5th level character will have 1 level in Human, 3 levels in Pageboy, and 1 level in Squire (for example). Some other combination?

Would we still go to level 30 at that point, or would we pick a different end point?

How would advancement work? Would we track EXP? Would we just say +1 level per adventure (not necessarily game session)? Something else?