What Power Sources do we Believe in?

[Manxome]

My opinions on classes have fluctuated somewhat over the course of the discussions, but currently, in my mind, the main motivations for classes (in descending order of importance) are:

1. Provide a straightforward way for individual PCs to have different strengths and weaknesses (this being important as a major source of tactics and motivation for teamwork)
2. Provide a plausible way for players to guess the strengths and weaknesses of NPCs based on partial knowledge
3. Make players feel different from each other

There are various auxiliary mechanics that could accomplish similar goals under a classless system, but I haven't heard anyone championing any specific proposals, and I haven't though of any that don't seem (to me) to be more cumbersome than just having classes.

The main drawback of classes that has been raised is that they limit player choice, but that's kind of the idea: if players can choose to be good at everything, they will, and this is a simple system for ensuring they can't.

Frank seems to be envisioning classes that are very broad and each include a lot of options, and I think that's a reasonable compromise between wanting to maximize player choice and still include enough constraints to make character creation interesting and non-trivial.

SO:

• Who still wants a classless system?
• Do you consider the above goals unimportant, or do you have another plan for accomplishing them?
• If the latter, what's the plan, and what do you perceive as the trade-offs?

[virgil]

I've accepted the role of classes for some time, and find them an easy arrangement to do. The times I've seen classless, people gravitated towards archetypes anyway, so you might as well go with natural inclinations.

I am curious as to the motivation to go away hit points that continually rise as you level. It's not that I'm against TNE's current wound/fixed HP arrangement, but wanting to know why that's chosen over the more common setup that D&D has.

[Judging__Eagle]

I've accepted the role of classes for some time, and find them an easy arrangement to do. The times I've seen classless, people gravitated towards archetypes anyway, so you might as well go with natural inclinations.

But a lot of people like to make rounded characters.

Either some ways to shore up defense on an offensive character (armour or healing) or offense on a defensive character (attack types that the character wouldn't normally have, usually something along the lines of getting a ranged attack on a primalily close ranged character).

On the other hand, my usually preffered archetype is "skilled"; usually that's done either by picking up things that give more skills points, usually to benefit attack choices/movement modes/defenses, or to simply give new options.

[CatharzGodfoot]

It's not that I'm against TNE's current wound/fixed HP arrangement, but wanting to know why that's chosen over the more common setup that D&D has.

Actually, I think the current TNE system is purely debuff based, with no HP or wound 'points' at all.

[Username17]

I am curious as to the motivation to go away hit points that continually rise as you level. It's not that I'm against TNE's current wound/fixed HP arrangement, but wanting to know why that's chosen over the more common setup that D&D has.

It has to do with extensibility. The idea is that people who are +N levels above you should be a certain amount difficult to take down. D&D has claimed that as a goal since 2nd edition AD&D. And honestly, it's really hard to make that work with raw hit points.

Consider the difference between level 1 and level 2. The relative hit point gain is, I think you'll agree, large. Defenses change somewhat of course, but the main differential is the hit point shift, and enemies are practically twice as hard to drop. And yet the differential on hit points from 12th to 13th level is much less obvious. Even as average Con modifiers continue to rise (giving a faster than linear hit point boost over many levels), hit points scarcely ever nearly double going up a level once you get past the first couple. To maintain a constant difficulty, defenses will have o go up in a frankly very difficult to calculate fashion. And you know that they don't. After the first 10 levels there's really very little correlation between the difficulty of a monster and its level. Fighting enemies five or six levels above or below you may be easy or hard.

It's not that you can't just keep giving out hit points with proportional hit point increases, it's that this gets really problematic really fast. Let's say you start with 10 hit points and your hit points were expected to rise by 50% every level - by level 10 you'd have 577 hit points; by level 20 you'd have 33,253 hit points. That's just not manageable. And the math on hybrid Hit Point/ AC / DR systems is difficult to the degree that no one has ever made one that functioned as advertised. It's not that they can't, it's that it's sufficiently difficult that no one has ever done it.

But compare to a system with Drop DCs and debuff accumulation. The Drop DC can simply rise at a constant rate that is equal to the level-based damage bonus and then you have to get the same amount of debuff and the same damage roll to drop an enemy who is the same amount of levels higher than you. Every time. The entire difficulty of fitting things to the exponential curve just goes away. Small children can repeatedly add constant numbers, meaning that you don't have to have weird outlying stuff like low level animated objects (almost impossible to kill) or high level undead (made of crepes and plastic wrap apparently).

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

Actually let me cut out everything else and echo Catharz, we all know this is your project, Frank. It never came up for discussion whether TDG would prefer classed or classless. You decided and that was that.

Just like you told K, lets wait until you've written it up then comment on it.

[JonSetanta]

Since people have actual reasons for wanting to do classed or classless design, and there are valid reasons to do one or the other, that sentiment is laughable at best.

Valid, but not productive.