PL wrote:But highly inflexible considering its supposed to be a role playing game where people invent and operate their own characters as their ONLY contribution to the cooperative story.
Yes, Cowboys and Indians is a very inflexible game. It has the advantage however of being very quick to assess groups once people know the rules. A cowboy character can lasso things, an indian character can indirect fire arrows over walls, and both characters can shoot things with rifles and ride horses. It's a simple an inflexible game, and it isn't for everyone. But if everyone at the table has agreed to play it, they have agreed to play within those inflexibilities. If you come to the table where people are playing Cowboys and Indians and you try to bring in a character with a lasso
and a bow, heck if you try to come in with a character with a lasso and a bow but without horse riding skills, you're being an asshole. If you can't accept playing a Cowboy or an Indian, you need to play a different game that encompasses character options that you
can accept.
And saying "C&I is too limited of a game, I don't want to play it." is a perfectly valid stance. You don't see me clamoring to play original pamphlet Chainmail where every single player was a "Fighting Man." But if other people
are dead set on playing such a game then your options are to play within those limits, or not play. Now you're perfectly within your rights to say "Yeah, I really wouldn't play that game, if you want to play with me we need to play a game with more depth of player options." That's fine. But agreeing to a game with few options and
then demanding that you get special options made for you is a dick move.
Every game has limits of what you can play. Some of those are game balance based (you can't play a guy who can karate chop a planet in half in most games), and some of those are simply based on the story being told (you can't play an Ewok thunder mage in a Star Wars game even if he's just a reskinned Sith Lord). And if you agree to play a game, you agree implicitly to
accept those limits.
Now some games are classless and purely point based. If you're playing Champions, you agree implicitly that your character
is going to run around town stopping crime rather than sitting in a lab cranking out copies of his powersuit and selling them to Iranians. And you'll have to agree explicitly to fall within the numerical constraints of the game you're playing (so no spending all your points on a no-range personal immunity area of effect that wipes out every enemy and ally on turn 1). But other than that, you can really go nuts. Maybe you've decided to play Rampant, a character who shoots a beam of lions out of his chest, allowing him to either cause tremendous instant damage or make an area exceedingly dangerous depending upon how
fast he shoots them. Whatever. Go nuts. That has real advantages, and it has real disadvantages. It takes a lot longer to explain what your characters can do than more codified systems, and it can be hard to figure out if the team has all the bases covered ("Holy shit,
none of us can do Forensics?!"), and you accept those advantages and disadvantages when you go into an open system like that.
Some systems have soft classes. Shadowrun for example, is skill based. There are very definite and exact things that the team will want to have covered, but there's no definite order as to who on the team covers which of those bases or how. Maybe your team face is a Conjurer who also does astral scouting; maybe she's a bio-modified assassin who specializes in walking through security checkpoints with a smile and doesn't set of astral, physical, or matrix tests only to pop a monowhip out of her ring and kill with ruthless efficiency; maybe she's a technomancer who does the team matrix info gathering. And so on. There's a lot more than five thigs your team wants covered, and you probably have 3-6 team members, and they all have skills in various stuff. Hopefully the bases covered by each team member collectively allow the team as a whole to complete missions, and they'll do so in a different manner than another team who split up skills a different way. And that has advantages and disadvantages too.
And finally, there are games that have hard classes. A character who is an X is not a Y. AD&D is a solid example. If you're a Ranger, you're not a Bard or a Paladin. Full stop. And this has advantages and disadvantages just like the other setups do. And one of the advantages is that you can tell the other players what your character dos and what they are good at really quickly and easily with very little chance of confusion. And one of the disadvantages is that the number of supported concepts of the game is much less than the other systems.
Now, AD&D is a bad game. And one of the reasons that it's a bad game is that none of the character classes are really
different one from another. I mean seriously: a Paladin, a Ranger, and a Fighter have
differences but there's honestly nothing that makes me
care. Rangers get more hit points at first level and gain hit points slower over time, and they get a bonus to kill giant class enemies. But if you rolled up a Ranger and just
rolled badly you wouldn't even notice.
Now a Totemist, that's a class. Granted the mechanics are bullshit and the flavor is kind of retarded, but you make a glowing frost worm head and wear it on your face in order to shoot sonic blasts at things.
That is clearly different from other classes and that's the only reason that anyone gives a fuck about Incarnum. I was dead serious when I said that D&D would be a better game if they took as their base classes Binder, Shadowcaster, Totemist, Warblade, and Warlock. Those five classes do things that are clearly distinct from what other classes do. Having those as the base classes would accentuate the
advantages of playing with a class system at all. If you don't make the classes distinct, you are better off getting rid of them and just going skill based or point-buy entirely.
Characters in Slayers aren't made with character classes. They all swing swords (except Sylphiel who specialized to the point where she only casts spells), they all use spells (except Gourry, who specialized to the point that he only has sword techniques). Each character just picks abilities off the list and moves on with their life. And that's fine. That's a game where every single player has agreed to play a humanoid adventurer who has some combination of sword and spell techniques. But it's not morally superior to a game where some people call on malleable solid shadows and other people meld blue energy monster parts to their souls and none of the player characters do both.
-Username17