Classes, levels, and relatively equivalent combat capability

[Berkserker]

At one point I was trying to put together a homebrew for absolute fast-play with people who were new to roleplaying as a whole. Something absolutely simplistic, because I'm not going to ask total newbs to dumpster-dive through all the pathfinder abyss or work with thac0 or steps tables or all that. One of the things I got hung up on was levels, and how they represent massive increases in power. I wanted that in the game, and it led to the whole classes and power scheduling/resource management thing came up and eventually, I realized I was building towards something completely different from what I set out to do, something for simple beer 'n pizza fun with zero learning curve and shit-hot fast-paced action. A few things from that brainstorming stuck with me though, and they've been poking me a bit.

Something I've been thinking about: let's say you wanted to have levels because one of the things you want in your game is periodic massive power boosts. Classes seem helpful because, if they're well-written, they make sure everyone's actually getting more powerful rather than sticking gains where they aren't helpful. Is there a good way to both 1) do levels without classes and 2) make sure that everyone's actually becoming more powerful at about the same rate at level-up? Short of standing over the players during level-up adjustments with a big ol' hickory stick and muttering "Don't you DARE make shitty choices here buddy." Moreover, does it make sense to do so and can it be done without ridiculous levels of complexity? Would it involve divorcing combat applications and such from level and making, I dunno, something like a job function from FFV? Or is that just shoving the same problem into a different area?

[Koumei]

You can have people gain 1-2 abilities from a list every level, and then you tier the abilities based on level so every level you get level-appropriate abilities and you either stack up things that are suitable for a class or you play a Red Mage (Ninja, Mystic Knight, Paladin...). Then you can go full Final Fantasy and have stuff like this:

Level 1: Basic Black Magic [Fire, Ice, Bolt], Basic White Magic [Cure, Barrier, Aero], Basic Sword Arts [Power Break, Armour Break, Dispelling Cut], Basic Thievery [Steal, Speed Boost, Smoke Bomb], Basic Kung Fu [Boosted Unarmed/Unarmoured Stats, Dual-Wield Fists, Roundhouse Kick] (Also mandate people pick a set of proficiencies at this stage and give them their "knowing stuff/research/talking at people" skills here)

Level 2: Advanced Black Magic [Fire 2, Ice 2, Bolt 2], Basic Status Magic [Dark, Bio, Sleepel], Advanced White Magic [Cure 2, M-Barrier, Aero 2], Basic T/S Magic [Demi, Escape, Haste], Advanced Sword Arts [Magic Break, Speed Break, Double Cut], Status Sword [Poison Strike, Silent Strike, Confusing Strike], Magic Sword [Fire Strike, Ice Strike, Bolt Strike], Advanced Thievery [100% Steal, Mug, Alchemy], Advanced Kung Fu [More Boosts, Flying Kick, Fiery Fists]

And so on and so forth. So someone who wants to play Vivi does this:
Level 1: Mage Items Proficiency, Arcane Lore, Book Learning, Basic Black Magic
Level 2: Advanced Black Magic, Basic Status Magic
Level 3: Expert Black Magic, Advanced Status Magic
Level 4: Arcane Focus, Expert Status Magic
Level 5: Broken Casting Combinations, Ultimate Black Magic

You get the idea. Each option gives a few things people can do, but they're all pretty simple things that are explicitly spelled out. It's up to you whether you need to be able to cast Fire in order to cast Fire 2 - it is altogether possible to balance not needing prerequisites if the abilities of different tiers are not just upgrades but do different things (Sword Arts) or if upgrades cost more resources and you often find yourself not needing to use the strongest thing because you fight 5 Bandersnatch just as often as you fight 1 Behemoth (and way more often than the times you fight 1 Atmos).

[Username17]

If you're willing to do things 4E style, everyone can be pretty much on the same page in a harshly leveled system with either no meaningful differences between classes or no classes at all. There was no underlying reason that people in 4e-land couldn't take powers off of any list.

Now, 4E fucking sucks. It's a terrible game whose manifest failures almost destroyed the entire rpg industry. But aside from some frankly inexcusable math failures, the problems people have with the game are mostly how limited it is. That is, they put in a bunch of epicycles so that Rogues could only fight with a dagger, rapier, or hand crossbow and Fighters couldn't take the multiattack power and the stunning power because one required them to be spear focused and the other required them to be hammer focused.

You could, in short, make a game that did the basic 4e D&D "you get powers off the list for your level" thing in a way that was much more inclusive with much less wordcount. 4e is designed from the ground up to be incredibly easy to produce additional content for (both because it's extremely formulaic and because every class and build is so perplexingly narrow that you will literally never run out of archetypes you could write up), and in so doing it was also incredibly wordy. A 4e D&D class is 12 thousand words. But you could make something that was far more versatile in 2 thousand words.

-Username17