Foreword
The purpose of this thread is to collect together various ideas and concepts on the forums and present a single, detailed vision for how classes might look in TNE. I hope this will help everyone to better envision the impact that various abstract ideas might have on the final game, and focus discussion on any remaining areas of contention. I also hope this will provide a useful reference, since many of the ideas here are buried in tangential remarks in long, meandering threads. I do still expect the ideas persented here to be criticized, of course.
I am referring to this overall proposal as "broad classes," mostly because if we end up with multiple proposals floating around, it will be a pain to discuss them if there's no way to refer to them.
Anatomy of a PC
"Do I have to have a torso? Couldn't I have a couple extra arms instead?"
The most defining trait of a PC is its class. Each PC has exactly one class.
Your class gives you access to various abilities, but you don't have every ability available to your class. You just choose some abilities off of your class list; you get more abilities every time you gain a level.
Each PC also has a race. Your race may give you access to additional abilities, but the racial list will be much shorter than the class list, and they're learned out of the same pool, so picking up racial abilities means that you won't be able to pick as many abilities from your class. It should be possible to have a completely viable character without picking up a single racial ability.
In a few cases, a race may have a required ability. This means that every member of that species has that ability. You still don't get the ability for free; instead, you must spend one of your ability picks to learn that ability in order to be a member of that race. For example, an amphibious race might have "water breathing" as a required ability. This allows races to have potent abilities without making theminherently better PCs.
There is also a list of universal abilities, which all PCs may select from. These still come out of the same pool as your class and racial abilities, but everyone has access to them.
Note: One of Frank's posts suggested he was thinking that universal abilities may come out of a separate pool, so you couldn't give up class abilities to get more universal ones or vice versa. I don't see any particular goal that this serves, but I don't think it would particularly hurt anything, either, so if there's a valid reason for it, I've got no objection to that.
Characters with Class
Why Classes?
"You'd be surprised how little people care about the differences between holy fire and profane fire while they're being burned alive."
This question has been debated back and forth a lot, so I want to summarize the reasons I went with this angle for this write-up. All of the following are motivations for using classes:
PCs with Strengths and Weaknesses
We don't want PCs to all be good at everything; this makes for boring characters and reduces possibilities for tactics and teamwork. By restricting the availability of abilities based on class, we can simply write the abilities of a given class so that they're good at one thing and not so good at another. If we make all abilities available to everyone, that wouldn't work.
Understanding Opponents
When players are fighting against an NPC, we want them to have a framework for making reasonable guesses about the capabilities of their foe. By packaging a set of abilities together with specific strengths and weaknesses, we make it reasonable for players to guess both the general nature of a foe's capabilities and specific advantages and vulnerabilities, which allows them to make informed tactical decisions. However, the players still won't know the foe's exact ability set until they see the whole thing.
Even if you want to break the rules and surprise the players with something "they could never have guessed," you still want to have a solid baseline for expectations; you can't surprise someone if they consider everything equally likely.
Specialized Mechanics
One easy way to make a unique fighting style is to incorporate unique mechanics that are consistent across an ability set. One can easily imagine having specialized rules for shape-shifting, sneak attacks, a unique combo system, etc. that lend a particular set of abilities a distinct flavor, benefits, and drawbacks. If everyone chooses one class, then they can study and master the specific mechanics that are peculiar to that class. If they can be freely mixed, that makes the game harder to design, balance, learn, and play, because you need to understand ALL the mechanics and how they interact, rather than just the special rules for your character.
The Feeling of Uniqueness
We want players to feel like their characters are different from each other. This is a very nebulous goal; it is not the same as (and may even conflict with) the desire for players to feel like their characters are different from what is "normal" for the world (or the game), or from what they played in the last campaign. Still, classes do provide an easy way for players who want all the PCs in their group to do different things to be reasonably certain that they will.
The Conceits of Class
"You don't actually need attacks. Your job is to be a speed bump between me and the monsters."
Though they won't necessarily all be done at the same time, or all by the same person, and everything will undergo constant revision throughout the development process, it is expected that "writing a class" will at some point involve each of the following things:
Power Source
Different classes get their power in different ways. The number of broad power sources in the world is fixed and fairly small, so that we (and the players) can understand what they are and how they work, but two classes with the same power source may have different abilities depending on how they use it. A single class may also have multiple power sources--after all, if there are racial and universal powers, we're already assuming you can do things that aren't powered by your class source at all--but most classes will only have one, or maybe two, that drive most of their class abilities.
Strengths & Weaknesses
Every class has a defined strength--something like "mobility" or "battlefield control" that they're especially good at--and a two weaknesses, which are essentially the opposite. A few classes may have two strengths and four weaknesses.
If your class has a strength in a particular area, that doesn't mean your abilities of that type are flat-out more powerful, but it means they're more flexible or harder to counter, and you may get minor effects of that type attached to your other abilities. For example, if your strength is "area of effect," that doesn't mean your AoE attacks do more damage or cover wider areas, but it might mean that they're more shapable or that they ignore allies caught in the blast, and you may get minor AoE stuff added onto your other abilities, so that you might end up with a cleaving attack, or the ability to bring a touched friend with you when you teleport. Your strength will usually have a specific theme or subtype--for example, characters with the "mobility (flying)" strength an the "mobility (teleport)" strength may end up with very different abilities, even though they fill a similar tactical niche.
Conversely, if your class is weak at something, that means your versions are less flexible or easier to counter, and you probably have fewer total abilities on your class list with that kind of effect. For example, if your weakness is "battlefield control," then you might need to sustain your walls for an extra turn before they reach their full size, or you might not be able to sustain as many at once, or they might be easier to punch through, or not block as many kinds of effects.
While almost any area can be a strength, there's a special limitation on weaknesses: something cannot be a weakness if it is already covered moderately well by the universal or racial ability lists (because that would let you get around it). Therefore, we'll need to establish a list of categories that are covered "well" by universal or racial abilities, and which therefore cannot be weaknesses, and then any racial or universal ability that isn't on that list must be written as a "weak" ability.
Class Abilities
Each class has a big list of abilities unique to that class (there may be a few special cases where an ability is available to a couple classes, but you get the idea). And in this case, "big" means "at least 4-6 times as many abilities as the maximum you'll ever learn."
The reasoning here is twofold. First, we want every class to be able to support the 4 standard fantasy archetypes (commonly "fighter, rogue, wizard, and healer", but I'm going to refer to them as "bruiser, trickster, blaster, and support" to try to cover more ground get away from the "Fighters Can't Have Nice Things" problem), and the builds supporting those archetypes will ideally not have too much ability overlap. Second, we always want the players to feel like there are a lot of shiny features to look forward to, and while ideally each and every ability should look appealing, we really don't want players to feel like they have to take an ability that they don't think is good or that doesn't fit their image of their character just because there was nothing better available.
More information on ability construction further down.
Class-Substitute Abilities
Part of the reason for having the universal ability list is so that players can "dabble" in areas other than their focus, and get a little bit of a cross-class feel (hopefully without actually negating the advantages of classes outlined above). Therefore, when you write a class, it is expected that you will also write some new universal abilities that wouldn't look out of place on your class list, but which are OK for a non-specialist to take.
However, we still don't want these to mess up balance, etc., so the universal abilities can't rely on any unique mechanics that were invented for that specific class, and they must not break the "strength" rules of the universal list.
Retraining Method
Every class is expected to have some way of correcting mistakes (real or perceived) in a player's build; in particular, there needs to be some way of swapping out an ability you decide is not so useful as you thought for one that seems more appealing. This should not generally be possible, say, in mid-combat, but it should definitely be possible between adventures, and sometimes during a long adventure. I'd say that one day and access to suitable facilities is probably a pretty reasonable requirement.
Sample Builds
Each class write-up should include (at minimum) five sample character builds: a bruiser, a trickster, a blaster, a support character, and a "monstrous" character (the last being more likely to show up as opposition than as a PC). These are all built at some agreed-upon moderately-high level (TBD), but the level progression of each is noted, so that they can all be played organically from level 1, if you want. Additionally, in the final version, these should all be "good" (competitive) builds, though of course we expect it'll take multiple rounds of editing and playtesting before they reach that level.
Abilities
Abilities' Capabilities
"I can hold my breath for ten minutes!"
Abilities are the primary distinguishing features of a character; they determine the awesome things you can do that other people can't. PCs get to pick at least one new ability every level.
Different abilities are useful in different situations. Effort should be put into making all abilities distinctive and unique, especially within a single class's list. However, regardless of best efforts, we expect that some abilities will overlap more than others, and some will end up being subtly better than others; no system is perfect. This means that characters that choose lots of similar abilities will probably be weaker, overall, than "optimized" characters; we will tactfully point this out in the manual.
As a general rule, abilities "scale" to your level. In some cases, this may happen "automatically" if damage tests and such are already level-dependent, or if the tactical benefit of an ability is basically constant across levels; however, when this is not the case, the power should be explicitly written to change depending on the level of the user.
We will need to establish guidelines for what sort of power should be available at each level. One part of this is to specify approximate numerical ranges and acceptable severities of tactical effects (e.g. "at level X, you should be able to change your relative position to your target by about Y distance as a side-effect of a melee attack"). Another part will be to define the levels at which "binary" effects are allowed to show up (for things like flight, invisibility, incorporeality, etc.).
Abilities may synergize, but they do not strictly stack. The idea here is that the value of a situationally-appropriate action should remain essentially constant at a given character level; different characters are allowed to have attacks that are good in different situations, but if ability X is better in situation Y than at any other time, then no other ability is allowed to be even better in situation Y (at the same level). This means that one ability can't be strictly better than another, but it also means that you can't sacrifice breadth for raw power.
However, you can pick multiple abilities in order to perform a single schtick in a wider variety of situations; this is basically the same as choosing one power that's good for situation X and another that's good for situation Y, except that your "good option" in both situations has a similar visual effect.
Note: I'm currently working on the assumption that all abilities will be of (basically) equal value, but it would also be possible to assign them different costs--as long as the cost just changes an ability's versatility, rather than its raw power. Thus, you could choose between two abilities each good in one situation, or a single ability that's good in two situations.
Prerequisites
"No, I said I was proficient with ARROWS. I never said ANYTHING about bows."
We wish to ensure that players have many options and lots of flexibility in crafting their characters. Nontheless, some effects aren't available to everyone. There are a few reasons why you might not be able to get the ability you want:
Abilities with Class
Most abilities are only available to people of a particular class. Your race may also grant you access to a few abilities not normally available. I think this one's pretty straightforward.
Minimum Level
Abilities should generally be written in such a way as to be appropriate to all levels, but certain kinds of effects (combat flight, incorporeality) are categorically restricted to higher levels, and sometimes you hit a floor where you just can't reduce the effectiveness of an ability any more without turning it into something else (the ability to see through walls, for example, is fairly binary) or running up against the mechanical limits of the game (durations less than 1 round don't really work). When there just isn't any version of an ability that's appropriate to level 1, the ability has a minimum level at which it can be obtained.
Maximum Level
This is probably less common, but sometimes there's just no way to scale up an effect, or it gets rendered obsolete by some new effect. There's no need for an ability to breath underwater when you no longer need to breath at all; jumping really high is perhaps not so helpful after you can fly. If there's no way to make an ability appropriate beyond a certain level without changing it unrecognizably, it has a maximum level. When you exceed the maximum level, you can exchange the ability for another one of your choice.
Nonsense
Players are not supposed to be able to spend multiple ability picks on a single attack to get a more powerful attack. However, there may still be some times an ability doesn't make sense (or isn't useful) unless you have another ability (or type of ability). This will probably mostly occur with special class mechanics--for example, an ability that lets you sneak attack under a wider variety of conditions isn't available unless you actually pick up the ability to sneak attack, and the ability to chain widgets together can't be obtained unless you have two widgets to chain. This should be pretty rare, though.
Lasting Effects
"This spell lasts until the first Thursday after the next blue moon that occurs during a leap year."
As everyone on this forum is likely already painfully aware, buffs have been handled very badly in a lot of games. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the key issue seems to be that resources that are effective limiters in battle (e.g. actions) are often not effective limiters for things that you can do before combat begins.
So we're going to try to ensure that no one gets any freebies. Here are some long-lasting effects that won't break the game, and will hopefully cut down on logistics as well:
Permanent
Some effects just leave the world altered. If an effect is permanent, that doesn't necessarily mean it'll be there forever, but it means that it doesn't go away by itself; you need to take some action to get rid of it. The main example here is damage, which goes away when you rest, or use some sort of ability or item to reverse the effect. Positive effects are rarely permanent, especially as relates to combat--you can take and axe and go build a log cabin or something, and that's a "permanent" effect, but it's also a plot effect. Hopefully, if anyone tries to make a "permanent" combat buff or something, it will be obviously broken, rather than slipping by unnoticed. At least we're not pretending that you'll only get the benefit occasionally.
Sustained
Some effects can be maintained if you work at it. A "sustained" effect requires you to do something on a regular basis to keep it from fading--typically, you'll need to spend on action on it every round. This way, you can potentially make the effect last for quite a while--an entire battle, at minimum--but there's an actual opportunity cost to doing so, and you can't just keep layering these effects on top of each other without limit.
Example: Wall of Force: Conjures a thin, transparent barrier at a location of your choosing. You must spend a minor action every round to sustain the wall, or it vanishes.
Toggle
Some effects remain in place until you choose to reverse them. This is reserved for effects that you will actually want to turn off at some point; there must be some situations where you want the power turned on, and others where you want it turned off. Turning a toggleable ability on or off carries an action cost, so that we don't end up with a "just assume it's on whenever it's beneficial" kind of situation.
Example: Monstrous Form: You transform into a monstrous creature with no distinctive properties or abilities. While in this form, you are one size category larger and you can make highly effective melee attacks, but you may not speak, use tools, or activate any of your other abilities. Toggling this ability on or off is a standard action.
Lists
Everything in this section is highly speculative. I don't think much progress has been made yet in discussing how to order these lists or what to put on them, but when it's brought up there's a tendency for people to say "yeah, we should do something like that, but I have no idea what the details should be," so I'm just going to throw down some arbitrary specifics to give people something to disagree with.
Strengths & Weaknesses
"These elite assassins have incredible regenerative powers, allowing them to recover from all forms of injury save their one, secret weakness: blunt force trauma to the head."
The list of "strengths" and "weaknesses" that can be claimed by various classes is likely to grow continuously over the course of the project, and I'm OK with that. People can come up with a cool new thing for a class to do or a new (tactically-relevant) way of categorizing powers and use them to make interesting new classes. But we've got to start somewhere; and we've also got to pay special attention to anything that ends up on the universal list, since that can't be used as a weakness later on (unless we take it back off).
Also note that many of these may overlap. A single class can't have overlapping strengths/weaknesses, but I think that the fact that one class's strength or weakness may overlap with that of another class is OK, so I haven't made any particular attempt to eliminate overlap.
The following are proposed as things the universal list can do well, and which can therefore be used as "strengths" for a class, but not as "weaknesses":
- Consistent Melee Damage
- Consistent Ranged Damage
- Spike/"Set-Up" Damage (e.g. sneak attack)
- Speedy Movement (but not the ability to reach places you couldn't otherwise)
- Personal Defense
- Horde-Fighting (lots of weak enemies)
- Hero-Slaying (small number of powerful enemies)
- Area/Group Defense
- Battlefield Control
- Alternative Movement (climbing, flying, teleportation, etc.)
- Healing / Reversing Enemy Effects
- Coercion / Limiting Enemy Behavior
- Action Denial
"You must be at least this tall to break the game."
Certain kinds of powers have a major impact on tactics or the world as soon as they show up, and thus cannot necessarily be scaled down to all levels. The following describes one possible progression for these effects.
Note that the number of levels in the game is essentially arbitrary, so I'm going to assume a ten-level progression for discussion purposes. One could fluff out the numbers throughout, or add extra levels after the end (when everyone has everything), without fundamentally affecting the progression.
- Level 1: There are AoE attacks, but it isn't expected that everyone has them, and you probably can't get one if your weakness is horde-fighting. Some people can conceal themsevles in the middle of a combat, but can't actually fight while doing so. Specialists can bypass appropriate barriers (bruisers can kick down doors, tricksters can pick locks, etc.). It is expected that every PC has a decent ranged attack.
- Level 2: Mobility specialists get flight (or similar effects), and can attack while using it, but it's inherently unstable and hitting them with any attack has a good chance of grounding them.
- Level 3: Everyone has AoE if they want it. Most people have at least one trick for getting past obstacles (shatter walls, jump over, short teleport, etc.)
- Level 4: Controllers can trap people in cages that take a while to get out of if you don't have a suitable counter, but anyone can get out. Personal defense specialists start getting effects like incorporeality that make them invulnerable to many opponents, but they can't contribute to the battle (even indirectly) while using them, except for things like scouting.
- Level 5: Some people have stealth that remains effective while they're actually fighting, but it always has some drawback to its use, and the stealth isn't perfect. All PCs are expected to be able to initiate melee with flying opponents, though this may involve super-jumping, teleport-and-grapple, or sucking an opponent down to you rather than actually flying yourself.
- Level 6: Some people can "snipe," attacking from so far away that unless you can snipe or have a relevant mobility power, you're pretty much going to have to break off and re-engage later. No one can do this from the air.
- Level 7: Personal defense specialists can aid allies while using incorporeality or similar hard-to-counter defenses, but their actions are still very limited and they can't attack directly. All PCs are expected to excel with at least two completely different forms of attack, or have special abilities making their primary attack extremely difficult to counter.
- Level 8: Fliers are pretty stable, and you need a specific counter to bring them down.
- Level 9: Many people can throw down narrow but arbitrary defenses, such as immunity to temperature or to metallic weapons. It is expected that you'll often have to try two or three things against an opponent before you find something effective.
- Level 10: PCs are all expected to have a full suite of counters for standard effects. You have to do something genuinely surprising to seriously screw someone in a fair fight.
