Why no Classplosion in 5e?

[TheFlatline]

(5e's 12 classes is the literal minimum number to be a serious offering in 2014).

What on earth are you talking about? Can you even name a game other than D&D that lunched with as many as 12? Can you name a game that had 20 after expansions? World of Darkness has 5. Shadowrun doesn't officially have classes, but it claims to have about 6 classes, while actually having about 3 classes. Dark Heresy launched with about 8 and expanded into about 10. FATE doesn't have classes.

Oh, Apocalypse world launched with 11 and ended with like 16. So I guess you have that one going for you.

I think Warhammer Fantasy 3rd core had like 80 professions and my huge crate o' warhammer 3rd is up to like 200 classes.

Then again, each "class" is basically the equivalent of like a 3-4 level prestige class in D&D 3.x.

[TheFlatline]

Hundreds of classes seems like a great idea, but you have to ask, as a player and as a DM, so I want to learn hundreds of classes?

The answer to that is no.

I do not want to spend the effort required to read gigantic class books, hunt through obscure online articles and magazines, and otherwise pick the best classes for my game. It's a lot of work.

WFRP3 reduces each class down to one 4x6 index card. It has some splat text to help appeal to you but really, the classes usually are self descriptive. A rabble rouser is self-explanatory and the rat catcher literally has a small, vicious terrier you can teach tricks to and you catch rats when you don't "adventure".

If you have hundreds of classes you need discipline to avoid class bloat. When you have 100 classes you need to have maximum one page per class, and the ability to look at a header or paragraph and have an idea of what the class does, what it relies on, and what it's end game looks like.

[erik]

as far as I know nobody takes RIFTS, Rolemaster, or Warhammer seriously. Rolemaster classes are unbalanced, flavorless procedurally-generated garbage. Many Warham careers are literally jokes. I guess I want to challenge the idea that many games have actually benefitted from large numbers of classes.

Also, anecdotally, the number one complaint I hear about After Sundown is that it has too many classes.

But as you noted, the problem isn't the quantity of classes, it is the quality. And the qualify of the ruleset outside of classes. If Rifts had just 10 classes it would be a fucking disgrace that nobody would want to play. Instead it was a fucking disgrace that people couldn't help themselves from playing- thanks to the massive quantity of class options.

Of my physical RPG book collection I probably have almost as many Rifts books as DnD, and it was all because of the classes. I could have given maybe two shits about new psychic powers or spells. Equipment... I cared somewhat, but mostly it was about the new class options that me to the yard time and again. My biggest disappointments were with books that I couldn't mine classes out of for games.

And too many classes in After Sundown? What the what? Are they conceptually stepping on each other's toes (nope), if not then how the fuck is that possible? Hopefully it's not stupid reasoning like this:

Hundreds of classes seems like a great idea, but you have to ask, as a player and as a DM, so I want to learn hundreds of classes?
The answer to that is no.

No, you don't have to learn all the classes, just the ones people choose to bring to the table, of which there may be 6. Conservatively 30 minutes of work in total for the MC if they have to learn classes that are totally foreign, and that doesn't even need to be done during session time.

My enjoyment of Rifts classes was not lessened by that I didn't learn what classes were offered by Rifts Underseas or Cyber Ninjas or whatever books came out after I kicked the habit. If someone brought it to the table I'd be like "Oh, lemme see. That's ridiculous and stupid! No, no, no. Totally bring it."

I recall MCing for:
Seljuk Burster
Phoenixi
Psi Stalker with some MDC granting armadillo symbiont
Psi-X Alien with Automatic Dodge for his giant fucking head
Monster Hunter (2 of these actually)
Atlantean Monster Hunter
Head Hunter
Hunter Cat
Crazy
Phaeton Juicer
Robot Horse
Vagabond
Rifter
Coalition Military Specialist
Godling with a homebrew light saber and homebrewed Predator forcefield/cloaking
Some sort of giant beetle D-Bee that used power armor
Super Power human with supersonic flight

- We tapped maybe 1% of the straight RCC/OCC options (not counting the millions of combos if you mix classes/races), but we got a lot of mileage out of classes.

[Orion]

I tell people about After Sundown and they're like "sounds coo;" and I'm like "sweet, you should look through the monster writeups and see what you like," and then it's time to make characters and they're like "there were so many of them so I didn't read them." And then I pick out 3 for them to choose from.

[MGuy]

I can assume you're telling the truth about people believing there are too many classes. In my experience, as far as gaming goes, most people don't learn most of the ins and outs of the games they play. That doesn't matter though. When people get comfy enough with a system they are going to want to play different stuff and it's straight up better if you already have made a class that fits an idea 'close enough' than to rely on people making their own shit up. If D+D's Prestige Classes are any example, if you tell people to make their own shit up they are still more liable to use your examples than try to take a crack at doing it themselves.

[TheFlatline]

I tell people about After Sundown and they're like "sounds coo;" and I'm like "sweet, you should look through the monster writeups and see what you like," and then it's time to make characters and they're like "there were so many of them so I didn't read them." And then I pick out 3 for them to choose from.

That sounds like an issue that people have in general just reading.

I mean, we can use that argument to attack games in general. I played a Pathfinder game where I swear to god half the table couldn't be bothered to even read the rules. One girl was so ditzy and absent-minded that she couldn't remember how to roll an attack from one round to the next (not an exaggeration).

Now, Pathfinder may be shit, but we can't blame it's shittiness on a player's inability to engage in the fucking format that the game came in: ie printed word.

[erik]

When there's lots of options you do need a way to pare it down.
In Rifts it's basically- look at this list of options and examine what looks good, or get excited at overhearing or chancing upon something and go with it. You don't need to read everything.

There's often the uninvested folks who don't want to read 16 whole pages (with text that mostly amounts to 4-6 pages) so you have to give them the classes for dummies list of cherry-picked options based upon what you know about the player. In AS you can offer the 6 monster types and then have them pick one of the 3 that suits best out of that group. If presented like that then I really cannot see people getting overwhelmed at those since they're already so well-chunked. I think it sounds like you were playing with low-functioning bibliophobes, but you can still make it happen:

"Wanna play a vampire? Okay, now you want a hideous stalker, a dracula, or etna?" Etna? Done.

[Insomniac]

I tell people about After Sundown and they're like "sounds coo;" and I'm like "sweet, you should look through the monster writeups and see what you like," and then it's time to make characters and they're like "there were so many of them so I didn't read them." And then I pick out 3 for them to choose from.

That sounds like an issue that people have in general just reading.

I mean, we can use that argument to attack games in general. I played a Pathfinder game where I swear to god half the table couldn't be bothered to even read the rules. One girl was so ditzy and absent-minded that she couldn't remember how to roll an attack from one round to the next (not an exaggeration).

Now, Pathfinder may be shit, but we can't blame it's shittiness on a player's inability to engage in the fucking format that the game came in: ie printed word.

That is an exceptionally common thing. There is always a "new player" and then somebody who enjoys playing and shooting the shit with friends but doesn't give a toss about the rules so he or she has a ton of bad habits and misconceived notions, making them even worse for a game than a rawly new person.

What percentage of games do you think you've been in where the MC had the system on lockdown and all the other players were system savvy? For me, I'm guessing easily less than 40 percent.

[Whipstitch]

After Sundown's problem is largely a matter of presentation. Taken as an entire setting After Sundown doesn't actually have a particularly crazy number of monsters, since the playable splats are all doing double duty as the backbone of the bestiary. That's why the game is super easy to learn by MC standards but somewhat intimidating from the perspective of players who prefer to never bother learning what the guy one chair over can do with his character. It puts MCs in a tough spot where they have to lead players by the nose and occasionally chunk things down into bite size pieces. However, I'd hold that such a solution is still preferable to outright cutting monsters/classes, since if nothing else that it cuts down on the variety of opposition ready to be rolled out. Throwing down arbitrary limitations so you can herd cats a little faster is a pain, but it's not nearly as big of a pain as having to homebrew a whole mess of your own damn classes and monsters to keep things from getting stale.

[OgreBattle]

I tell people about After Sundown and they're like "sounds coo;" and I'm like "sweet, you should look through the monster writeups and see what you like," and then it's time to make characters and they're like "there were so many of them so I didn't read them." And then I pick out 3 for them to choose from.

Having a "choose your own adventure" flowchart segment seems the way to cut down on decision paralysis, was fun enough to read on tgdmb that I feel all RPG's should have one.

With After Sundown it's pretty much answering "What broad category of monster do you want to be" and from there "what branch of that category do you want to be" If it's fun to read people will read it. I own more RIFTS books than anything else purely because it's fun to read.


An app I've been using to mock up game concepts (both on desktop and on mobile) is http://www.invisionapp.com/, it would work well for making simple "choose your own adventure" flowcharts. So if you feel like fiddling around for a few hours you can create a character concept flowchart that you can show people on your phone.

[Username17]

I'll cop to ignorance. I've never read Earthdawn or Ars Magica. I sort of assumed that Ars Magica would have had 7 houses, because Vampire had seven clans. I *am* familiar with several versions of Rolemaster and Rifts. You caught me. If you'll look away for a moment while I move the goalposts, I do notice that none of those games are from the 21st century, and that as far as I know nobody takes RIFTS, Rolemaster, or Warhammer seriously. Rolemaster classes are unbalanced, flavorless procedurally-generated garbage. Many Warham careers are literally jokes. I guess I want to challenge the idea that many games have actually benefitted from large numbers of classes.

Well, we could talk about the 21st century. Earthdawn 4 launches with 15 Disciplines. Shadowrun 4 launches with 16 Archetypes. Warhammer 3 launched with like 80 basic careers. Feng Shui 2 has like 30 templates.

As to Vampire specifically, remember that the original book launched with 8 classes (you may have been forgetting the Caitiff or Toreador because they are forgettable), but the Player's Guide immediately introduced seven more (Assamite, Setite, Giovanni, Ravnos, Samedi, Daughters of Cacophony, and Salubri). The Sabbat guide increased that number by like fifteen. In the 21st century, they decided to go from ($TEXAS) classes down to an ultra-reductionist five. And this move bankrupted the company.

3rd edition D&D had 11 classes and added ($TEXAS) more, and it was the best selling edition ever. 4th edition dropped that down to a reductionist 8 and killed the game. Meanwhile, Pathfinder started with 11 and expanded it to the current 33 and is now the biggest game in the world.

Not only is massive classplosion totally the norm, but where class reductionism has been tried it has been a horrible, game destroying failure. It's not something which couldn't work in theory, it's just that we have actual data of it being tried and the results have been spectacularly bad. No one gives a shit about 3-class reductionist experiment True20 even though it has the same designer as monster hit Mutants and Masterminds.

Also, anecdotally, the number one complaint I hear about After Sundown is that it has too many classes.

After Sundown is like a hundred and fifty thousand words. That's half the length of a lot of bloated books of the 21st century. But it's still way too long for people to read the whole thing for a pick up game. Really, more than anything, After Sundown needs a better set of pictures, so that people can more effectively skim the book when selecting their first character.

Edit: And a Choose Your Own Adventure flowchart for character monster creation. I think all games should have one of those.

-Username17

[Orion]

Tell you what, I'll write you a class selector for Sundown as a peace offering. Anything you want to specify about the format?

EDIT: I forgot Caitiff. As for Salburi and Assamites and Ravnos, I thought you regarded the bonus clans as mostly embarassing redundancies, broken concepts, or offensive racism. They explosion of bullshit clans is half the reason people don't take Vampire seriously.

Also, Shadowrun 4 doesn't have 16 archetypes. It just doesn't. It has 16 pregen characters, but they're not playable, and not all of them even pretend to be distinct archetypes.

[Mask_De_H]

You seem to be missing the overall point here, Orion. People would rather have more options than less, even though it's easy for said people to get overwhelmed with choice. If you don't offer that choice, especially if you did so previously, people are going to feel ripped off.

More choice is seen as an unmitigated good, regardless of how things actually play out mechanically. It may be more difficult to parse at the start, but once players get even a modicum of system mastery under their belt they're gonna want more options.

[Username17]

As for Salburi and Assamites and Ravnos, I thought you regarded the bonus clans as mostly embarassing redundancies, broken concepts, or offensive racism. They explosion of bullshit clans is half the reason people don't take Vampire seriously.

I'm not going to say that all classes are good. I'm saying that the hit rate of classes doesn't seem to go up when you write less of them.

I don't think the After Sundown Golem worked very well. It had too much 19th century occultism and not enough Ray Harryhausen, and it didn't do what people wanted a Golem to do. That type needs to be radically rewritten.

Yes, a lot of Vampire bloodlines are bullshit. And yes, if you were competently redesigning the thing you'd cut all kinds of stuff. But whatever your competency level is, you're going to want to have enough types in there that your number made times your hit rate is a decent number. I mean, let's be honest: only 2 out of the five clans in nVampire aren't hot garbage. If they got that same 40% hit rate and made 15 clans instead of only five, they'd have enough non-shitty clans to make an entire team.

But even if you have a high hit rate and can make more than a dozen classes and only have two or three that kind of flub (I'll cop to the Golem, Troglodyte, and Fallen not really panning out the way they were supposed to), people still want more.

You can go fully classless, which gives people the diversity they want but also makes chargen take forever and leaves people stranded with option paralysis. But if you're going with classes, people want more.

-Username17

[Concise Locket]

You seem to be missing the overall point here, Orion. People would rather have more options than less, even though it's easy for said people to get overwhelmed with choice. If you don't offer that choice, especially if you did so previously, people are going to feel ripped off.

That's a problem for marketing spin doctors, not game designers. From a design perspective, a game line launch needs to have character build options sit on a solid foundation.

More choice is seen as an unmitigated good, regardless of how things actually play out mechanically.

"The food here is terrible... and in such small portions!"

Introducing crap from the beginning in order to provide the illusion of 'interesting' or 'more' choices is the perfect way to torpedo a game. Terrible class options taint a line's development down the road by introducing greater chances for developer errors.

[Username17]

"The food here is terrible... and in such small portions!"

Introducing crap from the beginning in order to provide the illusion of 'interesting' or 'more' choices is the perfect way to torpedo a game. Terrible class options taint a line's development down the road by introducing greater chances for developer errors.

There is a built-in assumption that you could have better stuff if you wrote less of it. And for most game companies, there is absolutely no reason to believe that is true. The choice isn't between five good clans and five good clans plus ten shitty clans. The choice is between fives clans of which two aren't shitty and fifteen clans of which six aren't shitty. Some people come out swinging with their best ideas first, but people also learn by doing. There's no special reason to believe that the twelfth class writeup is going to be better or worse than the third.

Now in a perfect world, it would be nice to expect that you could write up twenty classes and then winnow it down to five and have five seriously awesome classes. But history has shown us that what actually happens is that paring it down to five just gets you an equal ratio of chaff unless you have a sorting algorithm. And honestly, the only sorting algorithm that works is "crowdsourcing" it to fans. So by looking at aggregate fan opinions, you can figure out that Superman has legs and Gunfire doesn't. But if you just asked one random dude, he'd probably tell you that his favorite hero was The Question or whatever.

So once you've put it to the fans, you can discover which classes are good and which are shit. Although even that only works if you haven't created a bubble where you only hear the words of sycophants that tell you everything is good. For fuck's sake, White Wolf went to its grave thinking that the nWoD experiment was popular with fans because they drummed out all the "haters" from their message boards (and also rpg.net, because for some reason they were allowed to do that). And moving to a new edition, or even producing content for the current edition, you can take that under advisement.

But here's the thing: a class that polls poorly can flub because it's conceptually bad and should be binned. But it can also flub because it's written poorly or because it's mechanically bad, in which case rewriting it is a fine option. In Vampire specifically, there were a lot of the first kind of failure. There ain't nothing you can do about the Ravnos to make them not be stupid and racist. Even if you wanted to keep an Illusionist clan, you'd have to write one from scratch or start with the Kinyonyi or something. But in Kitchen Sink Fantasy, most class concepts are pretty vague and inoffensive. Sure there's shit like the Factotum that just isn't salvageable, but there's nothing stopping you from writing a decent Swashbuckler or Samurai. Those classes were awful in 3.5 because they were written badly, not because there's anything inherent about those concepts that makes a class suck.

Moving forward, you'd want to carry forward classes that were good and write new content based on those classes. And you'll note: Pathfinder has done that a fair number of times (what with all those fucking alternate spellcaster classes). And to the extent that they have done that, they've done very well for themselves. Even though I don't think anyone here is confused that they are appreciably better at writing than the Hamlet Typing Monkeys..

-Username17

[Insomniac]

How much better of a position would 4E have been if it just started with a few more things?

Like, Aasimar, Gnomes, Goblins and Half-Orcs as playable races and Barbarians, Bards, Druids, Monks and Sorcerers in the core.

That's just 9 things. But how much of a better position would it have been in? Would that have been good enough to forestall a catastrophe? Would 5E even be out right now?

[Seerow]

How much better of a position would 4E have been if it just started with a few more things?

Like, Aasimar, Gnomes, Goblins and Half-Orcs as playable races and Barbarians, Bards, Druids, Monks and Sorcerers in the core.

That's just 9 things. But how much of a better position would it have been in? Would that have been good enough to forestall a catastrophe? Would 5E even be out right now?

Problem is 4e went with a design where including those 5 extra classes would have been literally impossible due to sheer page volume.

But yes, if they had somehow managed to squeeze it all in, and made it so you could play wizards of a variety that is not just blasty (necromancer is the biggest callout for thing that was not supported in 4e early enough), then it probably would have been in a much stronger position.

[Insomniac]

Oh right. Because Barbarian takes 2 or 3 pages in 3.5, at the most, even about the same in Pathfinder with Rage powers, but it would take like 20 in 4E.

I thought 4E was going to work out for them but it just had too many holes that I am learning about now.

[Koumei]

I'd like to see the AS flowchart/CYOA thing, that'd be fun.

As for telling Frank to just write the new shiny "game that replaces D&D" already, the problem is not with the power schedules or with writing 10 or 20 level classes that use them. It's not even in writing up the pages of powers and options they get, though that's time consuming. The hard part would be making the underlying system.

Because that's actually important, having a system that covers hit points and what you roll and what the difficulties are for X, Y and Z. That also takes up loads of words and loads of time (and is the most daunting thing for people new to the game, which for a new game is "everyone"). That bit is huge, and you need to make sure you don't fuck up at that level while making it cover enough ground that people don't discover gaps everywhere yet not being so massive that people are scared to look at it. And you have to do that bit before you can just plug some classes and power sets into it.

Which is why the most adventurous things I've done for D&D-style games have been to "just make it a bunch of content that slots into D&D 3Ed". And I'm not sure if something on this scale can just do that, or if it really needs reworking, going right back to the idea of what a level entails and how big things scale and how many ability scores there are and so on.

[Username17]

A 4e class is 12 pages. That's obscene, and totally not helpful. But even with that amazing and deliberate waste of space, they could have gotten in 5 more classes in "just" 60 more pages. Some of that could have been made up by shunting things into the DMG. For fuck's sake, 4e's PHB spends 33 pages talking about magic items. And I don't think there's a person alive who would have been surprised to see that shit in the DMG.

They also could have presented classes in a less space wastey fashion. Even with the desire to put all the powers into a class, they could have put things in 8 pages instead of 12 just by not having the powers written like this:

True Nemesis Paladin Attack 15
You extend your holy symbol toward a foe, dealing damage
and singling him out as the continuing subject of your divine
retribution.
Daily ✦ Divine, Implement
Standard Action Ranged 5
Target: One creature
Attack: Charisma vs. Will
Hit: 2d10 + Charisma modifier damage.
Miss: Half damage.
Effect: Until the end of the encounter, whenever the target
is within 5 squares of you and attacks you or an ally, you
can make a secondary attack against the target as an
immediate reaction.
Secondary Attack: Charisma vs. Will
Hit: 2d10 + Charisma modifier damage.
Miss: Half damage.

Leaving aside the fact that that power is crap and also does almost literally the opposite of what a "defender" is supposed to do in that fucking edition, that is like a sixth of a page just for that one stupid power. You could get something less shitty into a lot less space.

The thing was that the 4e authors felt that their goal was to fill up as much page space as possible with as little actual content as possible. On the grounds that as long as they still had books to write, they could keep writing books for money. It's why they split the Draconomicon into two volumes and wrote an entire "Open Grave" book that was completely different from Heroes of Shadow.

Andy Collins insisted that the design problem for 4e to solve was how to fit in enough shovel text so that the 4e PHB could be declared "full" even though it only had 8 fucking classes in it. That's so alien that it's hard to describe. But that is what they did.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

The Fallen seemed like it was a flub simply because it was a little too specific about the character background. Most other monsters are like, "you have wolf powers kinda, here's why that might be" or some such general thing. Comparing Fallen to the other Transhuman types: The Icarids are just "anything that's sorta superscience" and the Reborn are also a rather general "whatever reincarnation thing you wanna do".

The Troglodyte, well I worked with the book for well over a year before being told that the After Sundown trog is always supposed to be a mole and not a lizard (like the DnD trog). There's an essay near the opening that mentions Mole Man, but the DnD trog being a lizard-thing is such a strong association in my mind that it overrode that.

I thought the Golem was cool, but I love robots and constructs, and so I imagined them being made out of all sorts of materials. Steel beams wrapped in caution tape, Jonny 5 wires and circuits, BG2 blocky humanoids of flesh, rocks overgrown with moss, all sorts of stuff.

[Foxwarrior]

The hard part would be making the underlying system.

But on the flip side, it means you can put in things like making kicking people through walls and having a swordfight with your enemy while jumping from horse to horse in a stampede into parts of the core rules, rather than requiring all parties involved to specifically invest in the "jumping from horse to horse" Feat and whatnot that a 3e-based system would almost certainly devolve to.

[OgreBattle]

The hard part would be making the underlying system.

Take the RPG system you like/understand the most and jump off from there. I'd say something like 4e just needs new classes and monsters and s'more skills, the underlying system isn't bad.

[ishy]

The hard part would be making the underlying system.

Take the RPG system you like/understand the most and jump off from there. I'd say something like 4e just needs new classes and monsters and s'more skills, the underlying system isn't bad.

What?
What part of 4e is not bad?