My awesome RPG class system… and why it didn’t work.

Rifling through some old papers, I came across an old notebook from high school. Most of my spare time in high school was spent sleeping, but I did manage to have a few lucid moments during which I would direct every neuron in my teenage brain to designing the perfect RPG system. Typically this meant RPGs of the video game variety, but since video RPGs by their very nature take rules written to be interpreted subjectively by humans in a tabletop setting and transform them into something that can be parsed by an unfeeling computerized brain it occurs to me that pretty much any system designed to work in a video RPG will work in a tabletop RPG as well.

(Hi, I’m Brickroad and I’d like to introduce you to the run-on sentence that devoured humanity.)

Anyway, this particular system was class-based, which means your heroes each pick a specific class which then in turn dictates their abilities. For example if you had a character and that character was a Monkey Charmer, he would have the ability to charm monkeys. In most RPG settings you have a team of heroes, and each hero has a different class and therefore a different set of abilities. The idea is that no one hero can be more than one class at a time, and that only a team of heroes whose classes and therefore abilities compliment each other will be successful.

This class-based system must have started with 15- or 16-year-old me asking, “What are the fundamentals of the typical fantasy classes, and how far can they be broken down?” I know this because the papers I came across way back in the first paragraph of this update come in the form of a class tree, at the top of which are the four class archetypes as recognized by AD&D 2nd Edition: Fighter, Rogue, Cleric and Mage.

Actually, that’s the second row. The top row contains two extremely generalized classes, Peasant and Acolyte. I think my crazy head decided that, at the start of the game, you would pick one of these two pre-classes; Peasants are physical laborers, Acolytes are academics. Peasants could therefore upgrade to one of the two physical classes: Fighter or Rogue. Acolytes would upgrade to a magical class: Cleric or Mage.

The next tier is almost done too; Fighters further break down into armed (Knight) and unarmed (Monk) combat. Rogues could decide to focus on thievery (Thief) or social skills (Bard). For Mage I had Elementist and Necromancer, and for Cleric I had Healer and… a blank spot.

Okay, so here’s where the flaw in the system starts to break things apart. A single character’s progression through this class system would have them becoming more and more specialized but not necessarily more powerful. I think the reason I left the Cleric classes blank was because I envisioned Clerics as a class who could, well, heal and turn undead. However, a class that exists only to fight undead would be too remote. No party would want that character except on that one quest where you have to kill a vampire.

It gets worse. I guess the initial two pre-classes weren’t really supposed to count, which makes sense. So a character starts his adventuring career as one of the four base classes, then upgrades to one of the specialty classes. If left like this, congratulations Brickroad, you’ve just invented Final Fantasy 1! I guess I felt for the system to really pop I needed a fourth tier, because I’ve got one here half-done. You could go Fighter -> Knight -> Samurai or Fighter -> Knight -> Paladin. Never mind that neither Samurai nor Paladin are necessarily “better” than Knight, nor necessarily derived from it. Monk doesn’t break down into anything, because I suppose I couldn’t think of a was to further split it in half. Healer splits into Medic and Doctor, showing I had apparently completely stopped trying at this point. Elementist breaks into Pyromancer and Geomancer, completely disregarding two of the traditional fantasy elements because the system wasn’t designed to accomodate them.

I’m beginning to see why this idea never went anywhere.

The RPG class system 15- or 16-year-old me designed was exactly the opposite of where RPG class systems eventually ended up. The days of your class dictating your abilities died years ago. Nowadays it’s all about builds. It’s about variety. Here’s a stack of points you can spend on abilities; go crazy. Even games that retain a class structure, like World of Warcraft or Etrian Odyssey or, hell, even the new D&D give wide freedom within classes. The Fighter you played last game won’t be like the Fighter you play in this one. Most systems even allow you to re-build your character whenever you want, to completely choose new abilities, which is something my rigid ever-more-specialized class tree would never have allowed for.

But hey, if I had developed the idea and I had actually made a game based off of it, at least there could have been a bullet point on the back of the box that said “over 35 classes to choose from!”

2 comments to My awesome RPG class system… and why it didn’t work.

  • Tanto

    I actually had a similar idea, and a similar problem, some years ago. My idea was that each character had about three or four “base” classes they could chose from, and later in the game they could take a second class, which would combine with their first class to form a new unique class.

    Problem was, you ended up with about 50-odd classes in total, and there wasn’t enough differentiating them. As far as skills, you had physical damage, magical damage, healing, buffs, status effects, and a few other class-specific things like stealing, and there’s only so many combinations of those things you can make while still having the game remain interesting.

  • I remember trying to make a class system similar to Final Fantasy Tactics once, where leveling in certain jobs would unlock other ones but ran into the same problem as Tanto did: lack of differentiation. Physical fighters could either hit twice or hit for like double damage, and mages… well, making mages into something besides elemental cannons was something I couldn’t comprehend. It wasn’t until I played Etrian Odyssey that stuff like status effects, buffs/debuffs seemed actually viable to me.

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