How did I miss this? There’s been a flare up of the Class vs. Skill debate recently. You can track it across multiple blogs: Nerfbat, Zen of Design, Broken Toys, Moorgard, Nerfbat, Probably Not, Sierra Kilo, Raph Koster, World IV.
My regulars have heard my stance on this a few times, but I’m dropping nuggets of new design info in this post, so you’ll probably want to re-read it anyway.
While I’m aware of the design problems inherent in a classless system, I’m strictly anti-class. My goal is to provide a skill based system which encourages and rewards player participation in cultural organizations via the pursuit of professions. You could easily play the Drachurae Cycle as an entirely skill-based-system game, but you’ll receive none of the perks and incentives inherent in joining a guild and finding mentors.
That’s right, mentors. I spoke in my post on experience points about Learning Capacity. Characters with a high level of Pyrae (Wit) are capable of learning from doing, and from watching someone more skilled. This learning curve is heightened when you enter into a formal mentorship relationship. Any given character, NPCs and PCs, can take on one apprentice per eighteen years of their life, up to a maximum of three. The benefits of working with a mentor gradually increase over time, encouraging long term relationships, rather than a mentor who flips through apprentices every few days or weeks. What benefit is it to the mentors? Renown, of course. The better your apprentices do at their craft, the more Renown you gain. The more Renown you gain, the better your character. There are other serious world perks involved in gaining Renown, incidently. I’ll talk about those in a future post.
Characters with a high level of Hydrae (Lore) can learn from reading and are also capable of authoring instructional books, should they choose an instructional profession… Of course, any strong guild will do everything within their power to acquire and horde high level instructional books which would be of use to their membets. They also aggressively recruit characters capable of authoring such books. By aggressively, I mean, “using any methods available to them.”
Anyway, it’s all part of my “Reward desirable behavior, discourage undesirable behavior” approach to design. No restricting classes, but plenty of rewards for putting together structured characters.
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August 29, 2006 at 11:41 am
I think theres a third option not being considered, have no class and fixed skill, instead design characters with interesting and tactically self-organizing suites of abilities that are strongly suggestive of their personality – and have the relationships of the characters act as the delimiter of “progress”. This doesn’t have to be limited to wizards and werewolves, the abilities can be mothering or channel surfing or investment banking or any sort of context you want to be played.
I mean think about it, Role Playing is really about playing a role.
August 29, 2006 at 12:40 pm
I think that puts you in the ‘Skills’ camp, Patrick.
As I see it, there are two choices: letting the players make their own roles (“Skills”) or using pre-structured roles (“Class”). The former will always be broadly preferred by those strongly expressing Rational temperament, like the minority RPG fan hardcore, and the latter will always be preferred by the mass market who collectively cannot bear the complexity of character generation and management.
So, if you want a niche market – use Skills – if you want to be mass market – use Classes.
Undoubtedly a simplification, but apposite nonetheless.
August 29, 2006 at 7:24 pm
I think in my case its closer to class based, since the character creation happens before the game is picked up. My point is the emphasis doesn’t have to be on bigger numbers, but rather on percolations between agents, which can be represented in numbers, but is of another nature from lateral progression.