"A character class is a character’s job, life-style, or profession. Anyone can have this job, and there is usually different variations of it. A good example of a class are the various types of Police Officers: highway patrol officers, K-9 officers, SWAT team members, or homicide detectives. A character can only have one class, and the character’s level reflects experience and achievement.
This chapter will take you step-by-step through the class design process. We will take you through the steps of coming up with a concept for your class, linking it to the game world, and coming up with the skills and statistics best describing the profession. With that said, let’s look at some of the non-design issues that come up when thinking about character classes.
Stick to Your Theme!
The Theme of your Game World (remember, Genre = Setting + Theme + Mood) controls what classes are in it. Controlling what classes are in a game world directly controls the Theme. No class that “violates” the Theme should play an important role in the game world. Just because a class exists in a game world, doesn’t automatically mean players can create PCs using it, or referees can create situations linked to it. While a “submarine captain” character class exists in a modern-day game world, it serves no purpose if your theme is “Urban Street Gang Battles.”
Example: Let’s say your gaming group is playing a “cops and robbers” themed game. Good character classes would fit within this theme: police detectives, bank robbers, beat patrol officers, safecrackers, and so on. A plot comes up where a criminal gang steals military weapons for use in a heist, and several soldier classes are generated for military NPCs.
This event shouldn’t “open the door” for military-style situations or character classes to be introduced into the game. A player shouldn’t design a military character to hunt down the weapons, and pull a whole host of military-related plots and factions into the game. The game world’s theme is “cops and robbers;” and while playing special forces commandos versus criminals might be fun for a while, it destroys the original Theme."
More fun from the Class Design chapter, this time explaining how classes fit into the game's theme better, and some of our game world definitions come up (more on that later). Classes you made for the game had to stick to the game world's theme - even classes designed later during play. This section also introduced the idea of being careful about letting stuff slip into your game that violated your game world's theme, dropping the hint that players and referees needed to focus and create characters and situations that supported the theme, and not to go off track too much.
This is a unique problem with a lot of generic RPG systems, they cover so much, it is too easy to have the game wander off into areas totally off the wall and out there. We let people have total freedom in designing what they wanted to play, but once decided, it was better for everyone that play (both from players and the referee) stuck to the original idea everyone came up with when the game world was first created.
SBRPG was created out of our 30 years of roleplaying experiences, and a lot of the knowledge we gained is shared subtly in these concepts. We have saw too many campaigns slip off track with stuff that doesn't belong, and eventually the campaign died due to it losing what made it feel special. Continually reinforcing your game's theme, limiting what happens to stuff that is supportive of the story, and even mechanical stuff like limiting classes may seem petty, limiting, or even simple - but not to new players.
Who will tell the next generation of roleplayers, "This is how you create a world, keep your story on track, and run a game?" SBRPG's concepts are tightly linked to these ideas and lessons, and while it seems like a simple 'story telling game' - it is actually a lot more. A lot of games print rules just because something needs to be handled mechanically; we wrote rules to make sure you avoid the mistakes we made, to understand what works and what may not, and how to craft something that is genuinely fun and will last the test of time.
SBRPG was created out of our 30 years of roleplaying experiences, and a lot of the knowledge we gained is shared subtly in these concepts. We have saw too many campaigns slip off track with stuff that doesn't belong, and eventually the campaign died due to it losing what made it feel special. Continually reinforcing your game's theme, limiting what happens to stuff that is supportive of the story, and even mechanical stuff like limiting classes may seem petty, limiting, or even simple - but not to new players.
Who will tell the next generation of roleplayers, "This is how you create a world, keep your story on track, and run a game?" SBRPG's concepts are tightly linked to these ideas and lessons, and while it seems like a simple 'story telling game' - it is actually a lot more. A lot of games print rules just because something needs to be handled mechanically; we wrote rules to make sure you avoid the mistakes we made, to understand what works and what may not, and how to craft something that is genuinely fun and will last the test of time.
Sticking to a theme at char generation can be really hard. Especially with more narrowly defined themes, sometimes it feels like player have very overlapping skillsets within the group.
ReplyDeleteSBRPG made me realize the fallacy in this. When every character is a broadly defined "thief" or "warrior" archetype it leave little room for diversity for example in a cops or robbers game were almost everyones playing a "thief". When you have a narrow theme in a sandbox encourage players to play lower CDP characters say in the 100-120 range instead of the 160+ superheroes your used to with most games archtype classs. In a cops and robbers game don't just be a "Robber" not only does it add little diversity it just not as interesting. Play a "Hired Muscle", a "Safe Cracker", or a "Expert Pickpocket" instead.
Basically when playing in a narrow themed "cops and robbers in the mid 70s" use lower costed more narrowly skilled classes, then when playing in a more broadly themed "generic high fantasy dungeon raiding"style campaign.
Great insight, and yes, totally agree. There is a 'fun in the small' thing going on in SBRPG's class design system, and somewhere in there we say it's less fun to design a jack-of-all trades character. You need to think more like "Mission Impossible" when designing your team, and let other players in the group have specialties no one else has. It's a give and take, but it allows for specialization in the team, and that is always more fun for the group.
ReplyDeleteYes, it is fun to design on a budget, and making choices and trade-offs is the hallmark of a great design. SBRPG is unlike games with point-buy everything, like GURPS, in that you are designing your class from the get-go, and you can never just buy something you need later with development points.
SBRPG characters are a lot like TV show heroes, like "Magnum PI" or "Knight Rider", in that they never really learn too much outside their original definition, they just get really good at what they do. There is room for some new FI Skills to cover stuff, but for the most part, the original design is important and defines you through your career.
Compare and contrast that with mutli-class games where you pick up a little of this and a little of that along the way, but in the end, it is harder to define how many levels of PI, muscle hero, sharpshooter, and rich millionaire "Magnum PI" is at this point in his career.