Basic Fantasy: Hacking Subclasses

Is more better?

I found myself doing a rules development test with Basic Fantasy the other day, and I created a couple character for the test - based off of character we had run in several campaigns in other games. Well, Basic Fantasy only has the base four classes: fighter, mage, cleric, and thief.

The characters were from systems with dozens of character classes. So I found myself asking the question, is this character more a mage or a rogue? A bard? This bard? Well, this one is more a mage and that one more a rogue. How about this ranger? Well, a fighter with a bow would work. This paladin? Hmm, more like a cleric. They played more or less how I wanted them to, and all was well. I didn't need all of the expansion character classes to get the job done.

We have had that "more is better" thing going on since D&D was first written, and a part of me likes a world where things are simple and four classes cover it all. I know you can download some pretty nice expansion classes for Basic Fantasy and I would use them too, but in doing this I see how over the years games started creating all sorts of variant-flavor classes that really exist because a synonym existed for the base class. Is a knight...a fighter? Do we need a cavalier class? A squire class?

Or they invent abilities to make things fit, like giving the ranger class spells. I don't remember Robin Hood knowing magic, nor many magic-using rangers in sort of the pre-D&D fiction. They had good wilderness skills, but were still essentially - fighters. And then when you are combining skills and classes, you get creations like, well, we need a bard with wilderness skills and druid spells, so let's invent a forest-singer class. And the cleric spell version would be the nature-lyricist.

The splat-book buying side of me says, great, more options, take my money!

The side of me that avoids rules bloat sits there and says, you are pulling random crayons out of a box of abilities and inventing a class for them. What are you doing? I don't need any more options!

I get the feeling most subclasses can be done in Basic Fantasy base classes with a few house rules, a handful (like three) of special abilities added to a class, and increasing the XP to level by 10%. A bard is a thief (or a mage) with some songs or music powers. A ranger is a fighter with some special wilderness skills, and maybe a +1 to-hit with ranged weapons. A druid is a cleric who doesn't wear metal armor or weapons, and has a couple cool nature powers.

Maybe give each subclass a special limitation, rangers wear lighter armor, bards must use a musical instrument, druids do not wear metal armor, paladins must abide by a strict code, and other limits that make playing the class difficult but interesting. This way, yes, you can say the 10% XP increase could be easy to overcome, but you need to play by special rules to be special.

You could even make the "ranger subclass" an add-on class for any class, make it a package deal of powers and skills, and open it up to any class so you would have fighter-rangers, mage-rangers, cleric-rangers, and thief-rangers. Same with assassin, bard, druid, or any other class that flavors another class but is close enough to it to not really feel like a standalone.

If I were playing Basic Fantasy and a player came in wanting to be a special class, and we didn't have the Basic Fantasy website to reference, and we needed to house-rule a custom class - this is what I would do. Three cool abilities, a limitation, and +10% XP on top of the four base classes.

Done. Let's see how it works. If we like it, we keep it. If we want to tweak it, we can do that. If we hate it, well, stick with it, and we will say your character was the only one.

Time to play.