Your class is an aspect. Want to shoot fireballs? Roll your Lore (or Magic) skill and invoke your "caster class" aspect for a reroll or a more powerful spell.
The martial vs. caster divide is fixed here since everything is mostly the same, and flavor is the only difference between character types. Are you a paladin who smites and casts heals? Use the Lore skill, announce the effect, and cast. Power is all relative and similar. Want to be a half-caster versus a full? Don't buy the Lore skill as high and specialize in other areas. Let true mages and priests buy it at +4, while half-caster classes need to buy it at a lower level.
Yes, I get it, "but it is all the same!" And, "There are no flavorful abilities!" And "There is no class identity!" These are generic "generic game" complaints, and valid. But take a step back. D&D has repeatedly proven it can't balance casters versus martial classes, and it often stumbles in the dark and throws caster subclasses at martial classes to fix the problem. By falling all the way back to "generic power sets," we can see what a completely balanced system looks like.
Yes, we don't have the fiddly powers and rules here, and everyone has infinite casting unless you define some limits. But again, D&D 4 is pretty much infinite-cast now with all the resting exploits, especially at higher levels. Again, this is a step back: my mage and paladin are relatively balanced against each other, and there are no complaints that "one is more powerful than the other" because the concepts are so basic and stripped down.
As a result, we can look inside a fantasy world with relative class balance and parity. The rogue is as powerful as the mage. The ranger is as powerful as the monk. The fighter is as powerful as the warlock. I am not picking bard because it has the most class cheese; I am picking bard because I want to play a bard. I will balance it against the cleric.
To be fair, Pathfinder 2 likely has the best class balance in gaming. I need to give all the testing and design this team did props. To get there, they needed a huge framework, and the game feels heavy. I never got into this, despite trying, so this remains one of my biggest misses. Not the game's fault, but it is personal and just me. There are still issues with caster DPS and a few other nitpicks I see brought up from time to time, but they all feel minor.
And, let's face it, I have played enough D&D to know what the "typical bard powers" are, and in FATE, the system lets me invent new ones on the fly, as long as they get GM approval. I am not limited by the spell list here, and even many of today's newer narrative games fall into this trap. To keep you on the recurring revenue stream, today's games carefully define what you can and can't do, then slowly drip-feed new must-have powers in the next book you are forced to buy.
Want a "wall of sound" power? Sure, tell me what it does and make a roll. We will work it out from there. And all of a sudden, magic feels special and unpredictable again. Oops. Take that, carefully designed, limited power set, narrative gaming. When they remove your imagination from the game, they will replace it with your wallet.
We get so lost in the weeds with 5E these days that we can't see the design box the game and its systems shove us into. If you change the game, you will start to see the system's weaknesses and the revenue streams they purposefully built into it. We don't know what a game with a balanced class model looks like because most companies can't design it, or refuse to give it to us since "caster-focused books sell better."
And it is far too easy to slip into the D&D YouTube trap of comparing new subclass designs and theory-crafting, getting lost in those weeds and not realizing what is really happening here: subclasses that feel like patches duct-taped onto the game, or new power-gaming gimmies to sell the book (and later to get banned from people's tables because they break the game).
Once a game is designed as a recurring-revenue model, it becomes inferior to the ones we already have.
No comments:
Post a Comment