ADAD House Rules: Grok 3 Character Classes

Over on the ADAD House Rules Page, I added a simple tutorial for using Grok 3 to create ADAD/OSRIC/AD&D first-edition character classes using AI.

I am still not using AI art on this site since it takes jobs and artist talent from our communities.

But seeing and experimenting with AI-created character classes is something I have never seen before, and it produces some interesting results for just about any character class idea. I have gotten great results for barroom brawler, barmaid, torch bearer, dragon handler, axe master (fighter subclass), magic school teacher, and many others.

Also, I don't recommend doing this and then "selling it on DriveThru" since that is cheap and low-effort. However, this is fine for personal use if you only use it yourself. If I see someone doing that, they are getting a one-star review!

The characters are simple enough to pull this off with the first edition. Having AI design an entire 5E class with subclass choices that level up would take a lot of work since 5E puts a lot of "design effort" into subclasses. AD&D does this just fine, and the generation and prompts are quick.

Seeing first-edition characters going from level 1 to 10, getting abilities as they level, and having those reflect whatever you want is mind-expanding fun. If you wish to see a one-off class for a "Mermaid Trident Warrior," you can have that instantly. The class won't likely be balanced, but that is where your human mind comes in to tweak and fix the design.

This may diminish the skill and effort of game designers who put a lot of careful work and testing into a class and open the door for tons of junk to enter the hobby. This is a better use as an idea generator and something to create a new framework to begin work on. I will stress personal use only and use these as a recipe to "bake new ideas" with.

My Torch Bearer had this power at the 6th level:

Beacon of Hope

At the 6th level, the Torch Bearer can rally allies with their light. Once per day, they can hold their light source aloft for 1 round, granting all allies within its radius a +1 bonus to attack rolls and saving throws for 1 turn (10 minutes). At the 10th level, this becomes +2 and lasts 2 turns.

It is an interesting power, and I would increase the daily use limit, but I have never seen anything like it. And I have never seen a torch-bearer class designed with 10 levels of powers, an XP chart, hit die, minimum stats, and all the other trimmings.

If you see something you like, put it in a Word document and save your work! You can always return to a query, but having these in a personal idea stash is smart.

Again, please use this ethically and for personal use only. AI use has responsibilities attached, just like driving, gun ownership, a hunting license, or any other human right that society gives us that can hurt or negatively impact others.

This is also very scary, and it warps my mind about what pen-and-paper gaming will be like in five or ten years. Will entire role-playing experiences be AI-created, with the AI understanding dungeon mastering and every player living in a world of their own creation—with custom classes, races, peoples, NPCs, and every other aspect a DM usually comes up with? Will we even have traditional books with lists of character classes, monsters, races, and other content?

Will we even have "gaming as books," or will it be "gaming as an AI platform?"

At that point, how will the rules change? Will we even have rules, or just a set of descriptors for our character, like Cypher System?

It is a scary new world in which we live.

But also one that may have infinite possibilities.

Castles & Crusades: Mutliclassing

The multiclassing system is one of the best things about Castles & Crusades (C&C). Once you read this and understand the system, wow, this game is like very few others in the options and flexibility the game gives you. Not only in what you can combine but in the multiple ways you can combine them.

Many B/X games give you a class or a hybrid, and that is that. C&C gives you a box of types, treats them like Legos, and invites you to build the character you dream of playing. This isn't a GURPS-style point-buy system as we are still working with traditional classes, but being able to pick 2 or 3 and combine them in various ways gives me hundreds of ideas of unique characters I just can't get in other games quickly - or at all.

The Players' Handbook has 13 classes, while the Player Archive ups that number to 36, already an incredible number of standalone options, and this is more than a lot of B/X games deliver. And then the game turns around and invites you to combine them, allowing you to wonderfully simulate the hybrid martial-spellcaster classes of AD&D.

You can multi-class, which means you combine the XP-per-level (plus a little) of two to three classes and advance in them simultaneously. You can use class-and-a-half. Which gives you your primary class plus a half-level supporting class, perfect for the AD&D style paladins or rangers where they have a primary martial focus plus a slower-advancing supportive spellcasting class. The Player Archive adds more options, such as class-plus, dual-class, and reclassing.

Add this to a system that unifies all skills, feats, class ability, and saving throws under a unified ability-based system (SIEGE Engine). You have a more straightforward design than many B/X offerings, with less to write down and track on character sheets. I don't have to write down and reference arbitrary saving throws and attack matrixes. Everything is ability-based, which is instantly familiar to 5E players.

I had a few issues with the SIEGE Engine at first. Still, when I realized the system's class-ability and roleplaying uses, I started to appreciate the genius of what the designers did. Want to invent a new ranger class ability, such as Tree Ring Reading? Just develop an idea, talk it over with the GM, and tie it to an ability check based on your class level. You are freed from searching through and referencing endless lists of feats and skills, your powers are more situation-based, and the core system stays simple and clean.

This is a best-of-class OSR-style game that does a lot of what I love, keeps things simple like B/X, and invites you to get in and tweak to your heart's content.

Character Advancement as Story

The role of game designers? Obviously, to design a fun experience.

What happens when they fail? Obviously, a game that isn't fun anymore. We had this problem with D&D 4, and it shook our trust in games from big publishers. The game was great in some ways, but in others they let excess, bloat, and repetition ruin the game. And the bad parts outweighed the good. I flip through page after page of the same magic item, +1 to +6, one or two abilities each, a few of them the only good ones, and ask myself why?

D&D 4 was a card game printed in book format and it sucked. The tactical battle chess parts we loved.

I had this article this week where it felt too negative, so I kept rewriting it, but the problem wasn't one particular game or one feature, I felt it was more a systemic problem with the empowerment of those who play the game - versus the control the game designers exert over players. This isn't within the game as characters, but in a larger sense as players outside the game and our ability to change and improve the game.

With commercial games under closed licenses, you are stuck buying a new version of the books every couple years giving the game designers "another chance" to get it right this time. Or to simply "refresh mechanics." You are very much in a Mac/Windows situation, where the companies can drop support for hardware, force you to buy new hardware, change things at-will and invalidate characters, control the multi-player experience, and own exclusive access to the official rules.

Yes, third party publishers fill a lot of the gaps, but they are still dependent on the core game not breaking features for their products to still work correctly a few years down the road. Third-party products are also hard to sell at times to those unfamiliar, so I feel they are a patch to broken designs at best.

B/X is Linux

And Linux/Unix is great. Just ask your phone. Or iOS. Or cloud services. Or anything except Windows, but even they have made some great steps towards integrating, so props to their team for making things work together.

B/X is like the Unix/Linux world. You are free to switch distributions at any time. Anyone can come up with something. You are free to come up with your own system. You can make it as compatible or not with other B/X material, your choice. If a version of B/X goes "stale" (whatever that means) you can switch to another, but honestly, there is nothing stopping you from playing and enjoying something that isn't the "hot new!"

My Labyrinth Lord books are still good 20 years from now, just as fun, just as interesting, and they still work. Yes, Old School Essentials is the cool new kid on the block and I love that game, but there is room for everyone and honestly, no one really gets left out. I could take a character from either game and get them working in another in about 5 minutes, the monsters and magic items at 99% compatible, and the adventures just work as-is, with possibly a few very small tweaks here and there.

Mind you older versions of copyrighted games still work 20 years from now, but they will be forever locked in the same state. New content difficult to produce and acquire, updates and other creations near impossible, and remixes out of the question. As a matter of choice I prefer supporting open games with open publishing licenses when I have a choice, but there are some exceptions.

I feel B/X is a good thing for the hobby as a whole, even for the big commercial games, because it keeps people from dropping off the map and quitting pen-and-paper games entirely if they are not interested in the big publisher games. It sustains a lot of interest in the market interested in free and experimental gaming. A rising tide lifts all boats.

Big Box Classes

Here is where my thoughts take a huge swerve, and this is what I was having trouble with. Games, especially ones with "big box" character classes designed by the game design teams, run into a lot of post-launch issues. I remember the Pathfinder 1e rogue and the D&D 5 ranger being the "least exciting" classes to play, and those class getting entirely redesigned during the game's release cycle to "patch" them.

Supposedly, hundreds of thousands of people play-tested these games - and those classes - before release? That is what I see in the marketing material. Why weren't these issues caught, or were they late-game problems that were never really play-tested all that well? There is probably a thousand reasons why and this isn't a road I want to go down with my thinking, to be honest.

And also, play-testing the high-level games of any major commercial release - even in the MMO world - is never an easy or certain thing. If there is one thing about the playtesting the marketers tout, it is probably 90% done at the lower levels and very lightly where it matters most - the highest endgame levels.

And then I recently got this book:

This is the B/X Options book that lets you custom design character classes for all B/X style games. This is a great tool, and it even has a ton of classes designed with plenty of variants to keep a group interested for a good long time. I see this book as one of my essential books when playing Old School Essentials, either Basic or Advanced, since it gives me the tools to custom hack a class, give a player uninterested in the selection a few more options, or build a new class for an NPC just for fun.

I love the book, I love the toolbox it gives me, and this is going to be a keeper and highly recommended to anyone interested in B/X gaming. But this is also a book that got my interest in GURPS or Hero System 6th Edition rekindled.

I know, but you love this book, why switch?

I get this feeling where if I am finding myself having to design rigid character classes to fit my archetype characters, or changing my characters to fit a character class, something bigger is wrong here.

Point Buy Systems

Why design classes? With GURPS or Hero System, I get XP, and I directly spend those points on powers, abilities or skills as I level. I am not "pre designing" my experience as I level and running the risk my design sucks at level 20 and is unfun to play.

I know, these are closed systems for the most part, and I am still looking for that mythical point-buy creation and improvement open license game. I have not found it yet. So for now, GURPS and Hero System are good choices for me and have a lot of content to play with.

If my character starts out a rogue, sneaks into a wizard school and impersonates a student, learns magic, goes on a long boat trip, ends up shipwrecked on a desert island and has to be a survivor, ends up being a barbarian freedom fighter for local tribes after they learn their homeland was an evil empire, plays noble pirate for a while raising the evil empire's shipping, learns shamanistic spirit magic from the lizardfolk tribes, and returns to their home kingdom as an ambassador for the new world and negotiates a peace treaty as a diplomat...well, that is my character class when all is said and done.

That character is a mess, but they are a mess written by an interesting story, and they reflect their experiences in who they are. Their skills, powers, and abilities are all reflected by their background, and as I played them, that unique experience of "who they are" is directly reflected on that character sheet.

Does multiclassing do that well? Rogue 2/Wizard 3/Naturalist 3/Barbarian 2/Pirate 4/Shaman 3/ Diplomat 3? A level 20 character that could never negotiate with a pure level 20 Diplomat, or even a level 10 one. Then again, in a world that is changing and reflecting people's diverse backgrounds and cultures, why limit ourselves to "one set path in life" and tell ourselves "a game designer's intentions have decided who we are and what we will be before we explore the world and find ourselves?"

I wish B/X had point-buy character advancement.

Character Advancement as Story

I like it when a story shapes the character's development rather than the other way around. I feel if a class limits the character's story, we have a fundamental problem. At least in how I want to play solo games and sustain my interest in them. I do admit when I am playing with others, classes are a shortcut that directs people's roles around a table and brings some order to the chaos.

But when playing solo, part of the unknown for me lies in character advancement. I don't want to know what path they take, and I want that to change depending on the direction I take. As the fog of war of the character's future is revealed as I play, and I have no idea where they are going.

I don't get that in games with classes, B/X, Pathfinder, or D&D. For the most part, I know how their character is growing in skills, abilities, and powers. Multiclassing is my only option for change in the character's future, and that is a sub-optimal solution.

When I am in a game where something different happens, and my character has to buy new skills and powers to do well in this new situation, I never expected that. My road warrior needs to be a mechanic. My astronaut needs to be a medic. My ranger needs to be a wizard. Can they with their current ability scores? What do they need to do to make it happen? Is there a build that enhances what they already do?

I am surprised, my build is organic and fluid, and the story is reflected in the final character. I still like my B/X games with classes, and those are wonderful, tight, Monopoly-like designs and fun packages. For stories I tell solo, I like systems that give me complete control over my character's past, present, and future.

Subclasses as Primary Classes

As the bards, rangers, illusionists, druids, assassins, and paladins begin adventuring through our B/X games - I wonder if somehow they belong. Not as in get rid of them, but as in, "Were they ever implemented correctly?" I am thinking of this as in adding them in a way that doesn't take away from the central four classes in the game. I know historically these have been staples of fantasy gaming since AD&D, the moment when the basic four classes were all there was and the huge change began at "race as class."

And the door was opened to expanding the game beyond the core four classes.

So the question becomes, why play one of the original classes? A ranger does more than a fighter, flavorfully the ranger is more cool, and all the fighter really has is "better numbers" or "different attack options." When you introduce subclasses into the game, you make the original classes less interesting to play, and all of a sudden you are backporting cool into the original four when they were fine to start with.

Skill Rolls for Subclass Abilities

The old saying "a ranger is a fighter with a bow" comes up. Robin Hood did not have spells or dual-wielding abilities. You could simulate a ranger as a fighter in a game like Basic Fantasy by letting the player make nature-style skill rolls that a ranger would have as a background option and keep the game simple and maintain the strength and role protection of the fighter class.

Basic Fantasy also has that built-in leveled "skill roll" mechanic that makes this easy.

Same with bards, a thief with a musical background - or a mage-bard if your bards are mages. All of a sudden I have two music flavored classes by using bard as a background option instead of creating a standalone bard class that competes with the others. What about music? Let them "do what music does" through skill rolls, charm a crowd, soothe the savage beast, and so on through skill rolls - those don't need to be spells. In the case of the magic bard, well, they are spells and that is how they cast them. The magic bard's music background skill could also be used for any other music related check, and you are done.

Illusionist? That skill roll could be used to create minor illusions, manipulate the ones they create, and see through others. You could do some mechanical stuff within magic user to give them double daily use of illusion spells in a spell slot, and forbid them from scrying and informational style spells. Whatever you want to do in magic user is fine, but keep it in the original class with as few changes as possible. Same thing with ranger, adjust the allowed weapons and armor, and give them a +1 to-hit with ranged weapons and forbid them from wearing metallic armor.

Paladin? I would make paladin a background option of cleric, finally let them use edged weapons, and limit them in another interesting way. Perhaps forbid them from harming like-alignment foes, tithing, and getting constantly sent on missions against evil (or good if anti-paladin). You don't have to weaken or change cleric much in this case, and the base cleric is still a core of the game, while paladin is just a cleric flavor (and retains access to the full spell list). The one thing I never liked about AD&D paladins was that weak spell list. Here? A special type of cleric with some benefits, and some limitations to trade them off.

Let the base classes use their "class skill" for interesting uses too, fighters could identify foes, or know the origin of weapons and armor; thieves have a lot of cool skill rolls just on their own; clerics know rites and religions; and mages know history, spells, and other magic knowledge. Your background determines what your class skill roll covers. A mage-bard would know more about music than general wizard magic, but still know some things.

Parties of Subclasses?

And I am still sticking to the basic four classes, and the core party and play balance is not upset, but I have the options and flavor I always wanted. You get into these groups where you have a bard, ranger, druid, and illusionist and all of a sudden some core abilities the game's balance depends on are missing. Maybe no access to the heals the game expects you to have, or the bard's thief skills are sub-par. Do the additional abilities make up for it or is there a problem here? In AD&D I might say I felt there was a problem of parties of subclasses and things never felt right, or I had to fudge rolls to keep the play balance feeling correct.

I Still Like Them, but I Wonder...

Yes, there is a case to be made for nostalgia and unique class mechanics. Design wise I find those interesting too. But we should not feel beholden to the past or what came before, or feel if a game doesn't have a class and a player wants to play something similar, that we should limit them. With a little hacking and creativity, we can come up with custom class-mods to the original four (or how many ever your game has), and create something unique that the player could have a hand in creating with you.

I just wonder at times how really needed dozens of classes really are. I mean, it is nice to have options, but once you have dozens of almost-similar classes and variants in the game where you are doing numerical trade-offs to keep them feeling different you have lost me. The B/X style classes in Old School Essentials are really cool, and they are an example of what I would say "true" feeling subclasses would have been. The ones in AD&D never really impressed me, they felt like blends with weaker versions of powers other classes already possessed.

But if someone wanted to craft a custom B/X class at my table, I would jump at the opportunity to be creative with them. Rule zero applies to how your group interprets the game and how they design characters. You can change anything, even before you pick up the dice.

Basic Fantasy: 4+4 Races and Classes

During the audio Podcast discussing Basic Fantasy, Chris Gonnerman mentioned his perfect version of a fantasy game was “four races, four classes, and that is it.” Of course, there are plenty of web supplements for the game that add races and classes, but Chris sticks with his original idea that “4+4” is all you need for a perfect fantasy game.

You can see where the inspiration for this comes from, the basic four character roles are covered: fighter, mage, thief, and cleric. No, you do not have infinite choice, as is normal with any modern role-playing game. With a lot of games, such as Pathfinder, you can be a bard, or a druid, a barbarian, or any other fantasy staple. Basic Fantasy supports that too, but elects to keep the core game simple with 4+4.

Infinite Choice is Good?

Is infinite choice desirable? If you run a grocery store, you will quickly figure out that offering customers infinite choice is a path to confusion and lower sales. You really only need so many choices when it comes to buying cornflakes. I mean, really, namebrand or generic is about all the choice I want to make here. With classes in a fantasy game, admittedly having more choice feels like a good thing because you want to have a rich and varied world with many different options for players to find a unique and satisfying role in the world. The same thing goes for races, you would feel, with more options feeling like a richer and more varied fantasy world.

There are times I feel when limiting race and class choices actually produce a more compelling world. I find my creativity is heightened when I have less choices and I have to become creative when making something unique. If all Basic Fantasy has our the 4+4 race and class choices, I have a world where humans, dwarves, elves, and halflings all have to coexist. There can be no other fantasy races beyond possibly monster races, so these four races will have a history together and you will find that you are starting to create a rich background in order to make this limited choice more unique.

There are times when you have infinite choice where if you have a race that fits a custom role you will tend to pigeonhole that race into that role. Let’s say in my world I had a custom race of “bear people” that lived in the North lands and where your stereotypical barbarian tribe race. With my custom bear race I just pigeonhole them into that role. Without the bear race, I will have to take one of the four races that I have available and create a tribe that acts in that role. I just want these people to be big, hairy barbarians so I don’t really need a race of bear people when I could just quickly modify one of the four and everything stays simple. I could get rid of the hairy part and just put a tribe of elves in this role, or leave them hairy and use dwarves. I start having to be creative with the limited choices I have, and yes it really is a flavor question, but it does highlight not having choices and having to make do with your creativity.

The same can be said for classes. In a world with just fighters, thieves, mages, and clerics – the conflicts and interactions between these four views of the world become simple. The mages, of course like magic and the arcane world. Clerics see the world differently, worshiping gods and the powers of the divine. Fighters and thieves fill the roles of law and chaos, respectively.

Less Means More

Without druids, there is no “cult of nature” making the world’s background a little simpler. Without bards, there are no ways of casting magic through song, making arcane science just a little bit simpler. The same can be said for barbarians, which are just angry fighters anyways, so the method in which military conflicts are handled in this world are simpler. You do lose some extremely flavorful classes, such as paladin, so there is a trade-off to limiting classes, especially when a lot of players expect to be able to play characters in these roles.

But there is a point to limiting choices in that the game really only needs to fill the four most important roles when it comes to dungeon exploration: the warrior, the guy who steals things, the healer, and the magic user. The game is about dungeon exploring and filling one of those four roles inside of a dungeon environment. The paladin, while an extremely popular and flavorful class choice, is a hybrid class that fills two of the four roles, and is less desirable when you are trying to give every player at the table a unique role to fill that does not cross over another player’s role. In order for the game to remain at its purest state, you need to make a choice between warrior or healer, and choose to do one of those roles in the game.

When Do You Want Choices?

In a more story-based game, I would say go for it and have lots of custom classes because ultimately the story is more important than putting a player in a predefined and strict role. In a more limited environment, such as a dungeon where you need to make important choices based on limited resources and defined character roles, I understand the design decision behind limiting classes so a player has to work hard at being effective in the role that they chose. A mage cannot fight, and there is no spell blade class, so you need to use magic highly effectively in order to survive in a dangerous environment when you are a mage. Again, this is a limitation, and it is forcing you as a player to become creative within your role to use the tools best to supply to you to overcome challenges and obstacles.

With infinite choice, of course I can settle right into a comfortable role where I can play my paladin, fight all day long, heal myself, and have most of the powers of the cleric while I swing my sword. I do not have to make choices based on if I want to fight more or if I want to do divine magic more with this character in this game. I can have it all, and I do not have to make that choice. This is why there are so many custom classes in games like Pathfinder, the game is trying to cater to a wide audience by supplying infinite choices so a player can come into the game and find a role that is custom crafted to their play style. When you have to make a hard choice about what you want to play, this is admittedly more difficult, and therefore less desirable when you’re trying to make a game that appeals to a wide audience.

Although with newer books, I feel Pathfinder has too many classes. Another day we will discuss that.

The Difficulty of Choice

That said, I do like games with limited choices in that if they provide compelling choices than I am attracted to the difficulty of having to make that choice. If the choices are meaningless, there is less of a reason to play. If any choice is good, I am also less interested. I like having to make a hard decision and live with it and do well within that role.

I also like that the game does support modding it so a player that really, really wants to play a paladin or barred can play one of these classes. It is not the default way of playing, but it is supported because given today’s games you need to support these choices. The game does put limits on you, but is not so strict that it says you absolutely cannot play one of these classes. There is a little wiggle room, and that is more a strength of the system then it is a weakness. I do like thinking in the mode where the original for classes are the primary classes in the world, because of the simplification of player choices, and also the creativity that a referee has to work within in order to create a unique game world.

Thesaurus Classes

Thesaurus Class? Let's define this as a derivative character class from a role-playing game from one of the four base classes that specializes in one function rather than covering a field different from the existing classes in the game. Usually the increase in the specialized field is offset by a reduction in the other abilities of the base class. Examples?

Assassin

Role: A rogue that kills people. Wait. I thought rogues killed people? No, this one kills them even better, plus they specialize in poison. Wait. I thought rogues could use poison? So now my rogue can't be an assassin-for-hire? Well, no, you still can, no one's going to stop you, it's just now there is this class that does it better. So I have to re-roll an assassin now?

Ranger

Role: A fighter that uses bows. Now, some games do rangers right and give them combat pets, dual wielding, and specific nature powers, but many games do not do ranger right and we get a sort of fighter sort of rogue that sort of maybe can use magic powers that feels like a mash -up between three classes. Good rangers are a lifestyle choice. Bad rangers are fighters that can't wear plate and are limited to bows.

Cavalier, Knight, Swordsman, Guardian, Battlemaster, etc

Role: See fighter or paladin. Yes, you can use a thesaurus! Good job game designers, and thank you for making the base fighter class so unappealing. Thank you also for making me a buy a splatbook just to get a power-creep fighter class that makes my original book less valuable now. I absolutely do not need a splatbook knight thesaurus class, if you would have done your job in the base book you would have covered a knight option in fighter. If it is even needed. A knight is a fighter that belongs to an order of...fighters. Seriously. Choice? I don't need choice, I need less choices in class selection that matter more. Not more choices that matter less.

Swashbuckler, Pirate, Corsair, etc

Role: Rouges that live on boats. See also, cavalier, dragonrider, or knight in some games, which are basically fighters that fight from mounts. Since dungeon masters typically do not design dungeons for boats or mounts, these vehicle-limited classes do some things related to their home really well, and then everything else on dry land kinda less well.

Investigator, Brawler, Blacksmith, Sage, Guard, Archaeologist, etc

The old job-as-class qualifies as a thesaurus class, because these are either trade skills you should be able to purchase or just some sort of alternate-world "aren't town guards just fighters" thing. This really applies to classes like investigators and archaeologists, because in an ideal game, I should be able to buy a job specialization in those types of jobs and have a mage-investigator or a rogue-archaeologist and be able to combo a job and a class without all of a sudden having to multi-class and be forced to make the choice "do I want to be less of a mage or less of an investigator" every level. When you design a game, there are the important roles in the game that deserve to be primary classes, and then the everything else stuff that should be job specializations. While some jobs should be classes (depending on your world and story), not every job should be.

Thief-Acrobat, Shield-Fighter, Specialist-Mage, etc

Another thesaurus class exists when game designers give you an option to do one thing really well at the expense of everything else. Aka, the specialist class. It is silly, because really, you should make the base class flexible and able to do a variety of things well to keep thing interesting and give a player more choices during combat. Picking a specialist class limits you to doing one thing really well, and that one thing often becomes the only thing your character does. These appeal to min-maxers, make the base classes less appealing to play (because they are not the best at this one thing anymore), and force you to pick them because you know content will be balanced for thge specialist and not the general class. As a game designer, if you know the ultimate defender is the shield-knight, you will balance all of your game's boss monsters against that class and not the generic fighter. In doing this, you have just put everyone who picks generic fighter at a disadvantage and forced all fighters into the specialty class. A base fighter should be able to pick up a shield and be the best defender in the game.

"Other Games Have Them" Classes

Druid, ranger, paladin, warlock (witch), bard, and a bunch of other classes tend to creep into fantasy gaming because other games have them. This is okay if you put the design effort and time in to make these classes unique, special, and fun classes to play. If you are going to just make a warlock a variant mage and give them a special spell list of spells that wizards can use also I am going to be one pissed-off warlock and say you cut game-design corners and cheated me of a unique and exclusive spell list. You shouldn't add classes that don't belong in your world either, if your world doesn't have paladins, don't feel pressured to put them into your game.

Sword-mage, Holy-fighter, Spell-blade, Divine-mage, etc

Hybrid classes! In games with multi-classing, you don't need classes that  have multi-classing built in. If you can already make the choice of playing a level 5 fighter and a level 5 mage, why do you need a hybrid sword-mage class that is part fighter, part mage? This is not technically a thesaurus class, but you will often see a thesaurus name slapped on these to make them more palatable. Either multi-classing is going to work and be the way you do multi-classing, or you need to ship a complete set of hybrids to fill the roles you have in your game world. It is sad, because you know when the hybrids come out they are usually better than a multi-class kludge solution. Hybrids have some design behind them and typically work better (unless you are exploiting multi-classing because the low level classes have scaling powers and those are really all you need).

The Moral of the Story

Ask anybody involved in MMO design, your base classes matter. Pen-and-paper games typically think they live in a world where they can ship unbalanced designs and multiple classes to chase the holy-grail of 'choice' - but really, less is more. I don't want fifty or sixty classes in the game, I would love eight classes that do what those sixty do equally well. When I go to design a character, I want less choices that matter more. Let me specialize as I level up, but don't make those specializations things that limit me into one role. Good design matters, and doing what everyone did before is not an excuse to abdicate your choices as a game designer.

It is important for referees as well, if all you want to do is play basic Pathfinder or D&D 5 without the splatbooks, say that is what you are doing and don't let the tide of popular opinion force you into playing your game somebody else's way. Realize that splatbook classes are typically power-creep filled affairs to get you to buy a book, but in doing so, you make your original books and classes less desirable. Choice is not always a good thing to chase as a designer, or as a consumer, to reward. It is great if you are trying to sell books, of course, but as a referee or player, it is the inevitable drip-drip-drip of power creep that makes you say, "I hope they clean this all up in the next edition."

Pen-and-Paper Videogaming

Somehow, this all started when we were talking about XP charts.

When you have a unified XP chart, you are saying, "all class' power levels are roughly equivalent!" A level 5 thief should be as powerful as a level 5 fighter or level 5 mage.

Back in the original D&D, the designers knew about the power imbalance of mages and fighters (2,500 and 2,000 xp base), and put them above clerics and thieves (1,500 and 1,200 xp base). The charts were never a linear scale, just because a mage needed 2,500 xp for level two did not mean they advanced twice as slow as a thief all the way up, the difference between thieves and mages was never really more than a level or so of lag behind for the mage (a 14th level thief and a 12th level mage had around the same total xp).

Still, there was a difference.

In 3rd edition, we got the unified XP chart for all classes (and the CR system), and every class advanced at the same rate. Not surprisingly, those pesky power level differences came up, and this triggered an endless balance and rebalance cycle for all editions of the game since. You even see this in Pathfinder Unchained, where they redo three of the classes to make them compare better with the entire set of classes in the game.

"Mages are still the most powerful class in the game!"
"Rogues are weak."
"Why class X why you get all that plus a better to-hit with class Y?"

You hear a lot of this because naturally, a player expects a level five class X should be an equal and balanced choice with a level five class Y. You end up having to do the power and math shuffle on every class, again and again, like D&D 4th Edition's endless and painful errata and changes to classes and items.

If there was a problem with relative power level balance in the old "per class" XP chart system the issue could be easily addressed by just adjusting the charts. Mages still too powerful? Push them out by a thousand points here or there. So a level 9 thief is equivalent in raw power level to a what, a level 6 mage? Okay, that's where the charts should go.

We don't need to balance the class, we just adjust the charts.

The CR System Solution

Power levels were 'evened out' because of the CR system, really, and also to simplify things to avoid having a lot of charts. But note that in old school D&D, you did not all need to be the same level to adventure together, and conceivably, that level 6 mage in a party full of level 9 characters could and will contribute. This "the party needs to be within one level of each other, two max" sort of thing feels like it comes from MMOs and computer games, where it is important to balance things with math to make sure "everyone has a good time."

In the original D&D game, how did you determine CR? Here's how you did it:

"Last time our party of level one characters fought an ogre we got out butts kicked. Let's not do that."

You learned the game. There weren't thousands of creatures so you could weigh difficulty for them all relative to classes and powers. You failed, failed some more, died a lot, and then discovered what worked. You got lucky, and knew how far you could push your luck given what level you were and who was in the party. You had to think.

Try-fail-adjust-learn-succeed? That sounds like what you do in any game when you learn it.

The problem I have with CR encounter balancing is it assumes the dungeon master is a computer that balances content to entertain the players. The DM is there to "entertain" people like a DVD player, put in the disc, do the math, balance the game, and run the script. Press play.

Saying, "nobody likes getting killed," in D&D is like saying "nobody likes losing in Monopoly," and coming up with rules so one loses. Or even behind on money or properties every turn because every player needs to feel relative balance with each other. Yes, Monopoly is a competitive game, and D&D is cooperative, but if you take the learning curve out you take out the part of the game where becoming an experienced player is knowing what a monster does what and how you can fight them at what power level.

Pen-and-Paper as Videogames

Somehow I feel this is part of the progression of D&D towards an entirely story-based game instead of a board game. CR does what? Balances encounters so you can get through them all as a party so you can complete a story at the end of the night. Without CR, you run around the ogre's room in the center of the dungeon defeating rats and spiders while looting what you can, and maybe you never fight the ogre - and you decided if you 'won' based on survival. If there was a goal, it had nothing to do with 'story award xp bonuses' or a series of balanced encounters leading up towards it. If you got the chalice, you got it, and you earned the king's trust - xp and balancing had nothing to do with it.

Then again, the king's trust is a very nice thing to have, and you don't need to put an xp reward on that either.

Healing surges, regenerating resources, encounter powers, and anything that resets the party's power is another step towards a story based game (and also an admission of the inability to balance a resource depletion game, like the classic D&D model of play). You have to "reset" the party for the next "encounter" because you can't balance things in the overall scheme, when really, what resources the player have and want to spend should be up to them. It feels fake, like an MMO where health and mana regenerate before you get to the next room, and the entire game is designed to be low-risk entertainment rather than a challenge of how to spend limited resources dwindling all the time.

Don't get me started on this "go back to town" sort of "one encounter per day" cliche either, That comes from videogames and it assumes the world never changes between visits to the dungeon. The pen-and-paper game as videogame mentality breeds this unrealistic way of thinking.

Less is More is Fun

Sometimes we like games to be smaller in focus with a limited set of content, such as Pathfinder Basic Set, where we can get the feeling of how monster X relates to class Y and power Z. Part of why we love Labyrinth Lord and Basic Fantasy are because these rules are complete, done, and what's in the game is what is it. You can learn them. You know a level X thief is about as powerful as a level Y mage. You know how to defeat an owlbear, and how much power and resources that will take.

When you have thousands never-ending of monsters, feats, spells, classes, and powers, you never get a feeling of system mastery. You are always being hit with a new something, reacting, and never knowing how your power relates to the others before it is replaced and you move onto the next one. In Basic D&D, the fireball is what it is, and it is a unique AoE spell that fits a unique role. We don't have or need seventy variations of the spell. It is a unique puzzle piece to be pulled out when you need a...fireball.

And it becomes a unique resource we can spend, that does not recharge between fights.

That "how many resources it will take" is key. This is what the original D&D was about in the macro for the entire play session, not the micro between encounters. You should be able to run out of resources and 'fail' to achieve your goal, due to luck, normal use, or carelessness. You should decide if you will come back another day, if that is possible, and the next time the dungeon should change (tougher, better defenses, less loot, the chalice is lost, or they clear out) when the party gets back.

Know Your Game

There is a distinct game design here when you realize what is going on, and how every piece works together. Imposing systems like CR and auto-regen resources on what was a limited-resource game throws everything out of whack, and D&D becomes a totally different game. We are seeing a shift from resource management to story based gaming, while still thinking we are managing resources.

If you want a videogame style RPG, that is cool. Know what these look like. If you want a resource-based RPG, know what those look like. If you want to make a pen-and-paper game play more like a videogame, it is helpful to know what you need to do to get that result. If your love is resource-based play, know what rules enhance that experience and play that way.

We live in a time where every publisher tries to make every game appeal to everybody, and it all blurs together. The influence of MMOs and computer games in pen-and-paper gaming is strong, you see a lot of these videogame-inspired concepts in today's games, and they often conflict with how the original game was designed.

SBRPG2 Testing Continues: Powers and Talents

Powers.

Powers are always the tricky part of designing any game, along with the paths these powers take. Anyone can bang out a quickie set of roleplaying rules covering combat and movement, but when it comes to talents and powers, this is where the real design work comes in. You want to provide a sense of progression with both powers and talents, a gradual sense of getting better and more competent. A number of games fail in this regard, or are so stuck to what came before they will never improve.

With D&D3 and Pathfinder, the name of the game is placing powers and unlocks on a Christmas tree called a character class - the same classes that existed way back in D&D1. The class roles are still strictly defined, that choice you made when picking a class at level 1 defines who you are for the most part until level 20. In Pathfinder, this is more pronounced, since it pays to stick with one class. With D&D3, you are supposed to weave and dodge your way up several classes until you find a prestige class you like, and stick with that. They are two different games, but your progression for the most part is predetermined. There are a limited number of options based on the first choice you make.

D&D4 was good when they introduced the second round of multi-classing, you were this interesting mix of two very distinct classes that had strange synergies and power combos. They quickly buried this cool system under a dump truck of errata and add-on books, to the point where designing a character required the online character generator, and you had a shelf full of out of date and worthless books that couldn't be used to play the game. Design-wise, you were still limited by the set of classes you picked, you could synergize in that buid, but if you decided to take your character in a new direction at level 10 you were stuck.

We are trying to take a different spin with SBRPG2. All powers and all talents are open from the start, though your starting stats will help or hurt the choices you make. You are classless, which is a huge change from SBRPG1, but then again, we have a different goal here, this is a different time in history, and we are shooting for a game that provides the ultimate expression of character design and flow as you level up. It is an organic goal, one more suited to exploring power frameworks, making choices, and developing your character as they live through various situations.

The ultimate goal is to reflect your story, your progression, and to let you make choices based on how you feel your character is learning and unlocking powers - without penalizing your progression in other areas. If your mage is fighting and chooses to improve physical toughness and combat ability, you can improve that and put your magical studies on hold for a while as you become a better survivor. If you want to improve social skills through roleplaying, that won't hold you back in other areas, and you can just focus on that exclusively for as long as you would like.

With D&D3.x and its related games, when you get a level, you have to make a choice that punishes your progression in other areas. Picking 5 levels in fighter means you lose 5 levels of progression as a mage. It affects your end-game power incredibly, and a mixed design like a 3/3/3 fighter/mage/thief really suffers in combat power - in no way is that character like a full level 9 anything, and they fall far behind in terms of usefulness to the party. With SBRPG2, we have solved that problem.

Regardless, sorting out powers and design paths takes a long time, and this is something we continue to work on. We are blocking out a system for you to design your own, but keeping things simple at first will allow more people to understand the system, so something like power and power framework design may be left for later to work on. It is a great design, one came through after five years of experimenting, designing, throwing things away,and redesigning a simple system until we had a great base.

That core 'the way things should work' is key here, it is easy to copy another system's progression, but it is unoriginal, and you inherit all of the limitations and flaws of the original. When you set out to do something new, it is always cool, but a very hard road. Finding what the system should do, what it supports, and most importantly, how the system supports the notion of a character story or epic is what we wanted to do here. The idea hit us, and it is more than a simple concept. Thigns have to be carefully worked through and thought of, in order to make the whole greater than sum of its parts.

Design Room: Pathfinder Advanced Race Guide

Hello again! Today we are doing a Design Room breakdown on the Pathfinder Advanced Race Guide. This is not a traditional review, as you can go to the Paizo or Amazon sites and get plenty of those. Instead, we will be breaking this book down from a game design standpoint and discussing related issues with campaign and world design. We will start by covering the basics.

Again, Paizo puts out a beautiful book, a full color 258 page monster of a tome. I will always say, Paizo is the sports team that spends the big bucks, gets the best talent, and they are just a joy to watch deliver. The book is full of new options for existing races, new core races, new alternate races, and a race builder that is the star of the show - more on that later. Art, layout, and content are all playoff quality, as usual.

It is an impressive addition, and very useful in play. I wouldn't say this is an essential book to play with (like the NPC Codex is), as the races in the core rulebook are great and good enough for most every player. If you are a fan of alternate PC races, this book is for you. It really breaks down on you view of fantasy, and how you see the world.

The Creature Cantina

Some people see fantasy as the intersection of the basic D&D races: Humans, Elves, Halflings, and Dwarves. This is your pretty typical Lord of the Rings model for a fantasy world, and it works well no matter what rules system you follow. There could be other races in the world, but there is a distinct deemphasis on their importance in the world. The rule is, if the world can exist without them, they are a minor race.

As an example, compare Dark elves in D&D and Warhammer fantasy. Dark Elves in D&D are a minor race, the world can exist without them. Dark elves in Warhammer are a core part of the world, and they are a major player in everything from battles to Chaos magic. In our D&D world, in most cases, you could do without dark elves a lot easier than you could do without normal elves.

The problem with minor races is that they start to feel like those tack-on latex-mask races that appear weekly in shows like Star Trek, or the mess of races in the Star Wars Creature Cantina. Admittedly, Star Wars is doing a better job nowadays integrating and raising the importance of its core races, with the standardization of the big players in games like the new Star Wars MMO. With a plethora of minor races, they begin to feel like 'guest stars' in the game, and they become a bit more difficult to relate to. It is easy to see the problems a dwarf would have traveling through elven lands, but a kenku or a merman?

The Melting Pot

The Forgotten Realms in D&D3.x was notorious for its subraces, and the Advanced Race Guide gives you subraces in spades. In FR, there were a Baskin Robbins amount of elf flavors, moon elves, star elves, sand elves, sea elves, wood elves, and if I looked hard enough you could probably find stone elves and storm elves. The Advanced Race Guide does not go that far with subtypes, they prefer to differentriate with swappable racial traits, a couple new subtypes, favored class options, and new racial archetypes. It is a good balance of making a race different without creating a new ice cream flavor out of them. Paizo chose to go the 'this is an elf, but with this type of background' style of race design. It is a good choice, and keeps elves as a whole able to relate to each other better.

In a game design sense, you need to be careful of creating too many racial subtypes. You have to balance the fantasy trope of 'oh, there is a cool new race that lives here' with 'oh boy, another derivative flavor of the week race - enough already.' Too many racial subtypes and all of a sudden they are not special, and the original race becomes plain and boring. In the Forgotten Realms, who wanted to play a normal vanilla elf, when there were so many cool subtypes to choose from? Too much of a good thing is a problem.

The Drow in a Human's World

We bring up the specter of Drizzt Do'Urden here, and a PC choosing a race that obviously has problems even walking in the normal LotR style world. Admittedly, D&D4 does a good job with this, with dragonmen, tieflings, and even minotaurs being normal members of society. This is a reason why D&D4 felt so strange to many people, it adopted the Star Wars mixing pot model, and elevated minor races to major players. Nerrath was a fun mixing pot, where a half-giant could be the king, with a tiefling paladin and dragonman court mage working side by side.

With a normal world with the major four races, the drow PC all of a sudden doesn't fit in. This goes the same for aasimars, cat people, goblins, and even half-orcs and the like. I have been in a couple games where choosing a half-orc meant you were ostracized from the group, and you did not get as much play or RP time. It takes a skilled referee to incorporate race choices to a game, or be forward enough to tell players to stick to a subset of races when designing characters. It's okay if you want to do this, and actually helpful - if your vision of the world does not include a player's race choice, you will marginalize that PC subconsciously.

The Far Outs

"But I want to play a gray alien in your 1920's Gangsters game!" Another issue that comes up is the player that wants to play something so far out there it is difficult for them to even relate to the world. Two things can happen: either they become an ignored third wheel in the group, or the entire game centers around them and their wacky misadventures in a world that doesn't accept them. Either way, it's not a good thing. We have had this happen a couple times in our games, and a race guide gives players seeking this sort of attention a lot of ammo to use. I will be frank, I don't like it when race choice becomes a popularity contest. I guess you have to bring it up, since the selection of character race in a carefully crafted world is an important choice, and it can be used to disrupt a game.

There are good sides to 'far out' race selections, otherwise, we wouldn't have the Chewbaccas of the world, and everything would be bog-standard. It depends a lot on the group, theme of the game, and the game world. There is no better answer to talk it out beforehand, before anyone gets set on a particular choice. As a player, you need to feel out what is acceptable, bounce character ideas off the referee, and make sure other players in the group are thinking along the same lines. Selecting a far out choice can work, and not everyone in the group can be one as well.

No LotR Races?

Another fascinating use of the book comes with the Race Builder chapter, and creating campaign worlds. Here is a cool exercise, create a game world using five races. None can be one of the standard four (human, dwarf, elf, or halfling), and one race must play the bad guy. Now try to come up with a story for this world. It is a fun exercise, and it gets you out of Golarion for a while. You could come up with a world full of gnolls, kenku, cat-people, and frog-people - with demonic yeti-men as the enemies. This type of world design forces players out of their comfort zones, and can create a memorable short campaign full of new worlds, savage enemies, and plenty of pulp excitement. It is a favorite game of mine, and a model I used for my interpretation of Golarion's Jade Regent expansion.

My Jade Regent - Races of the Zodiac

To shake up MY Golarion, I reinterpreted the Jade Regent expansion using the animals of the Chinese Zodiac. I used the Advanced Race Guide to design each race, and thrust the players into a savage land where humans are the deposed rulers of the mighty Empire of the Zodiac (the Empress). The land has the following races:

• Ratmen - evil aligned until the tide turned
• Minotaurs (Ox)
• Tigermen - good aligned and used as slaves
• Rabbitkin - neutral
• Dragonmen - initially evil, were turned to good
• Yuan-Ti (snake) - evil
• Horsemen - neutral leaning good
• Goatmen - evil
• Intelligent Monkeys - good, and a fun one to play
• Kenku (rooster) - evil initially
• Wolfmen (dog) - neutral, turned to good
• Pigmen - evil

Granted, that is a lot of races, but not all of them were allied on one side. Some of them were demon-aligned, others persecuted, and others tried to remain neutral. A couple other races made their way in as bad guys, such as demonmen, ravenmen, ghost people (haunts), and a couple other evil-aligned critters. It was a fun game that threw characters out of their element, and forced them to roleplay and think about the nature of the race they dealt with. The goal was to unite the Zodiac's races and put the Empress back on the throne. This game is still going on since it is quite epic and sweeping.

I admit, it also seemed kind of like furry-friendly roleplaying; but hey, it was and still is cool, even if it seems slightly anthropomorphic. This is a great example of using the Advanced Race guide to create a campaign world, or spruce up a part of it you felt was lacking in variety and excitement. I could have done this with less races, but this is the Zodiac, so it was a cool metaphor to use for the conflict.

Overall

The Advanced Race Guide is indispensable for the creative GM world builder. It also allows you to get out of Golarion for a while, and create interesting one-shot worlds with an eclectic mix of races that are out of the ordinary. Sometimes, you need to mix things up and shake up perceptions. For players, this is primarily an options book for character creation, with a big 'check with your group' string attached. Where it shines are in building areas of the world or entirely new ones, and it breaks up the standard collection of fantasy races with a bunch of new kids on the block. Highly recommended for referees, a good buy for players looking for something different.

Design Room: Pathfinder NPC Codex

Serious games need serious supplements, and today we will be doing a design tear down of Pathfinder's NPC Codex. Note that this is not a normal review, there are plenty of those on Amazon and Paizo's site. What we will be doing today is breaking down a game or rulebook on design terms, and bringing up issues associated with game design and theory.

General
We are looking at a hefty 320 page book, with over 300 NPCs, the Pathfinder iconics statted out at various levels, animal companions, and a lot more. It's a nice book, lavishly illustrated, with a ton of useful info. I am more happy with this book than the Equipment Guide, but then again, I like character books, since they give me personalities to fill the world with (in the design and theme of the world's creators).

The NPCs have level-appropriate gear, and this is folded into the stats, which is nice, and makes the NPCs 'pull of the shelf' and useable. Only classes from the core rulebook are included, which is good, since if all you play with is core, you don't have things you can't use. This also opens up a Codex 2 and 3, with expansion book classes, which honestly, I wouldn't mind. From a design standpoint, including only core classes and races is fine with me, since it creates no dependencies on other books, and people not interested in ninjas and gunslingers don't have stuff they can't use. My bookshelf and backpack may complain, but hey, that's why they sell PDFs.

The NPCs are designed with a specific race for each, but it not too hard to swap those out with another race, different gear, or new feats and powers. If you play like we like to, and drop PCs into a 1-20 world, this book will be a very valuable addition to your Pathfinder arsenal of referee tools. In most cases, a nice piece of art is given, along with a sample character write-up of a personality in the world. This is a very nice touch, and I love to see the creativity in these designs and backgrounds. This is almost the next best thing to getting 300 new iconic characters, and plenty of drop-in personalities for your campaign words. Top notch, and thank you Paizo.

Tactics
Another big plus to this book is they give sample tactics for each NPC in combat. Monster tactics started way back in D&D2, when monster complexity started to creep up, and the monster manuals started adding tactics sections in the monster stat blocks. This continued in D&D3, and started to include things like feats, special powers, resistances, and a bunch of other stuff. Monster complexity in both D&D3.5/PF and D&D4 is up there, and referees need to pay attention to these blocks, or the monster (as designed) fizzles out in combat when it should have been special and memorable.

I am mixed about needing tactics blocks in games. In one case, I am happy to have them. In another, I feel it is a symptom of a complex game where someone needs to lay out things that should be readily apparent to those using the monsters. It is almost as if referees need 'monster training' and the tactics block is a way for that to happen. In many games, and most OGL old-school games, they don't need this, and what monsters can do is simple and apparent. Again, Pathfinder is a complex game, and this help is appreciated. Your taste and complexity tolerance may vary, but the goods outweigh the bads here.

Complexity
I can't review an NPC book without making a comment on character complexity. The sheer number of options, gear, builds, and equipment available in Pathfinder, along with the long list of skills and feats, makes higher-level characters quite complex. This comes with the territory, if you play Pathfinder, you are looking for that complexity, so it isn't a bad thing. Since OGL alternatives exist with simpler characters, you can play those. Pathfinder is a cleaned-up 3.5E, so the characters can grow to be quite large in terms of character sheets and power blocks. This leads to large entries in the book, which can slow down reference during play. Myself, I prefer simple characters and powers without the need to reference secondary books, but the NPC Codex does a good job of trying to make the characters easy to play, which is a plus.

Another design thought. The game ends up needing a book like this just to give referees and idea of power level of all the characters in the game. This is an important point - up until now, it was hard to judge power level without a computer program to generate NPCs or NPCs from modules or supplements. This book is invaluable for designing adventures and doing dry runs of combats, since pretty well designed standard templates exist across many character levels. Some community-created standards existed (if you know where to look), but none to this level of completeness and coverage.

Build Optimization
I should note that some of the more experienced character designers are starting to critique some of the builds. It is understandable, but I am of the feeling that not every build needs to be hyper-optimized. If you wanted to, you could tweak them yourself, swap ability scores, or use your favorite mix-max adjustments. For most people, I feel that the scores given are good enough, and reflect average NPCs, not hyper-optimized ones. In fact, I'd prefer average, and make the tweaks myself.

Ideas
The NPC Codex is just brimming with ideas. Do not discount this! NPC after NPC, the designers chose to include a wide variety of 'slices of life' throughout the book, giving you infernal champions, cave stalkers, and tons of other fun ideas for opponents, cultures, locations, and parts of the Golarion game world. You can crack the book open, find a NPC, and design an adventure just around the ideas presented there. They give a good overview of many different specific character types, and fit these into the world quite skillfully. Without these, the book would have less value, since page after page of bland character stats has been done before, and frankly any computer can do this. Taking the world and meshing it with character designs, along with a little bit of color and background, makes this a greatly useful book.

Comparisons With D&D4

Ben, "I felt a great disturbance, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in anger. I fear something terrible has happened."
Luke, "What happened, Wizards release another NPC guide for the Realms?"

But seriously, this is a major difference between Pathfinder and D&D4 - how the games treat NPCs. In D&D4, most NPCs are really supposed to be designed as monsters with the standard monster stat-block, 'hero' classes do not exist outside of the PCs and a select few NPCs. In Pathfinder, everyone follows the same rules, and monsters are statted realistically. You can even take a bobcat, make it semi-intelligent, and give it a couple levels of ranger if you want. You just need to do the math (D&D4 wins on simplicity of monster design).

Like Ben and Luke mention, there seems to be an outright hostility to powerful NPCs in D&D4 and all the official D&D campaign worlds (compared to previous editions). We are talking design here, and this is an important point. D&D4 is designed to encourage that the PCs are the only major heroes in the world, and everything else is a monster class. Later modules and adventures may contradict this, but the flavor of the original books is pretty clear. This even extends into D&D4's world sourcebooks, where it is very hard to find stat blocks for powerful friendly NPCs. A decision was likely made that 'powerful friendly NPCs ruin the experience' so they are discouraged and even written away in the guides. In D&D4, the PCs are the heroes - and the game is designed around that.

Is this a good thing, design wise? Possibly, since there was a supposed sentiment that the 'Realms was unfun to play in' because of powerful NPCs. Eliminating all powerful friendly NPCs from your source material is one way to fix this, and put the emphasis back on the PCs. It seems a bit heavy handed to me though, and not really the way I like to play. I like a world full of powerful good, neutral, and hostile NPCs - with no one possessing plot immunity. Powerful NPCs can fall, be replaced, or disappear like anyone else - a giant soap opera of characters interacting, coming, and going as the referee desires.

Pathfinder is different - the world is supposed to be filled with powerful NPCs, since that is how the world works. How many of them are 'friendly' and how active they are are up to you, having the level 20 paladin "Horace the Honorable" ride in and save the day every time for the PCs is really bad refereeing, and not really a design failure. D&D4's elimination of powerful allies in the game world is a design solution to a supposedly common refereeing mistake. Again, the design of Pathfinder is different, and continues the D&D3.5 treatment of NPCs - everyone is equal, and the referee is responsible for balance and smart use of them. I like D&D4's focus on the heroes, but I don't really like it forced in the game material I buy - this is personal preference that crosses over into the design realm.

Quality
Paizo is like the pro-sports team that pays big money, and consistently gets the great players who make incredible plays. The quality level in this book puts many games to shame, with full color pages, glorious artwork, interesting writing and flavor, and a sharp attention to detail. This high quality level can take an average release, such as the Equipment Guide, and knock it into the win column, just through presentation and detail alone. The NPC Codex is an example of a great release knocked into the stratosphere by quality and attention to detail.

This is another important design consideration - quality matters. Just one bad piece of art can sink your product (ask us), and maintaining a 100% devotion to quality in art, text, and content really pays off. If you have a choice between releasing your game now, or spending that extra time polishing art, text, rules, and layout - spend the extra time. You will be on the shelf next to these guys, and you literally want to bring your best game.

Overall
I like the NPC Codex, and design-wise, it is a solid book that I wish would have came out earlier. The way we play, this is an essential book. Highly recommended if you play Pathfinder, and even worth a look if you don't. You could pull ideas for hundreds of NPCs, enemies, and other characters from this book - and even possibly a new PC or two. This is a solid design, with a number of extra design elements hidden in the mix to make the book a lot more useful and fun. You can buy a PDF too to save you shelf space, and give your iPad or Android tablet a workout, and your shelf a respite. Overall, 5 out of 5 stars.

Character Design as Choices

George and I had a great talk about character design opening up a series of choices during play. In a way, character design lays out the choices the player will make later in the game. Is my character strong? Do I envision my character doing a lot of strong things? Does my character know magic, and if so, what type? Design guides later choice.

Now let's look at less-optimal character design. These are choices you make during development that have no effect on the game later. A good example is buying the Craft (baskets) skill in a sci-fi game where basket weaving plays no part in the game later. Bad choices can be player afflicted, or they can come from the rules by design. Consider a derived character statistic that plays little or no role in the game, maybe it is a saving throw versus a particular class of magic item (rods), or a character statistic that is calculated but has an esoteric or specific use (the original Top Secret had Evasion and Deception statistics that were never described how they were used).

Another thing to watch out for is pigeon-holing a character in design, which would be like making a technician in the Original d20 Star Wars rules. Of course, your character was useful, but many players did not like being the character who was forced to stay behind and fix the starship while everybody else went out to explore the alien world. It's an extreme example, but it highlights a choice made in character design that puts your character in a disadvantageous position when it comes to play-time. This is a tricky subject, since you need to have a feel for the game's theme, how good the referee is at including fringe builds, and what the typical adventure is for the group.

In most pen-and-paper games, you can never go wrong with a combat-oriented class, but that is often the lowest common denominator in RPGs. If you think of more cerebral role-playing, like old-school Star Trek or even horror-based Call of Cthulhu, you can build characters out of the combat-trap. In the end it comes down to player choice and what's easiest for the group to support. If combat is the challenge, you will get more combat-geared characters. If the game and the group feel other non-combat play is valid, you will see build and adventure support for less traditional builds. When you think of 'choice' with character builds, you often have to consider the environment those choices are made in.

A key tactic to preventing pigeon-holing and meaningless choice is to tightly link character design to the world's theme. If you are playing intergalactic space pirates, focus the character designs on roles that would be active participants in the game world. Of course, space pirates have mechanics and cooks, but those classes are not central to the 'space pirate' theme you want for your game. You want classes that are out there, piloting ships, leading boarding actions, stealing cargo, and being a space rogue in the game world. Active roles beat passive roles - especially when playing with a group.

An interesting contrast are games like Pathfinder and D&D, where the referee needs to allow players to create 'adventurers' from any class printed in the books. Many times this turns out to be a challenge, as the referee is trying to figure out what a forest druid, inner-city thief, and paladin of the sanctuary are doing together. The theme of D&D type worlds is dungeons and treasure seeking, so many times these games assume a broad 'adventurer class' exists in the game world, which I have always felt is a little artificial and forced. I prefer my adventurers to be forced into being a hero, it inherently is more heroic and appealing, at least to me.

Think about motivations for creating characters, how things fit together, and the theme of your world. As an exercise, try designing a group of D&D characters who belong together, united by a single theme or purpose. Design should drive choice, and also focus on the fun.

Sand Houses and Class Design Documents

There is a trend with certain MMO games to 'change everything' every once and a while in order to shake things up. Specifically, class builds is what I am thinking of here, and in particular, the mage class in the new World of Warcraft expansion. The class does not play as it used to, with most area-of-effect powers gone, crowd control very limited, and a focus on player-versus-player builds and options. It probably makes sense given a renewed push for PvP combat, and the game has seen this sort of massive change to classes with every major patch.

It brings up an interesting point, how much can you keep changing things? Players expect things to work a certain way, and when that is taken away, it is a negative experience. Do this too much, and players lose interest. In many pen-and-paper games, the concept of the core classes and what they did remained the same. It took D&D4 to do any major rethink work on class roles, and this was mainly in response to the MMO world. For the most part, the core roles and abilities are what players expect to see, and you see a return to this in D&D5.

A strong class design lays out goals, and designs powers and abilities to meet those goals. If you were to define two types of mages, say a fire mage and an ice mage, you would do well to create a design document for the two of them, and clearly lay out what they can do, and what they excel at.

In our sample fire mage, let us say fire mages are experts at area-of-effect attacks and damage-over-time spells - fireballs and ignite type effects. A design document for ice mages could emphasize single-target damage abilities, blizzards, and the cold-as-slow effect. You should probably go into great detail about the specific roles of each, and make each class a solid choice in the design document. You need to answer the question, "What can this class do?" You also need to answer, "Is this class a unique and satisfying choice?"

With your design documents, you can design your classes with the rules. Keeping the concept apart from the rules is key here, if your rules change or you need to balance things, you don't have to change the concept. Also, the idea players have of the class in their heads will most likely match the design document, rather than the rules, so you can tweak things without the fear of totally changing everything for players who like the class. The goal in structured class design is to lay out the big ideas first, and then do the fiddly rules implementations later.

MMOs sometimes change things to create controversy, and keep players interested. If the class roles in an MMO were to ever settle down, people could get bored and leave. Some MMOs are more prone to this 'class churn' than others, just because of the people that run them, and their philosophy on how they keep players interested. Some MMOs have kept pretty the same over the years in regards to class roles, and others have changed everything a couple times a year. It is all the study of marketing, keeping customers interested, and making the 'store' seem fresh and exciting. A lot of these theories trickle down into MMOs, and as a result, pen-and-paper games. They don't work all the time, and many times, how pen-and-paper games work is a totally different world than MMOs.

The Multi-Class is Half Full

Let’s dive in and examine D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder a little closer from a design perspective, focusing on character builds - specifically classes and multi-classing. Despite their common origin, they are very different games in the way they handle character design, and it is interesting from a game design perspective to examine. The question we need to answer is: what do you need to do to build a good character?

Let’s stop a moment and examine the core design concept behind D&D 3.5. The game was designed by veteran designers who worked on the Magic: The Gathering game, and that is a huge influence in the character build concept in the game. In Magic, you build your deck out of a variety of collectible cards. Players who do well typically have the best cards and piece them together in a deck full of tricks and power-plays. To do well, you need to understand how the game works, what cards to put in your deck, and what ‘build’ you want your deck to have.

How does this apply to D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder? If you look at character builds like card decks, you see some interesting design concepts in each game.

The Multi-Class is Half Full: In D&D 3.5, multi-classing is the path to success. Players are expected to combine classes, and build their way into ‘prestige classes’ built into the game. Even if you don’t multi-class, you still have a variety of choices to build your character with. Still, the most powerful builds in the game are class combinations. There is an issue with magic-using classes being very powerful compared with martial classes, but in practice, some of the best combos in the game lie in creating a ‘killer build’ out of the classes and powers they give you. Classes tend to be simpler, and you pick and choose as you level up.

The Multi-Class is Half Empty: Pathfinder takes a different tack, and encourages taking a single class all the way to 20th level. Each class is loaded with special abilities gained as you progress levels, and it pays to stick with something. There are prestige classes in the game, but they are more for world-flavor than character building. Due to the game’s 3.5 heritage, there are some good class combinations, but the intent of the design is to create ‘rich classes’ with lots of choice within a single class.

This is an interesting difference, and one to keep in mind when playing either game. Where D&D 3.5 character design tends to be more like do-it-yourself legos, Pathfinder tends to be more like preset action figures. To do well in D&D 3.5, you have to know the rules and how character builds interact with them; in Pathfinder, a lot of that is done for you, and the focus shifts more towards the world and story.

Where does SBRPG sit? In this analogy, we are more like an action-figure construction set. You can build anything you can dream of, but once set, you focus on improving your powers and abilities within that framework. Like Pathfinder, there is less of a focus on builds as you level up, and more on the story and world.

Class Design: Superspy Game II

Let's continue our superspy game OGL-based class design. Remember last time, we were stuck with the problem of what to do with our Technician and Investigator classes. Our Assassin (combat aligned) and Con Man (role playing aligned) classes were fine. Here are the problems with each:

Investigator: This class feels like it would be boring to play for many players, being the guy who looks for clues, cracks codes, and searches through documents. In a more action-oriented game, who would want to play a class relegated to paperwork?

Technician: At least the Investigator gets to do their paperwork during play, but the technician gets to setup gear, crack computer codes, defeat security systems, and fix vehicles. Most of these activities are one time affairs, or even worse, done off-stage, "Okay, while Mike sets up the listening gear, we get to go to the party and talk with the ambassador...." Picking this class means you get to work on the gear, while the other players get to do the fun stuff.

Again, some players may love these activities, and if you write rules well for these, they may be perfectly fine classes. But, we are working in a more simple action-oriented game like Basic D&D - but with spies. We need to focus the classes on action and adventure, and make every choice a fun one. Let's pivot the class designs as follows:

I will propose merging the two classes into a Specialist class, a master of using spy gear to obtain information. Since many missions rely on gathering info, or keeping that info from dropping into the wrong hands, the specialist becomes a key person who gets to use the cool listening devices, pick locks, breaks the codes, and notices the hidden laser alarm system. The focus goes from passive (search and fix) to active (use gear to do cool stuff), and cleans up the number of classes to three.

This is only one way to design classes for a game world, and your ideas could go along a totally different take on things. It is important to think of the "fun" for each class, and even bring in things like combat modifiers. There is a port of the DnD 3.5 rules system that attempts to do a modern rules set, and it sticks to the source material too closely. Paramedics in this system are based off of clerics, and are the second best fighters in the game. It's an odd choice, and it shows a little too much reliance on the original design, rather than starting fresh and coming up with things that work and are fun.

Class Design: Superspy Game I

Class design is one area we are very familiar with, having written it into SBRPG. I am reading a lot of OGR old-school type games based off the OGL, and many of them use the old 3d6 method and strict character class templates, even for modern games such as sci-fi and superspies. It is an interesting choice, and I would like to focus on class design, specifically OGL d20 style class design in these games.

Let's take a spy game, and rig this along d20 style OGL concepts. We could say we need an assassin, investigator, and possibly a thief class in our spy game. If we split the thief into a con artist and technician class, we would have a cool "team of agents" design, which is good for group-based play. So our classes are:

• Assassin
• Investigator
• Con Artist
• Technician

Interesting. Let's block out the assassin design first. Obviously, this class deals in combat the most, so lets give the class the best attack modifiers. We have an instant problem now, the assassin is the most attractive character in the game to combat-oriented players. In some groups, combat determines success, so this class will naturally be the best at the exciting and adventurous aspects of the game. I say let's do this, in our game, let's flatten the combat modifiers, and make every class the same at fighting. Let's assume this is dangerous work, and let every agent get training in fighting. So attack modifiers will be the same for every class.

Now what do we do with the assassin? Let's give this class specialized methods of attack, experience with poisons and traps, and a cool stealth ability. Take the generic "he's a fighter" thought out of the class, and design the class to play how we would like it to play. Fill up the class' toolbox with cool and interesting choices to give the players options and cool things to do.

With the Con Artist, not much is needed beyond blocking the powers out and doing a good job. This class is extremely fun, highly-role playing, and something everyone will want to play. If they are equally good at combat as they are sneaking around, doing the swindle, and pilfering goods, you won't have much trouble with them at all.

We have two boring choices, Investigator and Technician. There was a fun design discussion around the original Star Wars d20 game, where players did not like playing the techie or pilot classes in that game. The pilot could not contribute on foot, and the techie's job was to fix the starship in the background while everyone else explored the planet. I can see complaints about the Investigator being 'he just looks for clues' and the Technician as 'he just sets up the spy gear.'

So maybe these two classes need to pivot, and we should shift them to something more engaging. Or maybe they are fine, depending on your players. This is one of the tough parts about designing classes for a wide group of players, you have to start making assumptions and generalizing those to a more popular audience. With our d20 example, we need to go down this route. In SBRPG, you design the classes at play time, so if all you need is Investigators and Techies in your game, that's all you design, and your players are happy.

We will get to our Investigator and Technican class in a later post, and find out what would make them fun in our sample design in a later post. In the meantime, how would you pivot these two classes to make them fun?