Keeping things level

In my earlier post I talked about this concept called ‘RPG elements’ and how it wasn't really that prevalent across Rpgs, especially the Trpgs where these games are supposed to be inspired by. Last time I focused exclusively on classes, showing them as neither good nor bad, but a choice designers need to make for their system. However, once you get into play you start to deal with a new set of problems. RPG elements are also defined with the idea of getting gear and getting levels and upgrading your character with new abilities. Basically, it's character advancement.

Most players are familiar with character advancement in terms of levels. You grind exp until you get a new level, right? Well no, just like how many Trpgs don't have classes, many don't have levels or exp. Often levels tends to go along with classes. But let's get to the good stuff… how do you advance characters without levels? With loot of course!

Oh and yes, many games eschew loot as well. Players do not track money and pinch pennies, as that can be tedious and a waste of time. Commonly loot is abstracted as a skill or a stat. Sometimes loot itself is entirely inconsequential to the game itself. However, the results are the same; economics is removed as a way for advancement. So now we are back to the original problem. How do you advance characters? How do you show players getting better?

Could you just, like, not?

Well the easiest answer is the laziest. Just don't advance characters. While that is actually pretty lazy, it's not as bad as it sounds. Actually if you are playing a one shot adventure or a short game inspired by a song about trying not to be killed by a ex-disney actor who goes full hannibal lecter in the middle of the woods; well you don't really need character advancement.

Often many games deal with advancement in this way in spirit. Which is a flattering way of saying that lots of games handwave it. A very small amount of books really devote a lot of time or pages to advancement and understanding how that impacts the game; lots of that work is left up to the GM. The concept of a monster manual or encounters with levels themselves likewise isn’t very common.

It's a lot of work to determine monsters and how much damage they deal, and if they are right for the characters to face to create an interesting challenge (and if you characters can even hit those monsters… oh and that exploding dice mechanic isn't going to help you calculate those numbers). There is also the likelihood that the characters create a dynamic that is unique to the party and the monsters that you are likely to face, even if balanced for their level, can be overcome without challenge due to luck or clever thinking. In a way it's kind of a waste to determine or even guess at what players can realistically face... right?

Advancing Forward

The amount of complexity that advancements adds can make it an unattractive mechanic to game designers. But there are many simple ways of performing advancement; often this is tied to character creation or some sort of additional extension to it.

Most point buy systems allow for characters to advance by gaining additional points to invest. This typically leads to better characters and helps players patch over rough spots of their character. But this generally creates a system that makes it easy for a character to specialize at character creation and get fairly powerful early on (basically they just min/max their stats). You tend to end up with a dynamic that reinforces characters specializing their investment. Being a jack of all trades tends to seem like it's not a very useful character path.

Burning Wheel uses a system where you are required to succeed and fail at using a skill to eventually advance it. This is similar to many Crpgs where players advance skills by using them more often (Skyrim is a recent and popular example). However it's really hard to keep track of every time you use your skill (which is why the popular example is a videogame that does that for you).

There is also a social dynamics concern to this whole mess. Unless you are D&D or GURPS or maybe Vampires or Shadowrun, the majority of your players will play once and be done. Nobody is going to play your Regan-era-post-apocalyptic-nuns-on-motorcycles-trpg more than once or maybe twice. Playing Trpgs is an interesting scenario, most players may not play long enough to advance or they may not keep playing because advancement is bad. All you can do is hedge your bets and do work that maybe nobody will see.

How D&D does it

So if some systems can get it to work, how do they do it? Why does D&D advancement even work? Well, it's a combination of how levels work in conjunction with monsters and challenges. Certain set statistics (HP, skill cap/proficiency, saves, base attack bonus) advance with the character’s level. This ends up meaning that lower level characters will generate lower results to rolls, and higher level characters generate higher results. That sounds really dumb and obvious but it has massive ramifications. It means there are average results I can expect form a 1st level character and a 6th level character, 9th level character ect. That small amount of predictability means I can design a monster with comparable rolls and have a reasonable chance of getting a good encounter to happen. I can have things like ‘Challenge Rating’ for traps and monsters and get reasonable results when I pit them against my players.

Now this isn't to say that you can't work this out for other level-less systems before hand, but there is another side effect of levels; it creates a baseline for players. Players now know what stats are good and if they are above or below the average that they should be for that level. This baseline helps players figure out if they are good at something or just ok at it or at what ‘level’ they can operate at and expect to accomplish. D&D creates expectations and adds additional predictability to what was once the realm of guesswork and fudging numbers.

Oh and as far as loot and gold goes… well.. It's kinda like experience but it's for upgrading your gear. There is a reason why a lot of systems eschew loot, its just another redundant way of advancement (sort of).

What does this mean?

Well there are a lot of things to think about when it comes to advancement and it certainly doesn't mean that levels or additional skill points or no advancement at all is the way to go. However what it does help with is showing the strengths of each system. It means there is no perfect system until you determine what the rpg is going for and how it should be used.

What this certainly means though is that this idea that you should have classes and levels or only have a skill based system or have no advancement is wrong. No dogmatic adherence to any of these is required for a game to be a proper rpg.

It’s also important to remember that a lot of rpgs can come from many other sources. Mechanics are certainly not limited to d&d and GURPS and if you are willing to dig around in source material or borrow from other Trpgs you can find a lot more interesting systems out there.

In a way I'm saying you have permission to do whatever is correct for your game with the caveat that you should be aware of they common systems used and why. Make the choices about advancement for good reasons. 

RPG Elements (Class Struggle)

Look at all the rpg elements!

Keeping it Classy

One of the standard tropes of rpgs is having classes. The player roles and expectations are defined by them choosing between Bard or Barbarian. The term ‘rpg-elements’ is basically defined in part as including of this structure and nobody is going to argue that classes are not an 'rpg element', right? (hint: wrong) The observant player of Trpgs will realize that classes are hardly umbiquous.

As a matter of fact, D&D and its d20 system is kinda odd among most Trpgs for including this structure. Several Trpgs include don't have classes, or anything resembling them. The largest d20 competitor, GURPS, is generally class-less. Many other popular and not so popular games forgo classes as well, Traveler, Shadowrun, and the Storyteller system all are class-less.

This probably isn’t too strange to a lot of Crpg players out there. Many Crpgs also are class-less and work just fine without them. In a Tprg, it is not always the case and they squarely start to bring into question what these ‘rpg elements’ are really talking about (hint: it's D&D elements).

Some games thrive without classes.

Class-holes

So why do so many rpgs not have classes? Well, it probably has to deal with the difficulty of including them, namely game balance, roleplaying or design. Most of the time the inclusion or exclusion of classes boils down to one of those three things.

Most players want to play a game that feels balanced. Basically they want to feel like their actions matter and that they are an important member to the team. They want to contribute something. But if you have multiple classes a culture tends to develop around which classes are powerful and which ones are not. It's tempting and sometimes easier to just have only one way to make characters. The results of the character and their relative effectiveness is up to the player’s choices alone.

Many players object to classes. Often players have a particular character they want to play, and the system may not have a class for it. Also classes are often criticized as being ‘unrealistic’. In the real world there is no easy way to categorize all people into a distinct set of classes. Many systems start out with a design goal of being class-less to let players have a more realistic feel and better express themselves as characters. It gives maximum control to players to make the character they want to roleplay. (although the results of this are honestly dubious). It gives players freedom.

Designing classes is also pretty hard. You have to know what roles people are going to want to play in your system and what you want to allow it. And then again you may realize that having classes doesn't quite work for the type of game you are making. The design of the game may assume people aren’t in classes and have overlapping abilities. The game itself may better support its themes if players can make any type of character they want. This is particularly good if you want players to be able to form a hybrid of different play styles, like stealth and magic, or combat and charisma. When a designer is faced with a question of doing more work and getting dubious results, its much easier to just give control to the players.

In a way classes add more stuff to design and test, and the game might be better without classes. There is really no reason to have classes if they hinder role playing, make balancing the game harder and work against your game as a whole.Just give control to the players, it's their game, let them do what they want. What could possibly go wrong?

Quick, everyone hero pose!

Class act

But classes have some advantages, and there is a good reason why they are so prevalent in some popular systems. D20 didn't become popular despite its use of classes, it might have done so because of it. In most cases, classes have simpler character generation, compress information, and prevent a lot of problems that class-less systems have to deal with.

Making characters in an rpg can be one of the most difficult and more jarring experiences especially compared to its normal flow of play. The inclusion of classes helps to generate a large amount of the statistical data relatively quickly. Often it also adds inclusion of item information for characters as well. All this information would have to generated through rules and rolls on tables and sometimes without input of the player. Many class-less Tpgs (such as Traveller and Tenra Bansho Zero and to an extent Dark Heresy or Mutant Chronicles), have some form of ‘class’ during character creation only for generating stats. Classes make characters fast and increase relevant player choice. If you want in D&D if you want to fight stuff you can be a barbarian or a fighter and a lot of your character generation is already done.

*Dark Heresy technically has ‘classes’ called roles but they only influence skill, talents, and a single special bonus ability. Mutant chronicles seems to be in a similar boat.

Classes not only increase the speed in character creation, but also the speed of playing your character. Having the class of ‘fighter’ or ‘sorcerer’ already has packed in some information about what the character is good at and what their shortcomings will be. Class-less rpgs have a problem with figuring out what your character should be doing. Often it's hard to tell if you are really good at something, or just kinda ok at it. A class also helps to guide role-playing and inform people about what sort of characters best fit in the narrative of the rpg. There is a reason why you can't play a farmer or a blacksmith in D&D, because those aren’t the kind people who go into dungeons and do adventuring stuff. Classes help set the scope of what an adventure will likely turn into. Dungeons and Dragons always ends up in a dungeon or fighting or dragon and the only exception is when you are doing both.

Probably the biggest reason for classes is that they solve a lot of big issues with class-less systems. You can suffer through long character creation and you’ll always have at least an idea of what your character can do. However when you are in character creation with a class-less system you basically have the ability to make a character that can't function very well in the current party or any party. You can end up making a character that is like a farmer or blacksmith in D&D; technically useful and useless in practice. The way this problem typically manifests is during a player's first experience with the system. Which means they probably won't be very entertained if they end up with a character that is too weak to play.

So classes really a have their place and do some pretty great things. They make the game easier to play and easier to have fun with. They remove the flexibility of a class-less system and in many way it can make complicated systems better.

Keep calm and look at the pretty dancing people.

A Touch of Class

Ahhhhh! What do I do now? Are classes in rpgs? Or not or-I just explained- I can’t!

Well here we are back to ‘rpg elements are D&D elements’. I said in the last blog post that all my arguments can be framed as arguments about different aspects of D&D. Classes is another of these questions that Trpgs asked and came up with many innovative solutions for for not having classes, or for kinda having classes.

Traveler and Dark Heresy use a sort of ‘backgrounds system’ to help guide players in character creations and to help define what roles they are likely to take while playing the game. In these systems the player sort of builds up their character by selecting a background and profession/career. They have a little bit of choice bue they still stack them together to make something unique. TBZ and Talislanta both use variations on an ‘archetype’ system to speed character creation. The difference here is that players pretty much select one archetype and maybe customize some details around it to create their character and generally have a lot of leeway in determining the character's details. Similarly Double Cross has rules for combining up to three classes (called syndromes) to sort of define a character's powers, but all the details about the character are determined differently.

So in a way, you don't even really need to pick about having a class system or class-less when you are making an rpg. What needs to be realized is what classes do well and what classes struggle with and how you want to address these issues. Rpg elements doesn’t really exist on analysis. it's just designers solving a specific set of problems in either the same or different ways; classes are not used with the ubiquity that would define them as an element of Trpgs and Crpgs.

Moving forward

If you’re wondering about my next blog post. I’m going to be taking this idea of ‘rpg elements’ to another level… by talking about levels. (yeah those aren’t an rpg element either).