Strategy

What are the available strategies? What's in play, what's in development, what works, what doesn't, etc?

Quick list:

5e Core

Good:

Bad:

5e Advanced

Good:

Bad:

Class-based design

System 6 and 5e do a decent job.

Good:

Bad:

Notes:

Classless design

Good:

Bad:

If I were making 5e now

Classes are essential. The pros outweight the cons. They are inherently limiting, but it's also easy to create new ones.

It definitely should be possible for more advanced players to make choices beyond what class and path they'll choose at creation...but it also shouldn't be required. Even though most players will probably want to spread their wings a bit after a mere handful of sessions...there's a pretty big gulf between that end state and the initial state of asking a total newbie to take the leap into D&D. The concept of character class is known to most people who've never played D&D, but the specifics beyond that are not.

How can we accomplish this? Let's brainstorm some ways, and grade them -2 to 2 on Ease of Use, Flexibility, and Sexiness (flavor, imaginativeness, etc)

It kind of seems like class systems do just fine with Ease of Use and Sexiness, but struggle with Flexibility. So, rather than desigining a whole new system to nail all 3 on the first pass, why not tweak the class system to improve Flexibility?

Flexibility

Tools in our toolkit:

It seems like externalized abilities tend to perform worst: they're confusing, underwhelming, even a chore. They were the Achilles' heel of 3e and Pathfinder, and they continue to be a backbiter in 5e and System 7. It's a legacy of failure, the failure of 3e's fateful decision to apply the dreaded Don't Repeat Yourself principle and create a whole new system for a handful of minor abilities that were shared between a few classes, then inflate said system with a totally optional side rule about non-weapon proficiencies.

Multiclassing is pretty straightforward; the only thing System 6 got wrong there was frontloading class abilities too much (and having too many combo points). It's intuitive, flexible, and optional--hits all the marks.

Cross-class abilities are an ill-explored option. I think there are a couple video games that have tried this, but it's not often done. Perhaps there could be "major" and "minor" class abilities, and you could swap your minors for those of another class (within reason). Sounds potentially interesting, but very tricky to design; getting it wrong means it's just another externalized system.

Alternate advancement is also ill-explored. In many ways, the original concept of System 7 relied on this: you could advance Power Source and Combat Style separately. In practice, this made no sense, because some classes are their Power Sources, some are their Combat Style, and a few are both, to some degree. It's probably doable as a hypothetical, but the result won't be Easy to Use.

System 7 attempted to equate all Power Sources, so that you could treat each one as a minor aspect of your character, a backbone of your identity, or even your sole identity. A noble goal, and maybe one not to give up on...but it wasn't Easy to Use.

Ease of Use

This one deserves some defition. Easy to Use means:

One thing that's starting to become clear: System 6 benefited from having every ability granted by a class present on the class page, including spells. With a single-page Class document, character creation and playing the game are immensely easier than any other approach across the whole spectrum of systems. As a bonus, Class Identity has never had a better friend than System 6; since every class ability was class-specific, no two classes shared the same ability.

The weakest parts of System 6 in terms of Ease of Use were the externalized systems, i.e. Skills and Feats. It feels weird for these to be external to your class, because you acquire them through the same means that you acquire your class abilities: by killin' orcs. It feels more natural that Equipment is external to class, because it isn't connected to XP at all.

What is a class?

There are two axes on which RPG characters function: Special Powers and Play Style.

Play Style refers to how your character gets things done in the game. Does he skulk in the shadows? Does he flip through a vast spellbook to find the right spell for every problem? Does he rush in, axe flailing? Does he just sit there and wait for someone to tell him something useful to do?

Special Powers are the fantastic element of the game, things you can't do in real life. Perhaps your character can move things with her mind, or see the future, or mind meld. Maybe she has a Power Suit and can lift dump trucks over her head with it. Maybe she has a Galaxy Sword that makes her enemies tremble.

Ideally, every character should have a Play Style unique to them, and a set of Special Powers that feels adequate, has potential, and is in a fairly protected space relative to the other players. Special Powers should grow over time (though always in a way that makes sense, given where they started), while Play Style should probably remain pretty constant (barring numeric and tactical improvements), unless the player decides to change it.

Classes attempt to encapsulate both of these, as if they were inherently linked. In doing so, they reduce a two-dimensional continuum to a single dimension, forever declaring that all wizards are clothies with no combat skill, all rogues fight with two daggers, all fighters have no utility, etc. Stapling on flexibility with external Skills and Feats, or multiclassing, or whatever Alternate Advancement seems like a cheap afterthough compared to simply leaving that extra dimension intact.

Previous attempts to separate these two dimensions have had trouble, but I think that's because there was no way to reverse engineer a solution from the source material. Once information has been compressed away, it can't be restored via "zoom and enhance". We needed new input. We have it now: PtbA.

PtbA gives us a working template for class design that ensures everyone has utility. It doesn't always do a great job accounting for magic powers, but that's okay--we're going to extract those to a separate system.

Class

We'll call Play Style a "Class" to keep things approachable. A Class describes what your character "does", in the karmic sense. Given any situation, your Class is the greatest predictor of what you will do. Some classes rush headlong into danger, eager for glory; some search from many options to find the most efficient choice; some wait and see how things evolve before timing their response.

In RPG terms, the likeliest class list is this (keeping in mind Ease of Use demands we stick to existing concepts whenever they are the closest match):

Fighter

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