Ideas for retro rpg Classes/Spells/Skills?

[Togath]

As the title suggests, I'm trying to brainstorm ideas for a retro(in the sense of older dragonquest games, the first few final fantasy games, or the first two golden sun games, and others of that style) rpg.
I have a basic skeleton of spells set up(standard elemental single target and multi target spells, spells that cure status effects, healing spells, and resurrection spells), but I'm having less luck with coming up with non-spell skills, as well as filling out the class list more, which at the moment is comprised of "Bard" which has fairly average stats, but gets a lot of status inflicting spells, as well as an innate chance to dodge attacks, and "Bandit" which has high attack, speed, and hp, but low defenses, and has a slightly higher than average critical hit ratio.
Needless to say, I'm planning on trying out a few standard sort of classes(warrior, black mage, priest, rogue, red mage, monk)but I figured I should see if anyone here has ideas for quirky/less common ones.

[erikun]

Well, what kind of a game are you making? Are you trying to put together a RPG, or something closer to a board game?

For a RPG, I recommend putting together a list of things that you'd expect a character to do in the setting world, then make sure your skills are broad enough to cover them all, but not so specific that you have one skill for every little thing. Stuff like foraging, hunting for game, working with horses, repairing leather equipment, identifying different metals, learning new languages, and so on.

If we're talking closer to a board game, then you're less concerned about modeling what a character might do and more concerned with giving fun actions to each player. Just choose a number of abilities that would have fun effects for each class available.

[Lighturtle]

Something that might be a lot of work but very fun would be centering on enemy abilities. Final Fantasy did it pretty decently, with Blue Mages, controllers, Gau...
You could even have a "beastermaster" fighting via caught and raised pets! Breed them to combine abilities! A subgame within the game if you will.

Aside from that... a support class can be intersting, but that will depend a lot on your battle system. Maybe a spell to ex-morphoshift 2 blue badagronks into 3 red badagronks would add tremondous tactical depth? Hell if I know.

Another interesting archetype is the shapeshifter: enemy weak to magic, switch to a caster form etc. You can have the shapeshifter be versatile but slow to set up to compensate. It would be also nice that the optimal course of action is not staying in the same form all fight.

Last of all, you could make a gimmickomancer. Stuff like damage depending on your amount of steps modulo the amount battle fleds, maybe a passive so your ratio of time of the day by time remaining until next day adds a 5% chance per digit to add a 10% chance to bleed the enemy while you blow into the microphone if your sun level is high enough.

[Passive Pete]

Assassin is always a fun class, a mixture of sneakiness, attack, and light damage-inflicting spells, everyone loves that.

As mentioned above, Beastmaster would be really fun to play, and I love the idea of breeding pets for better abilities.

And are you going to go as complex as prestige classes? Like at high levels you can decide to take levels in a more specific kind of class, like pyromancer or golemsmith, by meeting some prerequisites.

[Togath]

The shape shifter concept seems fairly interesting..
Perhaps giving different forms decent passive buffs/ability sets, with an additional effect/s occurring when you shift to a new form?
Shifting into something tanky but with weak offense granting a chance to reflect a percentage of damage for a few rounds, or shifting into something with weak defenses but the ability to heal applying a small percentage heal(10-20% or some such, enough to be worth shifting into to keep from dying).

The gimmickomancer is of course an interesting concept.. Though I'm still working on figuring out how to program/script in gimmicks(so far the closest I've come is realizing I could have abilities/spells/attack/what-have-you that use the stats of the target to determine their strength, such as a spell that deals higher damage to an enemy with stronger spell casting, or other such things).

Another idea I had, though I'm still working out how to script it, is something that could allow the target an extra turn, or alternatively, to do the same action twice on the round/s that they're affected by it on.

As for why I didn't respond for a while.. It's honestly because I was confused by Erikun's messge, and unsure how to really reply.

[erikun]

As for why I didn't respond for a while.. It's honestly because I was confused by Erikun's messge, and unsure how to really reply.
You said you were making a "retro RPG", but it wasn't clear if you were making a pen-and-paper RPG, or a video game RPG, or some sort of board game, or some sort of card game, or something else entirely.

[Togath]

You said you were making a "retro RPG", but it wasn't clear if you were making a pen-and-paper RPG, or a video game RPG, or some sort of board game, or some sort of card game, or something else entirely.

Ah I can see the confusion then.
To clarify the sort;

in the sense of older dragonquest games, the first few final fantasy games, or the first two golden sun games, and others of that style.
So low-ish pixel graphics, turn based combat, and(mostly) random encounters with monsters. As well as area generally being divided into "towns" "the field" and "dungeons". Other features tend to very a bit more..
I've you've played them, I'm going for something like Chrono Trigger, the Dragonquest(8 and later)/Dragonwarrior(7 and earlier) series, or final Fantasy 9(albeit with 2d graphics).

[Grinner]

Ah I can see the confusion then.
To clarify the sort;

So low-ish pixel graphics, turn based combat, and(mostly) random encounters with monsters. As well as area generally being divided into "towns" "the field" and "dungeons". Other features tend to very a bit more..
I've you've played them, I'm going for something like Chrono Trigger, the Dragonquest(8 and later)/Dragonwarrior(7 and earlier) series, or final Fantasy 9(albeit with 2d graphics).

I'm going to assume you mean to imply "videogame".

It is quite fortunate that there's a whole PnP RPG themed around console RPGs. Taking a page from that book, I'd suggest:

Chemist
Dragoon
Geomancer
Mechanist
Ninja (Is that suitably different from Monk?)
Summoner
Time Mage
plus the aforementioned beastmaster/Blue Mage

[Psyren]

Check out FFV's huge pile of classes for some cool ideas.

[Lighturtle]

Taking a page from that book, I'd suggest:

You could just say "use FFV classes...".

That's not bad advice actually. I'd suggest trying FFV and Penny Arcade 3 for games that did classes really right.

edit: damnit.