Chimera245
2018-12-14, 06:55 PM
Core Concept: I want to make a game that allows players to change classes on a whim like in games such as Final Fantasy Tactics, etc.
"But that sounds like a bunch of messy and tedious paperwork for the players during play. It'll never work."
Originally, I had planned this to be played on a VTT. I reasoned that as long as I playtested and debugged my macros properly, then a character's attack rolls, or current hit points could be determined by calculus differentials in 4-dimensional hyperbolic space for all the difference it would make to the players. It wouldn't matter how much or how often the PCs stats change with a new class as long as it all happens with the click of a button.
But as I read through Dungeon World, Simple World, and other PbtA systems, I realized that my idea might actually be much easier to achieve in the traditional pen-and-paper play style than I originally thought, and wouldn't actually require a computer doing math for you at all.
My major goal is to get this up and running as something my group of friends can run and play. Polishing it up into something I can confidently publish is a much lower priority. (But if it comes to that, then yay, bonus points. Even then, though, I don't see it being anything more than a PDF posted somewhere on the internet that basically says "Use Dungeon World's rules, but make these changes".)
To that end, I intend to rip straight out of DW whenever possible. I like DW's interpretation of the PbtA system, and how it is basically "the D&D flavor without the D&D crunch". Kinda like Trix Yogurt.
"But classes are what a character learned and trained in throughout their lives up until the game starts. What gives the characters the ability to re-write their capabilities so casually and often? It doesn't make narrative sense. It'll never work."
As of the moment, I'm not putting too much thought into WHY the characters are able to shift between classes nigh-instantaneously. In Final Fantasy 3 and 5, you are granted this power by The Crystals, because you are The Chosen Ones. In Wild Arms Crossfire, you can change classes because of some gizmo that has been invented in this setting that adventurers commonly use. In Final Fantasy Tactics, everyone can do it, and no one questions it, or calls attention to it, and everyone shuts up and gets on with the medieval drama.
The way I see it, if everyone's cool just accepting it's a thing, then everyone just accepts it's a thing, and if not, then the first session involves an adventure to the Ancient Temple of Plot Device.
The first change I decided to make was to the Stats. I wanted something far more abstract than the standard Str, Dex, Con, etc. I don't see characters bodies physically changing with their class, just their general combat capabilities, so I wanted to push actual physical features back into the realm of flavor and fluff.
As a Fighter, one character might attack with raw physical strength, while another attacks with deft footwork and opportunistic strikes, and yet another might attack with knowledge of weak areas and pressure points from an intimate study of anatomy. Yet all characters would be rolling the same roll, and just giving different descriptions.
Right now, the stats are: (names are work-in-progress)
*Physical Attack Power- Your ability to effectively make violence happen to your target. It's the stat for swords, fists, axes, boxing-glove-on-a-spring-launchers, any sort of tool for murderous physical pain.
*Magic Power- Your ability to make magical stuff happen effectively. It's the stat that a wizard uses, regardless whether his magic is powered by intelligence, charisma, chakra, or the Power of Friendship.
*Initiative? Reaction? (I want it more abstract than "Speed" or "Dexterity")- It's the dodgy, dextrous, reactive, nimble, get-out-of-the-way, successfully-act-on-this-short-lived-opportunity stat. I'm still working on the exact nature.
*Tactics- Your ability to plan ahead, do complex things in combat, and generally make the battlefield move the way you want it to. Whether you plan meticulously, affect people with raw charisma, use one of those annoying "combat maneuver" weapons to trip, disarm, or grapple, or just want to tie someone's shoelaces together without them noticing, you roll Tactics.
*Adaptability- Your ability to make do with whatever's there. Finding a suitable improvised weapon, surviving in the woods when you run out of food, and generally finding ways out of the traps someone got you into by rolling Tactics against you. Someone trying to trip you with their whip? Use Adaptability to step on the end of it, then pull it out of their hands. Someone tie your shoelaces together? Use Adaptability to stay on your feet, then deliver a leaping double-foot kick to their nuts.
Physical stats would just be description and fluff. For example, if your character had high strength, you could swing a sword, and use your strength to make an Attack Power roll.
If you were a firebender, you could use your strength to make a Magic Power roll.
If you get in a quick sucker-punch in a bar fight, you use your strength to make a fast-reacty-stat-that-needs-a-better-name roll.
If you lift an opponent up and toss him at another opponent, you use your strength to make a Tactics roll.
If you knock over a big heavy table to give yourself cover, you use your strength to make an Adaptability roll.
Your stats change with your class. For example, when changing from a fighter to a barbarian, your Attack Power would go up, but your Tactics would go down.
I know it needs some work, like there's some conceptual gray-area between Adaptability and Initiative/Reaction that needs to be more clearly defined.
I saw different weapons using different stats, like a sword using Attack Power, and a staff using Magic Power. Things like whips, ballistas, etc. might use Tactics.
Mechanically, most of your character's data comes from your current class, with a few things tied to your actual character itself. Your current class gives you your stats, max HP, damage die, proficient weapons and armor, and moves-you-get-for-free-while-you-are-this-class.
Your character has its own class-independent alignment, level, and number of ability slots.
You gain XP (experience points) to raise your character level, and you gain AP (ability points) to learn skills from your class.
You have a number of ability slots equal to your level, and you use them for abilities you've learned from other classes that aren't your current class.
Let's say Jim-Bob Magoo starts out his adventuring career as a wizard. He goes out and kills rats, because the tavern in his town has sucky quests, and earns AP for the wizard class. He decides wizards are too fragile and easy to beat up, so he changes to a fighter. While he was a wizard, he spent some AP to learn some magic, obviously, and as a fighter, he puts "wizard magic" in his ability slot. Now he's a fighter that can cast wizard spells. But since his Magic Power is low as a fighter, they're not very good. He goes on more inane starter-town fetch-quests, and earns AP as a fighter. He spends it the fighter's armor proficiency, then switches back to wizard. Since wizards get magic for free, (it's kinda what they do), he gets it just for being a wizard again, freeing up his ability slot, and now he uses it for wearing armor like a fighter. So he's an armored wizard now, and is less crunchy, but can cast spells more effectively again. Then he earns enough XP to reach level 2, and has a second ability slot. He decides to change to thief and puts wizard magic and armor proficiency in the two slots.
In actual physical tabletop play, I saw a character sheet consisting of a piece of paper, an index card, and a number of sticky notes. The index card is your current class, and you have an index card for each class you have access to. You put the current one on top of your character sheet, and it shows your stats, and built-in moves. Then you put sticky notes with your other moves onto your character sheet in your ability slots. You'd probably also have sticky notes for equipment since that may change a lot too. Maybe a notecard each for spells learned in a particular type of magic.
The Basic and Special Moves, would largely remain the same, except for adjusting to the new stats. There would also need to be a new Special Move for changing classes and abilities, but it would pretty much be what it says on the tin.
DM moves, Monsters, Fronts/Dangers, etc. shouldn't need to be touched.
The meat of this is going to be designing the classes, and their moves, and deciding how much AP everything costs.
I've been working on this in my head for a while now, but I'm sure there are some big, obvious things I need to flesh out. Thus I created this topic in order to get some outside opinions on the whole thing.
Give me your advice and criticism so that I can feel bad about how much everyone hates my system and become a scarred, and socially-awkward recluse.
"But that sounds like a bunch of messy and tedious paperwork for the players during play. It'll never work."
Originally, I had planned this to be played on a VTT. I reasoned that as long as I playtested and debugged my macros properly, then a character's attack rolls, or current hit points could be determined by calculus differentials in 4-dimensional hyperbolic space for all the difference it would make to the players. It wouldn't matter how much or how often the PCs stats change with a new class as long as it all happens with the click of a button.
But as I read through Dungeon World, Simple World, and other PbtA systems, I realized that my idea might actually be much easier to achieve in the traditional pen-and-paper play style than I originally thought, and wouldn't actually require a computer doing math for you at all.
My major goal is to get this up and running as something my group of friends can run and play. Polishing it up into something I can confidently publish is a much lower priority. (But if it comes to that, then yay, bonus points. Even then, though, I don't see it being anything more than a PDF posted somewhere on the internet that basically says "Use Dungeon World's rules, but make these changes".)
To that end, I intend to rip straight out of DW whenever possible. I like DW's interpretation of the PbtA system, and how it is basically "the D&D flavor without the D&D crunch". Kinda like Trix Yogurt.
"But classes are what a character learned and trained in throughout their lives up until the game starts. What gives the characters the ability to re-write their capabilities so casually and often? It doesn't make narrative sense. It'll never work."
As of the moment, I'm not putting too much thought into WHY the characters are able to shift between classes nigh-instantaneously. In Final Fantasy 3 and 5, you are granted this power by The Crystals, because you are The Chosen Ones. In Wild Arms Crossfire, you can change classes because of some gizmo that has been invented in this setting that adventurers commonly use. In Final Fantasy Tactics, everyone can do it, and no one questions it, or calls attention to it, and everyone shuts up and gets on with the medieval drama.
The way I see it, if everyone's cool just accepting it's a thing, then everyone just accepts it's a thing, and if not, then the first session involves an adventure to the Ancient Temple of Plot Device.
The first change I decided to make was to the Stats. I wanted something far more abstract than the standard Str, Dex, Con, etc. I don't see characters bodies physically changing with their class, just their general combat capabilities, so I wanted to push actual physical features back into the realm of flavor and fluff.
As a Fighter, one character might attack with raw physical strength, while another attacks with deft footwork and opportunistic strikes, and yet another might attack with knowledge of weak areas and pressure points from an intimate study of anatomy. Yet all characters would be rolling the same roll, and just giving different descriptions.
Right now, the stats are: (names are work-in-progress)
*Physical Attack Power- Your ability to effectively make violence happen to your target. It's the stat for swords, fists, axes, boxing-glove-on-a-spring-launchers, any sort of tool for murderous physical pain.
*Magic Power- Your ability to make magical stuff happen effectively. It's the stat that a wizard uses, regardless whether his magic is powered by intelligence, charisma, chakra, or the Power of Friendship.
*Initiative? Reaction? (I want it more abstract than "Speed" or "Dexterity")- It's the dodgy, dextrous, reactive, nimble, get-out-of-the-way, successfully-act-on-this-short-lived-opportunity stat. I'm still working on the exact nature.
*Tactics- Your ability to plan ahead, do complex things in combat, and generally make the battlefield move the way you want it to. Whether you plan meticulously, affect people with raw charisma, use one of those annoying "combat maneuver" weapons to trip, disarm, or grapple, or just want to tie someone's shoelaces together without them noticing, you roll Tactics.
*Adaptability- Your ability to make do with whatever's there. Finding a suitable improvised weapon, surviving in the woods when you run out of food, and generally finding ways out of the traps someone got you into by rolling Tactics against you. Someone trying to trip you with their whip? Use Adaptability to step on the end of it, then pull it out of their hands. Someone tie your shoelaces together? Use Adaptability to stay on your feet, then deliver a leaping double-foot kick to their nuts.
Physical stats would just be description and fluff. For example, if your character had high strength, you could swing a sword, and use your strength to make an Attack Power roll.
If you were a firebender, you could use your strength to make a Magic Power roll.
If you get in a quick sucker-punch in a bar fight, you use your strength to make a fast-reacty-stat-that-needs-a-better-name roll.
If you lift an opponent up and toss him at another opponent, you use your strength to make a Tactics roll.
If you knock over a big heavy table to give yourself cover, you use your strength to make an Adaptability roll.
Your stats change with your class. For example, when changing from a fighter to a barbarian, your Attack Power would go up, but your Tactics would go down.
I know it needs some work, like there's some conceptual gray-area between Adaptability and Initiative/Reaction that needs to be more clearly defined.
I saw different weapons using different stats, like a sword using Attack Power, and a staff using Magic Power. Things like whips, ballistas, etc. might use Tactics.
Mechanically, most of your character's data comes from your current class, with a few things tied to your actual character itself. Your current class gives you your stats, max HP, damage die, proficient weapons and armor, and moves-you-get-for-free-while-you-are-this-class.
Your character has its own class-independent alignment, level, and number of ability slots.
You gain XP (experience points) to raise your character level, and you gain AP (ability points) to learn skills from your class.
You have a number of ability slots equal to your level, and you use them for abilities you've learned from other classes that aren't your current class.
Let's say Jim-Bob Magoo starts out his adventuring career as a wizard. He goes out and kills rats, because the tavern in his town has sucky quests, and earns AP for the wizard class. He decides wizards are too fragile and easy to beat up, so he changes to a fighter. While he was a wizard, he spent some AP to learn some magic, obviously, and as a fighter, he puts "wizard magic" in his ability slot. Now he's a fighter that can cast wizard spells. But since his Magic Power is low as a fighter, they're not very good. He goes on more inane starter-town fetch-quests, and earns AP as a fighter. He spends it the fighter's armor proficiency, then switches back to wizard. Since wizards get magic for free, (it's kinda what they do), he gets it just for being a wizard again, freeing up his ability slot, and now he uses it for wearing armor like a fighter. So he's an armored wizard now, and is less crunchy, but can cast spells more effectively again. Then he earns enough XP to reach level 2, and has a second ability slot. He decides to change to thief and puts wizard magic and armor proficiency in the two slots.
In actual physical tabletop play, I saw a character sheet consisting of a piece of paper, an index card, and a number of sticky notes. The index card is your current class, and you have an index card for each class you have access to. You put the current one on top of your character sheet, and it shows your stats, and built-in moves. Then you put sticky notes with your other moves onto your character sheet in your ability slots. You'd probably also have sticky notes for equipment since that may change a lot too. Maybe a notecard each for spells learned in a particular type of magic.
The Basic and Special Moves, would largely remain the same, except for adjusting to the new stats. There would also need to be a new Special Move for changing classes and abilities, but it would pretty much be what it says on the tin.
DM moves, Monsters, Fronts/Dangers, etc. shouldn't need to be touched.
The meat of this is going to be designing the classes, and their moves, and deciding how much AP everything costs.
I've been working on this in my head for a while now, but I'm sure there are some big, obvious things I need to flesh out. Thus I created this topic in order to get some outside opinions on the whole thing.
Give me your advice and criticism so that I can feel bad about how much everyone hates my system and become a scarred, and socially-awkward recluse.