3.P - Discussing The Freelancer (FFd20)

[MaxiDuRaritry]

FinalFantasyd20 (https://www.finalfantasyd20.com/) has a class called the freelancer (https://www.finalfantasyd20.com/classes/miscellaneous-classes/freelancer/), which gains a pool of points each level (60 at level 1 and 30 at every additional level) to spend on improving its abilities or on purchasing abilities from other classes. Class abilities that scale with level (such as spellcasting) cost 1/2 the purchase amount (generally 20 points to purchase and 10 every level it improves, which is mandatory).

You can't freely multiclass or take PrCs, meaning once you take levels in other classes, you can't come back to it.

What do you think of the class? How breakable is it? Would it fit the games you've played in? Or is it something you think needs to be changed significantly?

Personally, I think it would be a GREAT fix to the various martial classes (assuming full spellcasting were disallowed), as well as be a great general class that an entire campaign world could be built with. Kinda strong, considering you can take multiple full-spellcasting classes in basically a triple-gestalt, but if taking multiple spellcasting progressions were disallowed, that actually has great potential for a build-your-own-class framework.

Please use this thread for discussing the class itself. The other thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?661539-3-P-Optimizing-The-Freelancer-(FFd20)) can be used for build and specific optimization discussions.

[Rynjin]

I'll preface this by saying that making a "build a class" system for Pathfinder is pretty hard, and nobody has ever done it perfectly. However, Freelancer in particular is a bit wonky. It way overvalues certain things (like Exotic weapon proficiencies...why does ONE Exotic proficiency cost more than proficiency with ALL Martial weapons?) and undervalues others (full casting).

It's also impossible to build the equivalent to some EXISTING CLASSES by the Freelancer rules. You have 60 JP. Let's try to build their Red Mage, shall we?

3/4 BaB: 10 JP
2 Good saves: 10 JP
6 skills: 2 JP
All Martial weapons: 6 JP
Medium armor plus Shields: 8 JP
4d6 Starting wealth: 3 JP
2 Limit Breaks: 10 JP
3/4 casting, 1st level spells: 10 JP

Total just for the chassis: 59/60 JP

Class features:
Red Magery: 10 JP
Spell Proficiency (Bonus Feat): 10 JP
Armored Mage: 20 JP
Spell Combat: 10 JP

Total cost to build a 1st level Red Mage using Freelancer: 109/60 JP

Viladin doesn't do math when building classes.

If you want something with a bit more granularity, I made this back in like...2013 (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n8-emDAoVGEBLiNua6W55NOBgsXllcHmTGy9jrVuqVA/edit), and occasionally peck at it.

It's a bit better balanced in terms of point costs, though things are obviously not perfect given class features are not created equal. Still, I did try to split class features into different "tiers" with different point costs, which makes it IMO much more usable at the table.

As of now, you SHOULD be able to build every base class within the point limit.

[AvatarVecna]

Freelancer maybe works within its own system because the system was at least theoretically designed with Freelancer in mind, so they would've had point-costs in mind when designing abilities. Theoretically, anyway. But that won't apply to 3.5/PF material, at which point one must acknowledge that some abilities are far more valuable than others even if they would cost the same number of points. This is made even worse if homebrew is on the table, and given that Freelancer is not first-party for 3.5 or PF games, if Freelancer is on the table then it's probably one of a number of "homebrews" being approved.

Freelancer's approach to assigning point-values is too one-size-fits-all to ever work. The race building rules in first-party PF are widely considered easily-exploited trash that should never be allowed without a firm DM hand to guide and make sure a race isn't just hyper-optimized for the specific thing the player wants to do. But if we have to give the race builder rules a microscopic bit of credit, we can at least say that they made a list of every single race ability they could think of and assigned them individual point values. We can argue about if those values accurately reflect the value of what they're attached to for the rest of time, but they at least attempted to properly appraise them against each other.

Freelancer has made only the barest such attempt, and even that has fallen short. Sneak Attack is 20 points for the first +1d6 at lvl 1, and 10 points every odd level thereafter for another +1d6. meanwhile, full spellcasting costs...exactly the same at exactly the same frequency, until 17th level where the casting caps out. A 20th lvl Freelancer can have spent 100 points on full casting all the way to 9th lvl spells, and can have spent 110 points on 10d6 SA. But we know full well which of these things is more valuable.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

I can definitely see the need to be more granular with the costs. That could be broken down a little bit better, for sure.

It does seem like it could have some fun applications, though I haven't actually looked into messing with it very deeply.

[AvatarVecna]

Additionally, this is a minor complaint, but as someone who's actually tried to use this in a game, the skill section is incredibly vague.


Skills: 4/level. Increasing skill points costs 2 JP per 2 skill points, (max of 10).

"Max of 10". Is that "max of 10 skill points", or "max of 10 points spent improving skill points"?


4 Starting Class Skills. Increasing the number of Class Skills costs 2 JP per 1 Class Skill, (max of 10).

"Max of 10". Is that "max of 10 class skills", "max of 10 additional class skills", or "max of 10 JP spent gaining additional class skills"?

EDIT: Most of the costs in Freelancer are multiples of 10, but not all of them are. The bump from d10 to d12 HD costs 5 JP, and buying armor/weapon proficiencies is very difficult to get in multiples of 10, so we can't just assume the two maxes are "max of 10 JP spent". It also doesn't help that the most conservative read is "max of 10 skill points per level", which is already more than any class in the game gets.

EDIT: It's also weird that, in a system that uses the PF skill rules for the most part, class skills are valued more highly than skill points per level, when one of the big changes made to PF is that class skills matter less?

[Maat Mons]

At first glance, it seems obvious to pick up your maximum of one allowed "pet."

There's an archetype that ups your maximum number of "pets" to 2 + 1/4 levels. But it also reduces each one to 3/4 progression, and doubles the Job Point cost of all non-"pet" abilities. If I'm doing the math right, at 20th level, you could have 9th level spells from one class and 5 "pets" at effective class level 15. Opinions on if that's worth it?

It's obvious that you'd want to pick up full casting progression of at least one class. But since purchasing casting from more classes doesn't increase your MP or the number of spells you can cast each round, I'm not quite sure how many spell lists a person should purchase access to. My first instinct is to go Black Mage, White Mage, and then either Summoner or Geomancer.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

MP != PP != SP, so how about one of the mage classes, psion, and spell-point wizard? One could also pick up spellcasting from a racial class that grants more effective spellcaster levels than HD...

[Crake]

MP != PP != SP, so how about one of the mage classes, psion, and spell-point wizard? One could also pick up spellcasting from a racial class that grants more effective spellcaster levels than HD...

I dont think the class is intended to be used cross system with pathfinder etc, since “wizard” and “psion” arent final fantasy jobs

[AvatarVecna]

I dont think the class is intended to be used cross system with pathfinder etc, since “wizard” and “psion” arent final fantasy jobs

By default yeah it's good to assume that classes are going to be used in their own system and not ported into other systems even if they are similar and built using the same "game engine" so to speak. FFd20 may be a pathfinder rip, but it's not pathfinder material, not really. That being said, 3.5/PF/3.P games popping up allowing 3rd party material and homebrew aren't uncommon, and Freelancer is a common ask because FFd20 is compatible and Freelancer breaks really easy when the pool of stuff you can copy is expanded. And games like that, 3.P games where the brakes have been removed, are far more common than FFd20 games being played straight, so it's still useful to discuss.

From that point of view: nothing Freelancer purchases explicitly references Jobs. The resource being spent is called "Job Points", but you're not buying "Career Skills" with them, you're buying class features. Wizards have class features. Also the caster issues I discussed in the other thread briefly get even muddier if you do this because there's a decent RAI argument to be made that because you wouldn't get MP from multiple classes, you shouldn't get spell slots from multiple classes in such a game. But games like that tend to cleave towards the more powerful interpretations because they're really chargen-circlejerking poorly disguised as recruitment threads, and the more powerful/RAW interpretation goes "well it says you don't get MP from multiple classes but wizard/cleric/etc don't get MP anyway, so they don't care about that".

[Maat Mons]

For purposes of evaluating the Freelancer, it might be worthwhile to compare to Scholar (https://www.finalfantasyd20.com/classes/hybrid-classes/scholar/) with the Archmage (https://www.finalfantasyd20.com/classes/hybrid-classes/scholar/archetypes/archmage/) archetype. Scholar innately has access to both the Black Mage and White Mage spell lists. Ordinarily, the Scholar class only gets up to 6th level spells, but the Archmage archetype increases that to 9th level spells. The archetype also adds two different class features that let you pick up access to spells from other lists. One of them can be expanded on with feats. This gives Freelance not-insubstantially-sized shoes to fill when stepping into the roll of multi-caster.