Classes

Hey folks! As I said in the last update, there’s not a lot to talk about right now, everyone’s working on Flee, Mortals! and ARCADIA, but I thought it would be fun to pitch you on the class ideas we’ve been talking about internally. A lot of these classes have already been mentioned either in these updates or in passing in various streams, so it seems relatively harmless to describe them here.

This is also a good opportunity to talk about our approach to class design (such as it is) and what we know about how our classes will work (to the extent that we know anything).

There’s actually quite a lot we don’t know, but that’s not particularly bothersome. Getting this game done is going to require an enormous amount of work and many, many people working on it, not just the MCDM internal design team. There’s about 817 things we have to do before the game is ready for prime time, and right now we’re on like…#5. Part of not freaking out about how big the problem is, is knowing (or rather, believing very strongly) that we’ll get there if we just chop the problem up into millions of easily digestible bits and just start…eating? That analogy worked a lot better in my brain than on the page.

But also, these classes are the ideas that motivate us. Right now we’re working on a core task resolution mechanic, which includes a die mechanic, and we’re specifically focusing on Avoidance vs Mitigation (i.e. how saves work, vs how armor works). And there is absolutely a desire to get that right, and we get excited about new ideas and we look forward to testing them, but we’re not trying to invent a new mechanic just to be clever. Really all we want is something flexible and robust (meaning, can handle a lot of different situations well without breaking) that gets out of the way and lets everyone play.

So, for me, it’s getting to play these classes and tell amazing stories with them that keeps me going. I suspect the same is true for Hannah and James.

Why Classes?

In a class-based system, classes do a lot of work design-wise. Broadly, the purpose of a class is to combine a bunch of different game mechanics into one package that supports some archetype or fantasy. In many ways, using classes instead of just buying abilities from a menu a la carte, is a way to easily balance your game.

In a point-based a la carte system, you have to balance every ability against every other ability and this means watering down every cool idea you have so it can play nice with the others. I’m not sure there are any games that work purely in this sense anymore. Probably there are.

In a class-based game, abilities still need to be balanced against each other! But since there are very severe limits on how the player can mix and match those abilities, the opportunity to break the game is very much reduced. For instance:

Let’s imagine two classes, each with three abilities and the abilities are rated by power on a scale of 1 to 3 where 3 is the most powerful.

Class A has three abilities all rated 2. Class B has a 3, a 2, and a 1. Both have a total of 6 “points” worth of powers. But Class B has the most powerful ability! A Rating 3 power! Class A doesn’t have anything anywhere near that cool. Isn’t that broken?

Well some people might think so, and any specific ability could be broken depending on how it’s designed, but all things being equal, no it’s not broken. In fact it’s a feature. Class B has the super-cool Level 3 ability, but it also has the much less powerful Rank 1 ability, whereas Class A doesn’t have ANY Rank 1 abilities.

This can be a feature because some players just want to do One Dope Thing they can rely on and master along with a few low-power utility functions, and other players want to be more flexible and shine in a wider variety of scenarios. Now the different classes support different playstyles.

So, while this one ability might be better than that other ability, taken as a whole the classes are balanced against each other. But you already rated all the abilities, why not just give people some points and let them spend them however they want on a master list of powers? I.e. an a la carte system without any classes.

Well because then you have to test every combination of abilities which is not impossible, but it’s not a lot of FUN. And then you have to do it all over again as soon as you invent a new cool ability. And what inevitably happens is: the coolest abilities need to be nerfed into a bland flavorless goop in order not to break the game when paired with every other ability.

In a class-based system, that cool Level 3 ability only has to be tested against the other abilities that class can choose and this is a major benefit of class-based systems.

There’s a middle ground you see a lot in games like Skyrim where your character starts as a blank slate, and as you gain XP (think of XP as the currency of progression) you pick a branch of character development and every choice you make locks out some other choices. Same effect as a class-based system; we don’t need to balance Grim Specter of Death against every ability in the game, just the abilities in the Deathstalker tree. The flowchart forces you to make decisions and once you’ve picked Deathstalker, you can’t pick Elementalist.

Furthermore, presenting a new player with “here’s 100 cool abilities and 20 points, knock yourself out” is sort of abusive. 😀 I’ve worked on games that started off like this, although they weren’t RPGs, it was more “here’s a bunch of cash and a list of gear, knock yourself out,” but that gear was basically the same as class abilities in an RPG: they each let you do cool things.

New players don’t know how their choices will affect play, they have no idea which abilities (or items) synergize well together. Taking a batch of related abilities that synergize well together and all point towards a certain archetype, and then calling that a “class” is a great way to make it easy for a new player to make an informed decision.

“Well, I don’t know how this game works, but I have a clear idea what a Swashbuckler might be about, and this art really sells that idea so I just trust that MCDM knows what they’re doing, and if I pick this class it will let me do the kinds of things I imagine a Swashbuckler can do.” We take that whole thing really seriously, it’s one of the foundational principles of our design.

Levels

This is related to the idea of levels. Lots of RPGs don’t bother with levels, they just award XP as points you can spend, and there’s some “tree” or flowchart you can spend those points to navigate through. Each choice unlocks new options and locks off other choices you can no longer pick.

This has value because it means players get rewarded earlier and get to start customizing their character sooner. You can imagine an RPG where, after the first encounter, you get…5 XP. Your character sheet shows this flowchart of abilities and starting at zero you have different abilities you can “rank up” immediately after earning that XP. The first session isn’t even over and you made progress!

I don’t think our game works that way, but it might! We don’t know yet! But I don’t think so. But maybe! But probably not….

Delaying that reward has value for a couple of reasons. Obviously it means “leveling up” becomes a significant milestone and something you can hang many dramatic beats on. It feels good to finish an adventure and get enough XP to level up! Each event reinforces the significance of the other. Finishing the adventure feels more momentous because we leveled up off it. And leveling up feels more momentous because it happened when we resolved the plot.

But also taking a bunch of class abilities, bundling them together, and then awarding them all at once means you spend quite a while, several sessions at least and many many encounters with the same set of abilities. This gives you lots of opportunities to get used to how they work. To master them, in other words.

Maybe the biggest benefit, and possibly the reason I see leveling up used a lot in group games, but skill trees used in solo games, is a level-based system means the entire group is going to spend several sessions all with the same abilities they had last session. This means everyone has time to get used to what everyone else can do.

You discover synergies between your class abilities, you learn which characters on the team tend to need healing, which ones need which buffs. There’s a lot to learn! And if everyone’s adding abilities after every encounter, then things can change a LOT even in a single session and players start to feel like they don’t really know or understand the other characters at the table, and this contributes to a sense of isolation, an absence of any feeling of “team.”

Also, we don’t think players should be spending most of their time thinking about their character sheet, they should be thinking about their character and the world and the plot and the other heroes and their enemies. Taking abilities and awarding them in discrete packets called “levels” means you’re only shifting into that “ok, let me think about the actual game mechanics” mode once out of several sessions, not every time you beat an encounter.

Hopefully it’s obvious why there’s no One Right Answer to this. We’ve never seriously considered any other system for this RPG than Class & Levels, but that’s mostly because it’s just never been a problem in the games we’ve run before. It’s not broken, it’s not a problem that needs solving. It works, and we like it. 😀

Generic and Specific

Some of the classes below fulfill broad and classic archetypes. These are somewhat generic. That doesn’t mean “not cool” or “flavorless,” it just means you’ve seen these before. In fact one of the things that excited us about, for instance, the Tactician, is that we’re excited to make what is normally a bland and flavorless class (the “Warrior”) really fun and flavorful and distinct.

It’s important our game have these broad archetypes because they work well with lots of different fantasies. Knowing what I do about The Lord of the Rings and our classes, I think Aragorn is probably a Tactician! But so are lots of characters! Éowyn would probably be a tactician in our system.

Once we have those archetypal bases covered, we’re free to invent really different and even wholly unique classes like the Operator. That combination of “core” classes and boutique classes is, I think, one of the strengths of our (proposed) system. If we have a new cool idea, we can just make a cool class!

Multiclassing? What’s That?

One of the annoying things about designing new classes for 5E is handling all the nonsense around multiclassing. In a sense, 5E is the worst of all possible worlds. It’s restrictive, like a class-based system, but multiclassing lets you mix-and-match abilities like an a-la-carte system. Gross.

There are ways around this, mostly making sure no one class-level is too good, and any ability that’s “too good” just needs to start at “basically ok” and then rank up, getting better as you take more class levels. That way taking one level of any class doesn’t change your character that much, and by the time your signature class ability is Really Cool it’s because you invested a lot of class levels to get it that way.

We want to make sure there are LOTS of ways to customize your character, but we don’t think multiclassing is one of them. We’d rather just make new classes that support whatever fantasy you’re going for and make sure there are lots of other ways to customize your character.

Subclasses?

Will this game have subclasses? I dunno! I sort of assume…yes? But I also like Prestige Classes from 3E? Although maybe not that exact implementation of them.

However we handle it, I’m sure that not only will you be able to play a Tactician, you’ll be able to decide what kind of tactician. Same for every class. But it’s also fine if one class has three subclasses, and another seven.

Roles and Power Sources

Other tactical fantasy RPGs slate each class into a role (Striker, Tank, Healer/Leader, Whichever One The Wizard Is) and a Power Source (Primal, Arcane, Divine, Sarcasm, etc…) and we may do something like that? But thus far we’re in the Dreaming phase, not the Implementation phase, so we don’t know and we’re not worried about it. We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. 😀

Class Resources

One principle of design we believe in strongly is the idea that the player should get some resource they can manage however they want. It’s not up to us how you play your character, it’s up to you and a robust class resource puts that power in your hands. Do you want to save up all your Fury until the final round? Or spend it slowly over the course of the battle? Or somewhere in between? That’s up to you!

Not all resources work the same way! And some classes might not have any resource to manage, if we think that’s the best design for that class. This is a principle we believe in, not a law of physics we have to follow. We can make exceptions.

On With The Show…

Enough preamble! Let’s get to the classes! In no particular order:

The Tactician

This is our front-line warrior, commander, and weaponmaster. This class has no explicit access to magic, but all classes get the benefit of Surges that let them do, if not magical things, extraordinary things and the Tactician is no exception.

Is the Tactician a tank? I’m not sure actually, I think certainly that will be one way to play them, but it might not be the only way.

The Tactician has (or will have, we think) both a Taunt and a Mark. You can mark an enemy and now all your allies get some bonus to attack that enemy (“Get him!”). You can also Taunt an enemy and now that enemy suffers a debuff if they attack anyone but you.

Those bonuses and debuffs will vary depending on what kind of Tactician you’re playing and may well synergize with other classes to create fun combos.

You’ll also be able to grant your allies free maneuvers and free attacks and maybe even grant the entire TEAM maneuvers and attacks as you level up. In this manner are you a battlefield commander. You create this organizing principle that makes the entire team fight better.

This was the original design I pitched back in September. I think it was Hannah who said a big part of the fantasy of being the Front Line Fighter should be being the Weapon Master. Being able to do things with weapons no other class can.

I agreed, so currently we think your choice of weapon(s) also has a big impact on your character. You get ‘weapon stunts’ based on your weapon properties (heavy, one-handed) and maybe even the specific weapon you’re using (rapier, quarterstaff)? These will almost certainly be powered up by Surges, they’re sort of what Surges are for.

The Tactician’s class resource is Focus. The longer the fight lasts, the more locked-in you get, the clearer you see the battlefield as you get in the zone. Focus will probably not directly translate to More Damage, I don’t think the Tactician is a Striker, but rather more and better maneuvers, attacks, and commands. Imagine an ability that costs focus and allows the Tactician to run across the battlefield. Every enemy they run past has to save or get knocked on their ass. That’s a simple, low-level example of what we’re thinking of.

We’ve also talked about the idea that ‘opportunity attacks’ or something like them will belong only to certain classes. I.e. my goblins can probably move past your Mage undeterred, but if they try to do the same thing to a tactician or a shadow or a fury, Something Bad Happens. It’s unclear if this is how it will work, it’s just something we’ve talked about. It might turn out that remembering who gets free attacks and who doesn’t, in the middle of a battle, is too much of a pain in the ass.

The tactician’s prime attributes are Might and Reason. The prototype tactician already has an attack that uses Reason and it’s a lot of fun imagining your character outsmarting an enemy and slipping past their defenses. It also means they’ll be good at Negotiation, at least when using reason to convince someone.

On an unrelated note, Owen, my first boss, once said “You have an inordinate degree of affection for the definite article.” He meant, most of the card names I came up with for the Dune CCG began with “The” and as you will see, that has not changed. 😂 But it’s not up to me what format our class names will be presented in, that’ll be mostly up to some combination of James and Hannah.

Except in this post! Definite articles everywhere!! I’ve gone MAD with power! Muahahaha *cough* *cough* *wheeze*. Ahem.

The Shadow

At this point we shift gears from “a class we think we know a lot about” to “a class we only understand at a surface level.” Most of the classes will be like this right now, as you’ll see.

The Shadow is MCDM’s name for your classic thief/rogue/assassin archetype. No idea what their class resource is (we’re not taking requests!) but we’re pretty sure they’re explicitly magical. They use “shadow magics” like the Black Ash Sorcery to give the normal, mundane thief a bunch of cool shadow-themed abilities that compliment their stealthy assassin archetype.

I have no idea how this class works or what resource they manage! It’s nice though that one word for “following someone” is shadowing them. 😀

The Mage

We actually have a couple of ideas about how magic might work in our game and it’s possible each of those ideas could turn into a different class and there’s just different kinds of magic, or different ways to be a magic-user in our game.

The class we’re testing right now is predicated on the idea that magic is complicated and hard to master. It takes research to learn and master new spells and we talked about what I think could turn into a robust general-purpose research mechanic.

So their class resource is knowledge which they spend to learn new spells. But this is not a resource you spend during combat, it’s something you earn between encounters through research, either studying some ancient tome you recovered or inherited, or through libraries or just talking to sages and wise-women. Then you spend it to master your spells.

The basic idea is; spells require research to learn, and any spell you just learned is going to be tricky to use, because you haven’t mastered it yet. A new spell, when you first start using it, it’ll work! It’ll do what it says on the tin, but there might be some unintended consequences. Which could be good or bad! Not “wacky hijinks” just…you haven’t said the words exactly right, draconic is a very complicated language compared to common.

The more you cast new spells, the sooner you master them and at that point there’s no change of side effects. You know how to use the spell. Which might seem very powerful, but at that point you’ll have leveled up, those spells aren’t that powerful anymore (relatively speaking) and you just unlocked NEW spells which are way better! But how do you pronounce that syllable exactly?

The Fury

The Fury is MCDM’s name for its “barbarian” or “berserker” archetype. They are a lightly armored or unarmored warrior who’s hard to kill, has high mobility, and does a lot of damage. If this game has roles for the classes, the Fury is a striker.

The fury’s class-resource is…fury, and spending fury will usually earn you more damage on your attacks. But it could be that not spending fury means you ignore more damage! I sometimes imagine our character sheets like a Eurogame where gaining Fury means you earn “red cubes” and you can slot them onto your character sheet to “power up” different abilities.

The Talent

The Talent is, as many of you already know, the MCDM Psionic Class. They fulfill the Jean Grey/Eleven from Stranger Things archetype. Roughly analogous to the 5E sorcerer. No research needed, their power is innate.

The talent accumulates strain which is a negative resource. As you clear strain it gets converted into clarity which powers up your late-game abilities.

The 5E talent has a long list of powers with a broad array of uses, much like the 5E wizard. Each power has a Difficulty Number you need to beat with a stat roll (in this game, Reason). If you beat the DC, the power goes off without a hitch and you don’t accumulate strain. As long as you don’t burn yourself out, in other words, you can keep manifesting powers.

If you fail to beat the DC, the power still happens! But you accumulate strain. Each point of strain debuffs your character, but these debuffs do not hinder your ability to keep manifesting your powers. They hinder everything else. 😀 The decision, therefore, to keep pushing yourself or stop and rest is up to you!

The Beastheart

The Beastheart is our Pet Class and already exists! In 5E form. The MCDM RPG version should play pretty similarly: you have a pet (called a companion) who gains ferocity based on how many enemies are near it, and also every time it takes damage.

Your pet can spend that ferocity to do cool stuff, or you can pull the ferocity off your pet to power up cool, unique Beastheart abilities. If your pet ever has too much ferocity it goes into a Rampage, which could be bad.

This is already a proven winner and not only one of our most popular 5E products, it pointed in the direction we wanted to take the RPG. Here’s a class resource, it’s cool and unique, do whatever you want with it! And we have tons of unique companions and I expect the MCDM RPG version will have all those and more.

The Conduit

The Conduit is MCDM’s name for its divine healing/buffing class. Cleric or priest or whatever. James named this and when I saw it I instantly loved it. I sort of wondered if it wasn’t too jargony? But later I was reading some fiction I’d written and I discovered I often used “conduit” as the word people in the world used to describe their ability to call upon the power of a god, saint, or Power.

The current version of the Conduit rolls the Cosmic Die at the beginning of their turn. Law results generate Virtue and Chaos results generate Wrath. As soon as I saw this I thought “that’s super cool, I already know how those work.” Virtue is used to buff and heal allies, Wrath is used to harm or debuff enemies! And your Signature Abilities can generate one or the other depending on what you’re trying to do.

Well we cut the Cosmic Die for now. Maybe it or something else like it will return, but the idea of the Conduit managing two resources is cool, new, and exciting to me. So far in our testing, it seems to be working!

The Censor

The Censor (as in ‘censorship’) is MCDM’s name for its heavily armored holy warrior. It’s based on me thinking about taking the Illrigger’s core mechanic; placing seals on enemies that debuff them or boost damage done to them, and imagining how it might be generalized into a broader class.

I imagined a church knight charged with abjuring or smiting or censoring specific flavors of monsters. An anti-fiend Censor, an anti-dragon Censor. Maybe the categories work differently? A Mage-slaying Censor that does well against any spellcaster. A Giant-slaying Censor who specializes in enemies larger than them.

This was an exciting idea but as I started to noodle on it I ran into problems. If you’re playing an Anti-dragon Censor…what do you do when there’s not a dragon around?

???

I tried different ideas, but always ran into this problem. James saw the work I was doing and said “I think it can work,” and when he says that he’s almost always right. So, right now, I don’t know exactly how the Censor will work, it may be you can be an anti-fiend censor, or an anti-undead censor, but those abilities represent minor bonuses, and otherwise your abilities all work on any enemies. You know, you’re 90% Censor, 10% anti-undead Censor.

Whatever happens, there will definitely be ways to customize your censor so their seals give you a broad array of options for silencing enemies…with extreme prejudice!

The Summoner

This is a class I am really excited to play. I sort of hate the absence of good Necromancer options in most fantasy RPGs. I think I understand the issue: running a horde of zombies is hard to balance! And source in a…not super evil way!

But minions exist! This is a solved problem! The Summoner is MCDM’s name for its necromancer class. But “a necromancer” is only one way to be a summoner! You could imagine that an infernal summoner summons a bunch of imps! Or a nature summoner summons a bunch of sprites. An elemental summoner might summon a bunch of little elementals.

It’s a really broad concept that supports lots of different kinds of gameplay. The basic pitch is; you summon minions. They are your resource. You can command them to attack, OR you can sacrifice them (you brought them into this world! Only fair that you can banish them again!) to power up your cool spells.

We don’t know much more about this class, but it seems like a very fertile opportunity for design.

The Operator

This is one of the only classes we already have concept art for! Check it out! That’s a Jason Hasenauer original, but it’s actually for a video game we worked on years ago. That art wouldn’t appear in our game. In our world, that device would be a Dwarven Magma Diver.

The Operator is MCDM’s name for its Mech Driver class. The resource you manage is probably heat and you start by choosing a frame with different hard points you slot weapons and systems into. Different frames are good for different kinds of Operator with more hardpoints for movement, or weapons, or defense.

When I pitched this, Hannah raised a really good point! “What does your character do when they’re not wearing the suit?” Ah, yeah good question. Eventually as we talked about it, we hit upon the idea that, really, you’re MacGuyver. You’re the toolsmith, an expert with any and all tools. In 5E tools are objects that contain skills, and we imagined the Operator getting special abilities they could do with those tools, like the tactician’s affinity with weapons.

I dunno if our game will have tools as a mechanic like that, I sorta doubt it, but the basic principle is the same. Your primary ability is; you are really good with a lot of skills and can do cool things with skills other people can’t do. And “operating a dwarven magma diver” is just one of those skills. “Anyone can run one of these things! As long as you got the knack for it.”

I do not think of the Operator as a “core class” but I don’t know that our game makes any real distinction between Core classes and Boutique classes. We just want to make sure we cover the classics, and then we can get ᘺᘿᓰᖇᕲ. The Operator isn’t particularly weird as a class, but it’s weird in a fantasy game!

But there’s tons of precedent. There have been Fantasy Mechs in D&D, like the Apparatus of Kwalish, almost since the beginning. Ours is just cooler. 😀 I think of the Operator as being a class better suited for a more High Fantasy or Space Fantasy game. Operator is probably a popular class in Timescape campaigns!

Whether it belongs in your campaign is purely a matter of taste. Totally reasonable for a GM to say “none of that Mech nonsense” when starting a new campaign.

The Null

The Null is MCDM’s name for its unarmed, unarmored, martial arts class. We imagine these folks are explicitly anti-magic. Or even really anti-supernatural effects. Anti-spell, anti-prayer, anti-power. They nullify supernatural effects, maybe even canceling out, or suppressing existing magical effects.

They eschew all tools, no spells, no weapons. They concentrate on perfection of body compared to the Talent’s perfection of mind. The resource they manage is probably discipline but we really haven’t thought about how they work. Maybe they gain discipline by punching people, and spend it to ignore incoming supernatural effects?

However it works, it almost certainly won’t be just “magic doesn’t work on me.” It’ll be more like, you’re better at resisting it, or shaking it off. Eventually though, as you level up, maybe, yeah spells and prayers and powers don’t work on you!

I love the idea of a class that specializes in perfection of body and slowly, as they level up, they become less mortal, less bound by time and flesh until eventually they’re immortal creatures who don’t need food, water, or air.

And The Rest…

We’re pretty sure our game will have a Troubadour class, but we have no idea what it does or how it will work. We’ve talked about an Elementalist class that’s like the Summoner except you summon exactly one creature, like a bodyguard to fight with you. A pet class, but not like the Beastheart. We had a discussion talking about how magic works in our game and in that discussion we hit upon an idea for how our Druid/Shaman class might work but for the life of me I cannot remember it right now. 😀

In Closing

There’s always a danger when you post something like this MONTHS before anyone’s going to be able to playtest any of these classes. On the one hand it gives people something cool to talk about, but then they have nothing to do with that excitement and I think sometimes this can damage the brand.

But I really enjoy writing these posts and there is an awful lot of pretty solid design advice up at the beginning and so I hope it’s all worth it. I hope you’re getting value out of these posts. It sort of feels like a class we’re teaching.

Actually what it reminds me a lot of is Running The Game. Starting from first principles and making sure you’re teaching folks the basics before you get to really complicated stuff.

No idea when the next post will be or what it will be about! But we got a design meeting coming up this week, fingers crossed that it yields more fun stuff to talk about.

Until next time! Peace, out!