I’ve always come back to character classes when noodling around with game system design. I appreciate the variants on class construction–templates, packages, focuses–yet mostly am content with building characters using character classes. Now that I’m again working on a bespoke system (and a supplement offering alternate takes on an existing system), I’m again looking at character classes and what I want from them.
The ways I evaluate classes these days involves a handful of questions. I interrogate the class, so to speak.I interview it to gauge how well it’s going to fit. Including a class simply because it’s a cool idea just doesn’t cut it as good design–it has to actually work well in more than one fashion.
How does it fit thematically? Every class idea has to be evaluated for how well it fits the theme(s) of the game. “Well, it’s a fantasy game and this is a fantasy character class” isn’t enough justification. How well does that class serve the themes your design explores? For example, does an Asian-flavored monk class really serve well when all else in the system is very much European-flavored medieval fantasy? If the system demands self-sacrifice to succeed, does a class predicated on self-indulgence at every turn really fit?
Then, what purpose does it serve? What purpose in the types of setting the system supports? What purpose in a typical group of PCs? What does the class provide that helps the efforts of a group in meeting the challenges expected and demanded by the system?
This is a question that moves beyond the collection of discrete abilities possessed by class members. It reaches to what those abilities provide during play. For example, my previous post about thieves touched on what thieves can add to play–access to otherwise blocked areas, access to areas the party wouldn’t know even existed, information from shady underworld contacts, influence among the same, and so on. The measure of the class goes beyond the simple capabilities of picking locks and neutralizing traps.
What campaign types does the class fit? Assuming that the system is intended to support multiple types of campaigns, how well does the class fit with each of those campaigns envisioned? In a fantasy system that is intended to support undead-hunting PC groups or mercenary, A-Team style operations or rooting out Fae plots on the stability of the mundane lands or groups helping support a beleaguered barony during an invasion–how does it work in each of these?
How does the class develop over the expected course of play? If the game uses experience levels to guage development, how does it actually develop over those levels? How do its capabilities expand and change? What can it do at high levels that it couldn’t prior? As the campaign unfolds, how does it adjust to what’s going on?
A character class can only be judged worth adding (or not) after being evaluated from several points of view, I reckon. I know that I’ve had to redesign classes I’ve been evaluating; I’ve even discarded some ideas as not fitting due to concerns in one of the areas I mentioned above. It’s been entertaining to consider all the classes from multiple points of view and I expect it to help the final class roster work much better in all the games using the system.