Staying Classy

While the core mechanics are (and frankly have been) done for quite some time for Roguish, a more troubling aspect is how to handle characters.  One of the things I enjoyed about TFT, and other skill based systems like RuneQuest, is the feeling of making the character my own, unique and different.  By choosing what to specialize in I feel like my character is different from yours.  To me this difference is more than just I'm a fighter you are a thief, I developed mine and chose specific talents or skills to make mine different than yours.  Just like in life, different choices may have had me teaching history today rather than working for an entertainment  company.

Here is the problem though.  When you present someone a character sheet for RuneQuest, or Palladium Fantasy, there are tons of little skills and blanks to fill in.  Character generation takes quite some time, and for a greenhorn, it's more than a little daunting.  One of the initial hooks of D&D (Moldvay Basic box is where I started) was how quickly we could start playing.  You picked what you wanted to be, rolled stats, bought some gear, and scooted into a chaotic cavern somewhere to loot.

Melee and Wizard were quick and easy to play by limiting choices to a few skills or spells.   The problem was as you got into a full fledged RPG the choices exponentially grew leading to analysis paralysis.  Hmm...what skills will work best for me?  Whether you gamed with a munchkin, a rules lawyer, or a newbie, character creation could grind the fun out of the start of a game.

In today's gaming world the key to a good one is getting someone into action as quickly as possible.  In a blip-vert world, if it takes a kid longer then a minute or two to start playing and picking it up, most will move on.  Action movies start with action, plug in any console game and you get a cinematic pull in immediately.  So a whole generation is being programmed for instant gratification.  Second and actually as important, is individual customization.  It's a critical part of any experience now from buying a cellphone cover to making an avatar, to picking dice to play with.  People have an driving need to make themselves and their things special and unique.

So making every fighter or every dwarf exactly alike and relying or expecting a new or inexperienced player to fill in the uniqueness blanks is probably a bit much.  With experience, sure, but expecting a new player to do it? Not so much.

Okay so what about character background? How about rolling on some charts to get a back ground history or past career or reference stories?  Again while providing potential character grounding and background abilities for a new character, it may also seem random, pointless and overlong to a new player.  It could be even more daunting for a new referee.  If a player's character has friends in a local thieves guild, but your campaign is on the fringes of a decaying empire then how does that fit together?

Most experienced players will sort it out on their own suing house rules or systems from previous games.  While I personally like rolling backgrounds and unique character trivia, not everyone does, and it does slow down the start of the game.  So how does a cat who likes everything he just wrote in his own games end up chucking it all and not putting it into his own?

Well that's the tough part and its what's dragging the process out, that and magic-but that's a different post.  While I strongly dislike the confines of the class system, and the broken nature of it, it does have some strengths.  Having to multi-class characters is crap in my opinion. Its the ultimate combo of creating power munchkin gamers, and to my mind, a band-aid for an admitted broken system.  So then more and more classes and off shoots and specialty rules and classes are made to expand player choices.  It all becomes a bit unwieldy as presented.

Even so, I think a branching class tree will solve the problem.  Starting out as a Fighter, Wizard, or Rogue at level one has a player make two basic choices after rolling a character: Race then Class.  At Second level you'd then pick a specialty path for your character.  Then at a higher level (7th) you'd pick another specialty class to evolve into.  The key is making the game easy to start like the original D&D and adding individual stages of reward and customization as a player grows in experience.