Hey, I know this question is out there.....

I don't profess to have an answer; aside from allowing every character to play a Fighter / Magic User (Magus), and allowing them to choose from both Arcane and Divine Spell Lists.

Any ideas?

Yes.

A few ways you can go about it. The one I came up with and considered most viable and the least hassle was having everyone one of two classes, the Fighter or Thief, and then returning the original playtest Magic Adept feats. And expending on them to allow access to higher tiers of magic. Thus if someone wants magic they will have to pay in feats for it.

A more comvoluted system I came up with that opens things up to swapping abilities from other classes. Same basic startoff as above. But add in the option to trade a level ability gained for one from another class.

Essentially start off with a simple core and allow the players to customize off that.

Aaaand. Bradshaw had a video up with his own take on how to go about it.

Adventures in Middle Earth I believes make the answer to this a yes.

Check out the generic classes in the 3.5 Unearthed Arcana. For 5E you could probably make spellcasting just another feature on the warrior list and merge the expert in as well. Essentially, every level you pick a benefit from some class or another and the amalgam becomes your character.

Well, it is possible. Jut make a single "class" with a list of options. My version of Moldvay is basically a classless system "disguised" as a class system, i.e., the difference between classes is just the choice of skills/feats.

As others have said, yes. It's my preferred method of doing a D&D-style game and what I used for my own hack some time ago. A good published example IMO is the heroic mortal rules in Godbound. Everyone has the same basic rules (hit points and the like) and then as they gain experience they can choose from lists of what are essentially Feats to build their character -- gaining access to magic, getting special combat abilities, etc.

I'm sure you could do this, 5e is modular enough. But why?

Quote from: RPGPundit;1079111I'm sure you could do this, 5e is modular enough. But why?

Because some people have a pathological hatred of classes.

Quote from: Omega;1079133Because some people have a pathological hatred of classes.

I don't have a hatred of Classes; but sometimes I pause and wonder, what if?

At the very least for those willing to put the time and effort it would be interesting to see and/or hear the results.

Quote from: Razor 007;1079135I don't have a hatred of Classes; but sometimes I pause and wonder, what if?

Was not meaning you. I like both. Classes have their uses and from experience I learned as a designer that players have an easier time working out a character if they have at least some sort of basic frame to build on. Hence why my first book had not so much classes as basic frames the players could use as a starting point.

And the "custom character" system that was introduced in Dragon for BX D&D is still one of my favourites. Alot more functional than the one they put in 2e.

Quote from: Razor 007;1078326Hey, I know this question is out there.....

I don't profess to have an answer; aside from allowing every character to play a Fighter / Magic User (Magus), and allowing them to choose from both Arcane and Divine Spell Lists.

I haven't used it, but from search, "Freeform 5E" by DevanT77 seems to be a good effort.

https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/B1m8IMmMNZ

Any open point system can be abused - so I am sure that this could be messed with. However, the potential gain is the variety of characters and having personalized advancement. I would say that it should be used with some GM moderation, so the GM can disallow certain combinations or charge extra based on personal judgement. That was something I had to do in the Hero System, for example. One could even go to a more freeform system of just using GM judgement to give out advancements, possibly based on player wish lists.

I do feel that particularly in a role-playing game, game balance is overrated. With hugely varying circumstances, what happens in adventures, and so forth - it's almost impossible to rate abilities against each other. Too often, I feel, game balance can determine what adventures are suitable - as opposed to adjusting the system/characters to be balanced for the adventures.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1079111I'm sure you could do this, 5e is modular enough. But why?

Personally, classless characters seem attractive to me for immersion reasons. Compared to games with more freeform characters like FATE or GURPS, I find that D&D characters often feel artificial. The classes distract from seeing the characters as real people within the world. In particular, when characters ponder about their future - what they might learn and/or aspire to in a year or five years. In a class system, what they become is very regimented. Last November, I played in a game set in Eberron at AmberCon NorthWest using a variant of the Amber system - which was an interesting twist and made me think more about it.

Would you drop levels too?  Because you get a very different answer depending upon whether or not levels are kept.

If levels are kept, then it is effectively not a classless system, but a system that happens to have only one class.  Most of the answers so far are some variant on that, where the class is a vestigial framework that is only retained to hang the levels on.

If levels are not kept, then now we are talking some alternatives to represent magic ability, fighting ability, etc.  Could be skills.  Could be something else.  I think at that point, then Pundit's answer is probably on point.  Because once you start down that road, then might as well go with something like GURPs, Hero, or the like, with appropriate limitations to simulate something moderately D&D-like.  

I ran a Fantasy Hero variant of that nature for about a decade.  It worked very well for the purpose of breaking down those artificial distinctions.  Sometimes we wanted to keep a particular distinction, and kept it via campaign rules.  For example, the system might support doing arcane magic in heavy armor just fine, but we might say a character couldn't do it.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1079243If levels are not kept, then now we are talking some alternatives to represent magic ability, fighting ability, etc.  Could be skills.  Could be something else.  I think at that point, then Pundit's answer is probably on point.  Because once you start down that road, then might as well go with something like GURPs, Hero, or the like, with appropriate limitations to simulate something moderately D&D-like.

Obviously, taking out classes and levels makes the game a hybrid system that differs more from the original. But still, character advancement is only one piece of the game. There's a horde of other mechanics - combat, skills, spells, monsters, and so forth - which are unchanged. And D&D works very differently than GURPS in those.

In 5E, it's even official that NPCs don't use the class-and-level system.

At this point, I think the only play rules that reference character level directly is in spellcasting - and there you can just do what is done for NPCs, which is to have "spellcaster level" as an independent stat. Everything else is entered into the character sheet separately - like skills, saving throws, Base Attack Bonus, and hit dice. So if I were to adopt this for my D&D5 game, the only time things would change would be when players apply experience to advance their characters. All the rest of the game would be exactly the same.

Quote from: jhkim;1079215I haven't used it, but from search, "Freeform 5E" by DevanT77 seems to be a good effort.

https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/B1m8IMmMNZ

Thanks for linking to this. I had never heard of it, but it looks like a fun concept (particularly for a one-shot).