I despise classes. They are inflexible and break immersion. Often they come with their ugly brother: levels.

Quote from: SaphimI despise classes. They are inflexible and break immersion. Often they come with their ugly brother: levels.

I found the opposite during my early days in gaming. Being able to play a fighter, thief or wizard immediately immersed me in the archetypal world the Moldvay D&D implied.

Nowadays I prefer a little more latitude within a given classes capabilities (cf. the aforementioned True20), but they've never been an immersion-breaker for me. Levels I can also happily live with.

Quote from: JamesVClasses are freakin brilliant, because classes are the pole star to PC identity within the rules. Classes cuts through the rigamarole of Ads/Disads, skills, traits and powers that seem to litter many point buy games, and cut right to a useful and identifiable character. Templates are just proof of that usefulness for players and GMs.

Now I can see where classes don't always make the best sense, especially for settings. IMO, I don't think classes are a good fit for emulating more modern and realistic types of settings. But if it's sci/fi or fantasy, classes are fantastic.

That's my take on it.

Case in point:

Quote from: Ryan Stoughton in the Microlite20-thread on ENWorldI am going to start another thread about this, but here's my wicked-cool setting idea that I'd love to see an m20-oid handle. Think of an intrigue-filled wild west set a thousand years after victorian steampunk (not severe magic chaos like eberron's last war).

I'm a firm believer that PC classes tell the story best:

Gunslinger
(Like a Ranger, no animal companions, must go ranged combat). Part of a brotherhood that has tremendous respect but very little political power. Code binds the gunslingers (i.e., must accept duels) but it's not alignment-based, so gunslingers can be on opposing sides of all sorts of conflicts. Code includes being impartial and sticking to the terms of a bargain. Non-gunslingers with guns are hunted down by the gunslingers, as are major violators of the code. Gunslingers must aid each other when someone breaks the terms of a gunslinger's contract. No weapons may be drawn in the presence of a gunsmith (gunsmiths are the non-combatant judges / craftsmen / trainers of the order).

Shaman
Setting's spirits are all incorporeal and unseen, but run the gamut from fickle tricksters to ancestor ghosts to nature spirits. There are also demons in the world, but they're your enemies.

Advocate
(Ninja-like abilities, esp. momentary invisibility and lethal strikes) Played as trained members of Houses, which are like crime families in a world with no police to get in the way. Imagine if rather than the Cavalry showing up, all you could hope for in the wild west was the arrival of the currently dominant local crime family. They are the political powers of the setting. These Houses span the setting - so if you make enemies of a House in one place, you've got enemies in lots of places. Houses know better than to try to acquire firearms, and they know well enough to hire Gunslingers when necessary. Advocates' secret fighitng style, including their ability to move undetected and make deadly strikes is passed from one generation to the next in a kind of assassin's apprenticeship. Advocates reach the highest levels of power within their Houses, although Advocates don't reveal that they are anything more than other gentlemen belonging to their Houses unless they have to.

Warlock
(somewhere between the concepts of warlock and binder in D&D) You made the deal, maybe under duress, or maybe for good reasons. Now you get the benefits. There are many demons in the world, and they can be used... but they can use you too. What's important, though, is that you stay alive, because you're not looking forward to what's waiting for you on the other side.

Tetsujin (metal men)
Fighters are tetsujin, and tetsujin are fighters. Played largely as-is (using stats for Warforged or Ironborn or whatever). They are found in some ancient ruins, and about a hundred years ago someone figured out how to wake them up. They don't know who they are, they don't know how they were made. Often this means they can be used by others, and they're sought after by the Houses.

These options are designed to provide cool character options but also require some kind of conflict to be built into each character.

Characters start at level 3 and cap at level 10, after which they gain feats only. Since each class has a very specific "order" or cultural context, no multiclassing. However, characters besides Fighters could become Warlocks if they make a pact and do an hour long ritual involving the consent and agreement of an actual demon, losing all other abilities in exchange for a Warlock's abilities.

Imagine this as a dusky setting, with ruined castles covered by vines found in the wilderness in a world that has not seen a "nation" in a thousand years. The great conflicts have played themselves out, and while the scars have healed, this is not an age of rebirth. Small towns and large towns are the rule throughout the setting. Centres of power are fortresses. Characters are humans only except for fighters (see below). Alignment is not used, magic is strange, and resurrection is impossible.

NPCs have NPC classes.

Monsters in the setting are the result of demons messing with the natural environment - which is why they pop up near peaceful settlements. Magic items are rare, and are either from demons, relics of the people who built the Warforged, or both. Any evil outsider is a candidate for a demon, are any intelligent evil monsters.

(From here.)

Quote from: Greywulf on the same thread(...) In m20 terms, I'd suggest the following:

Gunslinger: Fighter, with a Masterwork gun. If they use light armour, give them the ability to use Track (Sub+MIND) at +1 or somesuch
Shaman: Cleric, possible using 4x5 magic system to reflect their spirit's specialities
Advocate: Rogue
Tetsujin: Fighter
Warlock: Magi, again, 4x5 or even Open Ended Magic

Does that make sense? (...)

(From here.)

These short blurbs tell me more about a setting than a list of skills.

Quote from: LancerSo in your view, how would you define a "useful and identifiable character?"

A character that has a job and can do it well enough according to the rules. With point-buy games, you have to be more aware of what abilities your player has or else you run the risk of spreading too thin and hitting the game's whiff level. Classes guarantee that whatever you're doing according to your class, you will do it comparably well. If not, that's just shoddy design, and not related to the use of classes themselves.

Quote from: LancerWell, without all those restrictions and "cant dos" from classes, of course.

And that doesn't bother me. A little restriction and "can't do" simply means that I might need a little help in getting around, and I have buddies for that. What matters is, I know who my PC is and what he can do well.

Quote from: JamesVA character that has a job and can do it well enough according to the rules. With point-buy games, you have to be more aware of what abilities your player has or else you run the risk of spreading too thin and hitting the game's whiff level.

Yep. And here's the thing: straight up point buy (seconding an earlier poster that there are other ways than point buy that can work) makes the player into an amateur designer. Some players have little problem with that and do great. Others... well, aren't so good at it and make characters that are ineffective and illogical. But is it fair for you to single out the players you think suck at point design and make them use a class system? I think it's better everyone operate under the same rules.

And some just don't want to. To take an example, one time I had a player that wanted to make a martial arts type character. I pulled out a copy of my Blood and Fists, a cool little supplement that lets you make any martial art you can imagine. Now this obviously isn't point buy, but a looser menu driven class scheme similar to True20. Even that didn't work for her. She just wanted a class that gave her more damage and abilities as she progressed. This lead me to offer her Beyond Monks, which still gave her some points with which to customize her character, but didn't force her into doing the design busy-work of re-inventing the wheel.

Because face it: with point buy, if you decide to make a "martial artist", how different is the martial artist you make going to be from another well designed martial artist? I'd assert that the difference is no greater than the variance that feats and menu-driven class abilities or choice of alternate class levels can provide.

Templates are basically a porting of the strengths of classes to point gen systems. The shortfall with templates is that once character generation is done, they don't help you anymore.

I don't agree that modern and future settings don't benefit from classes; you still have tasks and roles and can define the action through the roles. I don't think they work well for the supers genre because abilities tend to be more wild and unrelated in the source material.

Quote from: Dirk RemmeckeSnip

I suspect Greywulf is a fan of The Dark Tower series. Very cool.

To answer the title question directly and predictably: it depends. Classes are a mechanism and games that use the mechanism for a reason usually get some success out of it. Games that don't also have an appeal. The only time classes bother me is when they are a reflexive design -- a part of the system because the author just doesn't know of another way to do it -- and turn out to be inappropriate to the material.

There are lots of great games out there doing things a bunch of different ways. I like that. I don't want one game or one way.

Quote from: JamesVA character that has a job and can do it well enough according to the rules. With point-buy games, you have to be more aware of what abilities your player has or else you run the risk of spreading too thin and hitting the game's whiff level.

Not really. Not with a GM that is willing to give you the help you need (as you mention later in your post). This is independent of the type of character creation system you are using. Not to mention that well-designed templates make this easy.

QuoteAnd that doesn't bother me. A little restriction and "can't do" simply means that I might need a little help in getting around, and I have buddies for that. What matters is, I know who my PC is and what he can do well.

A "can't do" is just that, a "can't do." As long as those exist, I won't have the complete freedom to create a character the way I want to.  To me, that sux although YMMV. The buddies that you speak of can still help you in a point buy system.

In an earlier post you seem to talk of Ads/Disads as a bad thing.. This is another thing that point buy systems tend to have that class systems like d20 lack. But it is such merit/flaw systems that help flesh out your character and give it personality-- things that go just beyond combat or skills. My characters in such games aren't just some video game characters on paper focused on killing things(like they tend to be in d20 games), but a person that can kick butt AND with a living, breathing personality of his own.

Quote from: LancerIn an earlier post you seem to talk of Ads/Disads as a bad thing.. This is another thing that point buy systems tend to have that class systems like d20 lack.

I'm not against ad/disad rules per se.  But they're often poorly done and trigger extreme min/maxing attempts in otherwise non-munchkin players.  They often put the burden on the gm to adjust the game to make sure that the group's 20 or so disads come up at a reasonable rate.

Quote from: NicephorusI'm not against ad/disad rules per se.  But they're often poorly done and trigger extreme min/maxing attempts in otherwise non-munchkin players.  They often put the burden on the gm to adjust the game to make sure that the group's 20 or so disads come up at a reasonable rate.

A small price to pay for the end result I prefer. For a GM intimate with the workings of his system, this is a no-issue. As for ads/disads being "poorly done" in many point buy games(whether true or not), that is an issue with that particular game's design, not with the concept itself.

In a class system, you are putting faith in the game's designers also that all the classes are reasonably balanced with respect to one another (remember the furor over Rangers in 3e?) and that feats/abilities and other such things also are properly scaled as well.  The more classes/abilities you have, the greater the chance that something will go awry...

The point is that there is no perfect system and these types of problems crop up no matter what system you play. It comes down to what your personal preferences and what you are looking for in your game.

Quote from: ZardozSince alignment is being questioned, wy not take a shot at classes too? Do you think that the class idea is a good one for RPG's?

Depends on the game in question. Classes are an excellent way to say "this is the sort of person this game is about"; the core classes in just about any edition of D&D are a fabulous example of this.

Looking at it from this perspective, I think class structures break down under two circumstances:

- The answer to "what sort of person is this game about?" is especially broad. If you want a game where people could potentially stat anybody up as a PC (say, if you're trying to design a generic system to model everything from rebellious peasants to warring gods), classes aren't going to work for you, unless you come up with such a vast number of them that you may as well just scrap the whole thing and use a point-buy system. Classes only work, to my mind, if there is sufficiently few of them that each class occupies a clear niche and is obviously different from the other classes.

- The answer to "what sort of person is this game about?" is especially narrow. The classic example of this is Ars Magica, where (if you're not bothering with troupe play) all the PCs are magicians. When all the PCs are magicians, or vampires, or whatever, you need to find some other means of differentiating them beyond "what sort of person are they?". Sure, the vampire clans in Vampire or the Houses in Ars Magica are almost like classes, except not really; they provide enough room for customisation that two Ventrue vampires or two Tremere magi could end up being completely differently from each other in terms of build.

Classes work best when the answer to "what sort of person is this game about?" is sufficiently broad to allow a range of different types of character, but narrow enough to exclude characters which fall outside that range. D&D is the classic example: the answer is "this game is about people who set forth to find adventure and advance themselves". So, clerics and wizards and thieves and warriors are in, pig farmers (who aren't likely to be inclined to go adventuring - who'd look after the pigs?) and emperors (who have no need for personal advancement) are out.

Quote from: ZardozSince alignment is being questioned, wy not take a shot at classes too? Do you think that the class idea is a good one for RPG's?

Well hey, consider how GURPS doesn't use any kind of class structure, and to me GURPS has always managed to turn itself into a drawn out min-maxing contest at character creation.   Though don't try to tell the nutcases over at the SJ Games Forum that...

RPGPundit

I mention that I like classes here, but not the reason for it.

I use two game systems- Age of Heroes for fantasy and HERO System for everything else. The first is classed based, the second isn't.

The primary reason for the use of Classes in Age of Heroes  is advancement control and niche protection (which seems to mean something different to some people here, no sure what- so I'm using to mean what I thought it has always meant).

My fantasy campaigns cover decades of game time, players over decades of real time (at about 3:1 or 4:1 ratio). It seeks to have fathers fighting alongside sons and balance throughout the range of the game is highly important to.

I might be able to manage that with open point buy such as HERO System, but the work determinging how the points should be spent are not worth it. Plus frankly, few systems scale well as the characters advance. In D&D, just how useful would a 20th level find his 1st son on a adventure to save the world?

To me Classes resolve this problem. I can provide with nearly any character concept I'm willing to allow into my game- and do it a method that is basically fire and forget for me (as GM, not designer).

Quote from: RPGPunditWell hey, consider how GURPS doesn't use any kind of class structure, and to me GURPS has always managed to turn itself into a drawn out min-maxing contest at character creation.   Though don't try to tell the nutcases over at the SJ Games Forum that...
RPGPundit

Classes are nice for packaging abilities in a way that makes sense (in theory). I think the adoption of templates for GURPS was a smart move that marries the best of classes and the flexibility of point systems.

I concur with the min maxing part. I had several min maxers among my players who stretched GURPS to the breaking point.

Rob Conley

Quote from: LancerIn an earlier post you seem to talk of Ads/Disads as a bad thing.. This is another thing that point buy systems tend to have that class systems like d20 lack. But it is such merit/flaw systems that help flesh out your character and give it personality-- things that go just beyond combat or skills. My characters in such games aren't just some video game characters on paper focused on killing things(like they tend to be in d20 games), but a person that can kick butt AND with a living, breathing personality of his own.

Most D20 variants (ergo most class systems) have advantages. They are called feats.

Disadvantages... I'd rather have no disadvantages than classical "points up front" disadvantages. As far as I've seen, they only get treated like a point farm, and players only pick ones they think they can avoid. Games like 7th Sea, Spirit of the Century, Haven d20, Spycraft, and the like (not all class systems, mind you) have flaws that only reward you when they are an obstacle are much more palatable IMO.