Wednesday, September 4, 2019

Don't put me in a box yet!

Recently, I've taken another look at a couple of systems to find out which one might be best suited for fantasy one shots. I do these a lot at the open gaming nights at our bookshop, and mostly, I've been using FantasyAGE and DungeonWorld for these, depending on how free-form I want things to be and how I feel about one or the other of these system on that particular day. However, one thing I don't like about these two systems is their pretty rigid character classes (yeah, I know, "playbooks" - they're still basically classes). So I startet looking around for something new ...

... which got me thinking: What exactly is it that I dislike about character classes? Especially for one-shots, they're a great tool. Done well, they ensure that every character brings some core competences to the table (Kevin Crawford made me aware of this very simple function of class in his excellent Stars Without Number), and they usually make it easier to create pre-gens and explain to new players what their characters can and can't do.
Disliking character classes for the kind of fantasy one-shots I tend to do is actually pretty irrational. It's a transfered dislike that comes from another source: I dislike what character classes tend to do in campaign play.
I mean, I'm a player in a Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign and loving it. I love little system details like the "deed die" for warriors that allows you to pull crazy stunts without any rules overhead; I love rolling on the crazy tables for spell results; I LOVE the artwork; but every time I look at the class chart that tells me how exactly the core abilities of my character will look like fifty, hundred or five-hundred XP hence (should she survive), I get vaguely depressed. It's all planned out. I'll never be able to shield bash like a dwarf if I'm not a dwarf (I could try something similar as a mighty deed of arms if I'm a warrior), and if I'm a halfling, I'll just have to fight with two weapons to minimize my chance to fumble, because everything else would be totally bonkers.
In a way, DCC characters seem to get less interesting as they advance, at least in terms of the rules (unless you're a wizard who gets corrupted ...). I mean, in the beginning, it is all about the profession you roll and how you can make it count in your first few adventures. Later, you get all the standardized and much more powerful class fare and turn from a farmer with a hayfork into a proper warrior. Don't get me wrong, DCC classes are shock-full of great and crazy ideas, but still - the whole thing makes me feel boxed in.
It's important to me that this is not about control. I'm totally okay with rolling stats, and I'm a big fan of lifepath systems that allow characters to emerge I would have never thought of; I've been playing in a RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha campaign for a while now, and although I made very few actual decisions in character generation, I consider my character in that group one of the coolest I've ever played. In my book, having full control of your character often turns out to be a recipe for coming up with something that sounds interesting in concept, but turns out to be no fun to play at all. I don't need control; I just need the idea that my characters way through life is open-ended.
Of course, most class systems are not as rigid as DCC and other old-school games; FantasyAGE allows some customization through talents (though it relegates a lot of that to higher levels), and you also get a lot of control over which core abilities to raise. Still, I always feel I have to pull against the system to come up with something that surprises me. And DungeonWorld, despite all its free-form elements, is even more rigid when it comes to classes and what they can and can't do ...
Of course, this IS also a feature, especially for one-shot play. Once again, I'm being al little irrational here, but I just feel more comfortable with running and playing systems where characters feel more open-ended.
You could object that a character usually is more than her or his stats, anyway. While that is true, in most rpgs, characters are their stats to a significant degree - there's of course other stuff defining them, first and foremost what they have experienced in their hopefully adventurous lives, but still, a lot of what the characters do and how they will come across is based on their mechanical core abilities, at least if you're playing the typical stuff.
I've tinkered with making FantasyAGE less class-dependent and succeeded to a certain degree, but there are some other problems with it, mainly its "featism", where the characters' abilities are increasingly defined by special moves with special rules for them (another thing I don't like, because it produces so much rules overhead and simply feels inelegant - also the reason why FantasyAGE's class-less sister game ModernAGE doesn't do anything for me). However, at some point, I felt that maybe I was just putting a little too much effort into making FantasyAGE something that comes closer to my ideal of a "good" role-playing game, while it already serves perfectly well as a one-shot game for our open gaming nights (well, not perfectly - I have to stick to low-level characters because of tfeatism, and I had to pare down and simplify the Combat Stunts to make them manageable for newbies).
So in the end, I'll probably keep using FantasyAGE and DungeonWorld for a while, until I find a game that works well for one-shots, but also supports interesting character development on a rules level. At the moment, I'm having a closer look at Tiny Dungeon and the Ubiquity system, which both look promising. Also, simple BRP games like OpenQuest are always an option. Apart from fantasy, I've found myself strangely enticed by the current edition of Mongoose's Traveller - I actually like the skill-centric core mechanics, and as I said, I'm a big fan if lifepath chargen. I love giving up control - I just don't want to feel stuck in a box that I'll never be able to get out of again ...

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