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Classes or classless, which system is better in RPGs?

Desolate Dancer

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By having high scores in "Unarmed combat", "Massage", "Etiquette" and "Seduction" skills?
I'm really baffled by the assumption going around in this thread that you can have a class for anything, but you have to limit skills to some arbitrary standards. By the same logic (or, more exactly, lack thereof) I could ask you how you would emulate "Toaster repair" skill from Wasteland having only the 4 core DnD classes and multiclassing.
So how many skills are you planning to implement? You just named 3 arbitrary things that I just came up with, but a single class can easily cover this 3 and dozens of others.

In a class-based system if you have e.g. 12 classes they will 99% cover every possible trope, concept and skill that you can encounter in an average fantasy rpg.

In a class-less system you have finite many skills. Finite many skills cannot possibly have a contingency for every idea/encounter that the DM/game designer can throw at you. You can try and do that but you have a constraint in time and budget, plus you risk alienating a portion of your target audience if they are NOT looking for another Path of Exile 'skill-tree'.

And to answer your question: if I only had 4 classes then Toaster repair skill (aka Tinkering) would obviously go to the Expert/Rogue/Thief, provided the 3 other classes are Warrior, Mage and Priest.
 

V_K

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Finite many skills cannot possibly have a contingency for every idea/encounter that the DM/game designer can throw at you.
So skills are finite but classes are infinite? This is the same backward logic by which the DM making an encounter that isn't supported by the game's systems is somehow a problem of the system and not the retardedness of the DM.
Expert/Rogue/Thief
There's nothing in DnD 1e that says rogue is the same as "expert". By the same logic, the concept of "Illusion" spell school could be extended to include detecting illusions (i.e. siren songs).
 

JarlFrank

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monk-masseuse-courtesan hybrid, lets call it Geisha. It is obvious they can be useful in quests related to back-pain and ball-dancing, and they can also do well in hand-to-hand combat and hidden weaponry, but how would you pinpoint this on a class-less system, in a ttrpg or otherwise?
By having high scores in "Unarmed combat", "Massage", "Etiquette" and "Seduction" skills?
I'm really baffled by the assumption going around in this thread that you can have a class for anything, but you have to limit skills to some arbitrary standards. By the same logic (or, more exactly, lack thereof) I could ask you how you would emulate "Toaster repair" skill from Wasteland having only the 4 core DnD classes and multiclassing.

Exactly. I don't get the problem with this.

The monk-masseuse-courtesan hybrid can easily be implemented in a classless system by just adding skills like massage, unarmed combat, seduction, maybe even a sex skill if you want that kind of thing.

And since you ask how to implement this not only in a CRPG but also in TTRPGs... TTRPGs are even easier to design this way than CRPGs, because players and DMs can introduce house rules.

How a DM has to introduce a new class in a class-based system: come up with a new class with entirely new abilities, levelup bonuses, etc etc.
How a DM can introduce a new character concept in a classless system: just add a handful of new skills the players can invest points into.

The perfect example of this is GURPS. GURPS is a universal role playing system with rules that can be applied to any setting and any story. You can use it for fantasy, science ficiton, superheroes, etc. There are even GURPS supplements for real-world settings like cold war espionage or WW2 partisans, and it's very easy for the DM and players to come up with their own additions and add them to the game.

GURPS allows you to purchase advantages and disadvantages for your character, as well as having classic skills to invest points into. The advantages and disadvantages include character backgrounds. Wanna play a paladin? Take a disadvantage called "Vow of Honor" which forces your character to act honorably, and the DM is allowed to force you to do a thing or forbid you from doing a thing if it would break your vow. This disadvantage gives you additional points you can then spend to increase both combat and magic proficiency, to get the typical hybrid fighter-cleric style of character that most paladins are.

If you have a classless system that is flexible enough, you can create any "class" with it - except that it's less rigid. Especially in a pen and paper system where players can use house rules and add their own elements to the game, this is vastly superior. There's no need to create an entire new class if you want to do something new, you just invent new skills or new advantages/disadvantages and you're good to go.

Class based essentially restricts the choice of possible player characters to what the designers intended. Classless allows the players more freedom to come up with their own character concepts.
 

JarlFrank

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So how many skills are you planning to implement? You just named 3 arbitrary things that I just came up with, but a single class can easily cover this 3 and dozens of others.

In a class-based system if you have e.g. 12 classes they will 99% cover every possible trope, concept and skill that you can encounter in an average fantasy rpg.

U wot m8

Ok let's try a little experiment

Let's take those 12 classes and try to make a classless system that covers the same breath of possibilities as those classes do

Step 1: take all the skills and abilities those classes have
Step 2: make all those skills and abilities selectable by players when they create or level up characters
Step 3: you now have a classless system that has the exact same amount of possibilities as the class based system, except actually there's more possibilities as you can combine abilities more freely than in the class based system

Let's say you have the geisha, a monk/masseuse/courtesan

What if you want to play a sorceress who's good at massaging and sex?

Well, you can't, because massaging and fucking are abilities exclusive to the geisha.

In a classless system, you can easily create a sorceress/masseuse/courtesan, as easily as you can create a monk/masseuse/courtesan.
 

Desolate Dancer

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So skills are finite but classes are infinite? This is the same backward logic by which the DM making an encounter that isn't supported by the game's systems is somehow a problem of the system and not the retardedness of the DM.
No. Classes inherently represent every possible adventurer type in your game so it is logical that any given encounter is resolvable by at least 1 of the classes, preferably there's also a minimal overlap so that they can assist/supplement one another. The DM/game designer should not use an encounter that is unresolvable, obviously. There can be encounters that are class specific, yes, but this should be used sparingly, just as race specific and faction specific encounters.

In a class-based approach you declare the: skills that you must have, skills that you might have and skills that you can't have. This gives soul to your character.
In a class-less approach you don't declare anything, you just throw a bunch of skills and devise a point buy system. This will result in an inherently soulless character.

How do you even answer the question: 'What character are you playing?' in a ROLE-playing game if you cannot even name your own character? Either you start explaining one by one all of your skills and their current skill level (or whatever), OR you'd simply say that 'well I'm kind of a melée type sword dancer caster hybrid who is equally good at using a rapier and casting illusions spells...' To which your partner can simply react like: "Oh, so you are a Swordspell?" So to sum it up, you cannot NOT label your character, it is tedious and not human-like to act in that way, but once you actually name them (either by accident or willingly), you might as well play with official classes. Classes can still offer a great deal of variety with the additional benefit of being easy to pick them (no analysis paralysis or skill-scamming), easy to transition to the game world (you know more or less what a Wizard or a Thief may or may not be capable of doing), and giving a framework for your party (if we are talking about a party-based game, but I'd argue that even a single-char game does better with classes).
 

V_K

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Oh, so we're talking about souls of fictional beings. I didn't know you were that far gone, sorry for bothering. Say hi to your imaginary friends from me. Yes, to all 20 of them.
 

JarlFrank

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In a class-based approach you declare the: skills that you must have, skills that you might have and skills that you can't have. This gives soul to your character.
In a class-less approach you don't declare anything, you just throw a bunch of skills and devise a point buy system. This will result in an inherently soulless character.

How do you even answer the question: 'What character are you playing?' in a ROLE-playing game if you cannot even name your own character?

Uuuh but you can?

In a class based system it's the developers who name your character. Any character concept that is outside of what they've explicitly designed cannot be played. As in my example above, a dev may have thought about a class as specific as the geisha, but the dev hasn't thought about adding a seductive sorceress, so if you wanna go for a seductress you have to go with the geisha. It's restrictive and artificial.

In a classless system it is the player who actually gets to shape and name his character. Maybe you want to play as literally Conan the Barbarian? Yeah, go ahead, pick the skills, abilities, advantages and disadvantages that make your character as close to Conan as possible.

In a class-based system you have to hope that the devs included a Barbarian class, because if they didn't, you're shit outta luck.
 

JarlFrank

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So to sum it up, you cannot NOT label your character, it is tedious and not human-like to act in that way, but once you actually name them (either by accident or willingly), you might as well play with official classes.

Why?

Again, the example above: dev thought of monk/masseuse/courtesan, but not of sorceress/masseuse/courtesan.
Maybe the dev even thought about barbarian/scout/philosopher, but not about soldier/diplomat/wrestler, so if you want to play a combat-diplomacy hybrid you have to go for the Conan style barbarian philosopher.

What benefit is there in restricting roleplaying choices for the player?
 

Desolate Dancer

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Step 1: take all the skills and abilities those classes have
Maybe I haven't stressed enough but we aren't just talking about (mechanical in-game) skills there's also the narrative part of the whole deal, among many. Your whole premise is that you can convert these stuff back and forth but it's not like that. In order to cover everything as in every imaginable skill you can come up with you would need thousands of skills. Yet, if I say 'Art' as a general concept or 'Entertaining' as a general concept you can easily attach these to a Bard or Geisha class. A class that way remains open-ended since even if you don't have a mechanical in-game skill equivalent of Calligraphy e.g. you can still hand-wave the whole encounter by saying that 'Geishas spend their childhood practicing every forms of art and entertainment so ofc they know how to do that.'...

Let's say you have the geisha, a monk/masseuse/courtesan

What if you want to play a sorceress who's good at massaging and sex?
Ofc you can do that, why not? All bugs are insects but not all insects are bugs. A Geisha is be definition good at sex, otherwise they'd get fired from Geisha school even before they reach level 1 that class. But this doesn't mean that anyone's wife or gf can't be good at sex. But in game, if you have to pick anyone during an encounter where you have to fuck the guard to give you the keys, then Geisha will be the obvious choice: she is a trained professional who also has no quarrels fucking unknown man for benefits, unlike your picky SJW sorceress who is unwilling to even summon monsters since she believes it is a form of slavery and is totally casternormative thing to do. The only limit is your imagination, but, as always, there are guidelines and pathways...

In a classless system, you can easily create a sorceress/masseuse/courtesan, as easily as you can create a monk/masseuse/courtesan.
In a class-less system you might just as easily imagine the same thing, that a class-based system offers you plain and simple from the get-go.


In a class based system it's the developers who name your character. Any character concept that is outside of what they've explicitly designed cannot be played.
Yes, and here's why that's a good thing... any skill outside of the skills implemented in-game are also off limits to the player. So, what's the big deal? It is constraining to have classes yet it is not constraining to have 'just the skills' those damn developers coded into the final product? I mean I admit the difference in the magnitude, all I and others are arguing is that the additional 'safe space' does not worth the effort since you lose out more on not having class-based concepts than winning on a point buy-esque system.

In a classless system it is the player who actually gets to shape and name his character. Maybe you want to play as literally Conan the Barbarian? Yeah, go ahead, pick the skills, abilities, advantages and disadvantages that make your character as close to Conan as possible.
As I stated before, there are many other factors in an average rpg that helps further shape your character aside from the base class. Constraining really is not an issue, especially not of the imagination, if anything, the class helps to give some framework to your character, as well as weaknesses and 'can't haves' something that I rarely see in skill-based games. The former is more role-playing the latter is more power fantasying.

In a class-based system you have to hope that the devs included a Barbarian class, because if they didn't, you're shit outta luck.
Sure thing, but generally speaking if you build a game world then you should build all possible adventurer type classes as well that should belong to the world, in your opinion ofc. Mind you, just because as a player you have a fantasy idea, the game itself is not bound to cater to all your ideas and all players' fantasies. Due to the sales machine it is unfortunate that this rule had long since been forgotten. If I as a writer/designer build a game world (first and foremost) and I say all elephants are pink in my game, then a player who wants to have blue elephants can fuck off. Just as in politics you cannot simultaneously cater to all, so then you might as well focus on a group and cater to their needs tenfold. Any attempts otherwise will end up like every single shit game that has been shet out in the past decades.
 

anvi

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You guys are all a bunch of larping noobs. You care more about building up your virtual Barbie than you do about the quality of the combat. I think this is because you have never played something with truly great combat so you don't even know how good it could and should be. If you played something with powerful class spells, you would see how fun it is to be a Necromancer that can drain life from an enemy and completely recover all your health while also protecting yourself with spells like Fear. Or a Wizard that can Disintegrate a target, or a Cleric that lands a heal at the last second which completely heals the target, etc.

As soon as you give the player the ability to have any of these spells they want, the game becomes far too easy and broken - because everyone is a tanky disintegrating healer. The only way to prevent that is to weaken all the spells which ruins what made them good to begin with. Or you restrict the spells which is basically all a class is... only with less effort put into making sure every possible choice plays well. You can't have it both ways. You can have your Barbie games that you build a character from a pool of bland abilities, or you can have a class based game with interesting, challenging and well tuned combat. You can even have classes that let you pick spells/abilities so you still feel like you contributed to the design which is the best of both worlds.

It's restrictive and artificial.

Conan the Barbarian?

In a class-based system you have to hope that the devs included a Barbarian class, because if they didn't, you're shit outta luck.
A game not having a class that you want isn't a problem with the class concept, it is a problem with that specific game not having what you want. A good enough game with classes has everything you would want covered, and more. Also why shouldn't it be restrictive? You talk about Conan, but if he could chop off heads with his 2 handed sword while also using massive healing spells, fireballs, and teleports, it would be a joke. If you restrict what your Conan build can have, then that is basically just a class... And it is better to have the classes designed by a talented dev than pray that players will end up with good combat when picking from a large pool of abilities. It just isn't going to work, you will end up far too strong by picking the most powerful abilities, or far too weak if the enemies are designed to challenge a self healing Conan Wizard, when what you built was traditional Conan. Or they do what every classless game does and resort to having no spells or abilities that are powerful or interesting. ie: Skyrim.
 
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JarlFrank

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Step 1: take all the skills and abilities those classes have
Maybe I haven't stressed enough but we aren't just talking about (mechanical in-game) skills there's also the narrative part of the whole deal, among many. Your whole premise is that you can convert these stuff back and forth but it's not like that. In order to cover everything as in every imaginable skill you can come up with you would need thousands of skills. Yet, if I say 'Art' as a general concept or 'Entertaining' as a general concept you can easily attach these to a Bard or Geisha class. A class that way remains open-ended since even if you don't have a mechanical in-game skill equivalent of Calligraphy e.g. you can still hand-wave the whole encounter by saying that 'Geishas spend their childhood practicing every forms of art and entertainment so ofc they know how to do that.'...

Prelude to Darkness is a very good (if horrendously buggy) classless RPG which has a "music" skill. It doesn't have a lot of utility but can be used several times during the game for things bards might do. Singing, playing instruments, etc.

A classless system also allows for broader skills and abilities like "art", "music", "entertainment" etc rather than having to split it into "wind instruments", "string instruments", "singing", etc.

Furthermore, you can enhance classless systems with backgrounds, as I mentioned in several examples above, like GURPS allows you to, for example.
If you want your character to be proficient in calligraphy, just pick the background "had a classical education". Now your character knows stuff that you get taught during such an education regardless of his other skills.

In a classless system, you can easily create a sorceress/masseuse/courtesan, as easily as you can create a monk/masseuse/courtesan.
In a class-less system you might just as easily imagine the same thing, that a class-based system offers you plain and simple from the get-go.

Yes, and? A classless system allows you to play the same kinds of characters a class-based system does... and more beyond that. I don't get your point here?

Class-based systems offer you a handful of pre-packaged character concepts. Classless systems allow you to build those concepts yourself, or go beyond that and come up with your own concepts. The only limit is determined by what skills, abilities, backgrounds, advantages, disadvantages the system offers, and by how many points the player gets to spend on his character.

In a class based system it's the developers who name your character. Any character concept that is outside of what they've explicitly designed cannot be played.
Yes, and here's why that's a good thing... any skill outside of the skills implemented in-game are also off limits to the player. So, what's the big deal? It is constraining to have classes yet it is not constraining to have 'just the skills' those damn developers coded into the final product? I mean I admit the difference in the magnitude, all I and others are arguing is that the additional 'safe space' does not worth the effort since you lose out more on not having class-based concepts than winning on a point buy-esque system.

What do you lose out on in a classless system? I played many different class-based and classless systems, both in cRPGs and in pen and paper, and I always found the classless ones to be a lot richer, more replayable, and more open for experimentation. Classless systems even allow you to do completely retarded shit that you know isn't going to work out, but you can still try it and have some fun - like playing a techno-mage in Arcanum whose abilities cancel each other out. Not a character I'd stick with for a full playthrough, but it was fun seeing how far I could take her. Class-based systems just don't allow you to do anything like that in the first place.

Not to mention that in pen and paper, this opens up a lot more interesting character concepts for the players to try out than a more rigid class-based system.

In a classless system it is the player who actually gets to shape and name his character. Maybe you want to play as literally Conan the Barbarian? Yeah, go ahead, pick the skills, abilities, advantages and disadvantages that make your character as close to Conan as possible.
As I stated before, there are many other factors in an average rpg that helps further shape your character aside from the base class. Constraining really is not an issue, especially not of the imagination, if anything, the class helps to give some framework to your character, as well as weaknesses and 'can't haves' something that I rarely see in skill-based games. The former is more role-playing the latter is more power fantasying.

My favorite classless systems are those that allow you to pick advantages and disadvantages at char gen, or offer you perks that come with a bonus and a malus during level up. Daggerfall's character creation was amazing by how many different options you had. Wanna play a pure fighter? Get bonus points to spend on skills by making your character completely unable to ever cast a spell. Wanna play a lightly armored thief? Completely disallow your character from equipping any armor heavier than leather. Works out very well.

And if you want to play a character within a class framework, all Elder Scrolls games - which are classless since Daggerfall - also give you "classes" to choose from, which are basically selections of major and minor skills, as well as (in Daggerfall at least) advantages and disadvantages. But you can also just say nah, fuck this framework, and create your own "class".

In a class-based system you have to hope that the devs included a Barbarian class, because if they didn't, you're shit outta luck.
Sure thing, but generally speaking if you build a game world then you should build all possible adventurer type classes as well that should belong to the world, in your opinion ofc. Mind you, just because as a player you have a fantasy idea, the game itself is not bound to cater to all your ideas and all players' fantasies. Due to the sales machine it is unfortunate that this rule had long since been forgotten. If I as a writer/designer build a game world (first and foremost) and I say all elephants are pink in my game, then a player who wants to have blue elephants can fuck off. Just as in politics you cannot simultaneously cater to all, so then you might as well focus on a group and cater to their needs tenfold. Any attempts otherwise will end up like every single shit game that has been shet out in the past decades.

Of course. And by including all the skills, backgrounds, advantages and disadvantages adventurer characters might reasonably have in your world (you can safely discount stuff like fishing and basketweaving because no adventurer does that), you also give the player the framework within which he can create reasonable characters for that world. I don't approach classless systems with the idea of "I want to play Red Sonja and if the game doesn't allow me to, it's shit" but I look at all the available skills, stats, etc etc and then come up with the kind of character I want to play based on those available character creation tools.

You guys are all a bunch of larping noobs. You care more about building up your virtual Barbie than you do about the quality of the combat. I think this is because you have never played something with truly great combat so you don't even know how good it could and should be.

I found Underrail's combat to be pretty great, despite being single character turn based (usually turn based is better with a party). Lots of different weapons and abilities, and you're forced to at least somewhat specialize if you want to be competent at something as there are tons of perks to take but you only get one perk every few levels, so you can't be great at magic and guns and melee and crossbows at the same time. But you can experiment with builds and try something like a sniper with some backup debuff magic, things like that. And the game's combat is a lot more fun thanks to all the experimentality.


Overall, it depends on what you want from your game, of course. A dungeon crawling blobber where exploring dungeons and fighting are the main elements of the gameplay plays very well with classes. But classless works better for pretty much anything that isn't purely combat-focused, as long as your classless system is well designed (similarly, class based will also fall flat if it's got shit design, so let's just assume the perfect class-based and the perfect classless systems for our argument).

Why wouldn't you play a sword-swinging, spell-slinging, lockpick-turning jack of all trades in classless system? Because a jack of all trades is a master of none. Because maybe your strong and agile barbarian doesn't have enough Aether Affinity to cast spells well, while your seductive sorceress has pumped up her Aether Affinity so much, she doesn't have any points left for strength. Maybe metal armor interferes with spellcasting like in D&D, which is a feature that can work regardless of class restrictions (and a much more clever way of preventing wizards from being tanks than simply disallowing them from equipping armor at all; what are they, too stupid to pull a chainmail shirt over their head? their int is supposed to be high, not retard-tier).

A solid enough character system doesn't require classes to balance it.
 
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As soon as you give the player the ability to have any of these spells they want, the game becomes far too easy and broken - because everyone is a tanky disintegrating healer. The only way to prevent that is to weaken all the spells which ruins what made them good to begin with. Or you restrict the spells which is basically all a class is... only with less effort put into making sure every possible choice plays well. You can't have it both ways. You can have your Barbie games that you build a character from a pool of bland abilities, or you can have a class based game with interesting, challenging and well tuned combat. You can even have classes that let you pick spells/abilities so you still feel like you contributed to the design which is the best of both worlds.

That's a false argument. A classless system is limited by the advancement style. A good example of a classless system where a character cannot be everything is Freedom Force. There are no character levels, nor class. Different abilities are purchased with experience, like in Deadlands table-top RPG. If you want your character to be a highly generalized gish, they will not be as good as the specialists. It plays to the strength of the classes system, where character progression is choice between breadth and depth. People can dabble or diversify without restriction, but the opportunity cost is real. Theoretically you can have a character which can do it all, but the experience required to do so would be astronomical--far more than the campaign itself possesses.
 

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As soon as you give the player the ability to have any of these spells they want, the game becomes far too easy and broken - because everyone is a tanky disintegrating healer. The only way to prevent that is to weaken all the spells which ruins what made them good to begin with. Or you restrict the spells which is basically all a class is... only with less effort put into making sure every possible choice plays well. You can't have it both ways. You can have your Barbie games that you build a character from a pool of bland abilities, or you can have a class based game with interesting, challenging and well tuned combat. You can even have classes that let you pick spells/abilities so you still feel like you contributed to the design which is the best of both worlds.

That's a false argument. A classless system is limited by the advancement style. A good example of a classless system where a character cannot be everything is Freedom Force. There are no character levels, nor class. Different abilities are purchased with experience, like in Deadlands table-top RPG. If you want your character to be a highly generalized gish, they will not be as good as the specialists. It plays to the strength of the classes system, where character progression is choice between breadth and depth. People can dabble or diversify without restriction, but the opportunity cost is real. Theoretically you can have a character which can do it all, but the experience required to do so would be astronomical--far more than the campaign itself possesses.
This approach - classless system with limited resource for advancement - is in itself not unproblematic either, at least in computer games, because it allows the player to build his character into a walking dead that can neither progress, nor grind. There's one thing that classes are really good for - unlike all the bullshit mentioned in the previous two pages - and it's communicating what character concepts are supported by the content in a CRPG.
 

Max Damage

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Yeah, no. Classes don't guarantee playstyle viability or even that they'll do what's written on the can, for some reason you think classes = guaranteed quality playtesting, which has been proven wrong countless times.
 

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the powers themselves aren't - as in, you cannot learn them, you cannot train them, nor do they necessarily improve with experience.
Multi-class rules easily accommodate what you're saying - 1 Wizard 5 Fighter is totally viable
You're kinda contradicting yourself here. The powers cannot be learned nor improved with experience, yet you can multiclass into the required class and gain levels in it.
(not to mention that 3.5 classes are, for all intents and purposes, skills by any other name - precisely because of how they are designed with multiclassing as a core mechanic in mind)

This is a semantics argument. If you want to say classes are skills because multi-classing exists, then by definition we are talking about different concepts. Similar with powers vs. skills.

Do not say "skills" and then twist it into meaning any sort of mechanical decomposition. Skills have a set definition and a set way by which they reasonably operate. The size of a dragon evolves as it grows; this is not the same as growing in skill.
Nope. I'm talking specifically about the 3.5 edition approach, where upon level-up you can chose to advance in any available class. This makes those classes effectively skills. Compare that to ADnD dual-classing, where you a) have penalties for switching to another class and b) have to commit to the new class (can't advance in the old one anymore), and you'll see the difference.
Anyways, that was a side comment, not the main argument which you chose to ignore. If powers are innate and cannot be learned, the player shouldn't be able to multiclass to relevant class. If powers cannot be improved with experience, they shouldn't grow in power with class level either. And if they can be learned and improved, they can just as easily be served by skill+feat combination.
Now this is just silly. A class, aside from other things, contain many/most skills. Some maybe harder to learn than other, and some is plain impossible (perform), but there's nothing say a class "effectively skills". That was a silly statement. To wit, a sorcerer is different from a wizard in many things, skills being the least of it.

Second bold statement, another silly statement, specifically "can not be learned". The rule of the system say a character can pay experience to advance to another class for which they can learn powers. This is a rule of that universe. "shouldnt be able to" has nothing to do with it. it's like saying H2O must only stay a gas and cant not transform into liquid state and have many power come with that state.

Your basic problem, is that you dont like DnD3.5 and you wish to impose your will to change it.
That is fine, you can do that in any game you are a DM.
But spouting bullshits here will get smashed, because you are not DM here and I/we dont have to take your shits.
 
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JarlFrank

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I mean 3.5 does have sorcerers whose magic is innate, therefore changing from a different class to sorcerer makes little sense.

... which wouldn't be a problem in a classless system with backgrounds :M
 

anvi

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As soon as you give the player the ability to have any of these spells they want, the game becomes far too easy and broken - because everyone is a tanky disintegrating healer. The only way to prevent that is to weaken all the spells which ruins what made them good to begin with. Or you restrict the spells which is basically all a class is... only with less effort put into making sure every possible choice plays well. You can't have it both ways. You can have your Barbie games that you build a character from a pool of bland abilities, or you can have a class based game with interesting, challenging and well tuned combat. You can even have classes that let you pick spells/abilities so you still feel like you contributed to the design which is the best of both worlds.

That's a false argument. A classless system is limited by the advancement style. A good example of a classless system where a character cannot be everything is Freedom Force. There are no character levels, nor class. Different abilities are purchased with experience, like in Deadlands table-top RPG. If you want your character to be a highly generalized gish, they will not be as good as the specialists. It plays to the strength of the classes system, where character progression is choice between breadth and depth. People can dabble or diversify without restriction, but the opportunity cost is real. Theoretically you can have a character which can do it all, but the experience required to do so would be astronomical--far more than the campaign itself possesses.

I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm saying it can only be done with boring weak abilities. Compare it to what you get in high level AD&D and it is a joke.
Yeah, no. Classes don't guarantee playstyle viability or even that they'll do what's written on the can, for some reason you think classes = guaranteed quality playtesting, which has been proven wrong countless times.
It does guarantee it with good devs.
 

V_K

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That was a silly statement. To wit, a sorcerer is different from a wizard in many things, skills being the least of it.
If you, on a level-up, can freely chose to add a point to a Sorcerer "class" or to a Wizard "class", irrespective of what class you started as, or what classes you advanced as before - that makes Sorcerer and Wizard "classes" effectively a kind of skills. The fact that 3.5e has something explicitly called "skills" in addition to that doesn't have anything to do with them (and has everything to do with DnD authors' penchant to needlessly convolute things).
Second bold statement, another silly statement, specifically "can not be learned". The rule of the system say a character can pay experience to advance to another class for which they can learn powers.
If you bothered to read the whole discussion, you'd have seen that this wasn't my point at all but the point that I was replying to - that powers cannot be represented as skills because they, for some reason, cannot be learned. I completely agree that it's bullshit, and was just showing that "powers cannot be learned" argument doesn't apply to class-based systems as well, as long as they allow multiclassing.
Your basic problem, is that you dont like DnD3.5
Now that is something you're kinda right about - though I don't like DnD in general, not 3.5e specifically. This has nothing to do with the argument here though. The point that I was arguing against is that you can have mechanics in a class-based system that you can't represent in a classless skill-based system. I just couldn't pass by such bullshit being stated, even though I myself prefer "soft" TDE-like classes to complete classlessness.
 

V_K

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Classes don't guarantee playstyle viability or even that they'll do what's written on the can, for some reason you think classes = guaranteed quality playtesting, which has been proven wrong countless times.
I didn't say anything about guarantees, learn to read.
 

Max Damage

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I read correct, it was implied from your high horse. If you insist on that point, you can perfectly achieve "dead man walking" status in most of class-based systems as long as they allow you to take suboptimal character development choices, deliberately or through lack of necessary knowledge. Lots of classes and descriptions are pretty vague or outright misleading in practice, from my experience with vast kinds of RPGs. Unless leveling choices are very low impact (or there're none), you're not granted smooth sailing. What skills/feats/weapons/spells/gadgets/playstyles are supported (and to what extend) depends on developer, regardless of them being restricted to classes or not.
 

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