Should some Class-Race combinations be forbidden?

Realms of Arkania did something similar.

 

Multikult? In a land with several sentient races, there's bound to be some mingling, with a halfling or two being exposed to human culture and him (and his future colleagues) finding out he makes a good paladin.

 

The simple answer is "no", because RPG world-builders should be allowed the freedom to construct it in whatever way they want. Personally I abhor blank canvas characters that are built according to whatever strikes your fancy. Part of the reason for the huge decline in RPGs is exactly that mentality where "role" is no longer "you perform a unique role in the party dynamic" to "you're a LARPing faggot who wants to bastardize all cool traits into one hero a la Cartman in that anime-esque episode of South Park."

 

Every "RPG" should integrate software that puts character creation requests to a vote on the Codex and /v/. Unless passed unanimously, the player's creation request is denied, the error message reading: "Your race/class combination broke <name>'s immersion. Unable to complete request."

 

I miss the 3d6 rolls in Player Character creation where players ended up with very few statistical benefits. Where you'd consider a life as an mercenary if you had a 13 in strength, and your weapon played as much (or more) of the outcome as the average Lv1 soldier who wielded it. Notable NPCs heroes/villains would have a formiddable +3 strength bonus AND a coveted +2 sword. But after a few D&D editions later we were rolling 1d8 for the sword and adding 35 in bonuses, min-maxing took over and the characters were as boring as the players themselves.

I much preferred the first edition way; choose a race, roll 3d6 and cheat when your DM isn't paying attention.

 

Heh, try rolling up a level 1 human fighter the 'fair' way and pitting him against a housecat. I'd be surprised if you can muster 50% win rate. Never mind a commoner vs a cat. Or, god forbid, the 'hero' vs a commoner in full plate.

Minmaxed stuff is lame, but that doesn't mean the heroes should be below average piles of crap. If the only thing heroic about your character is that you rolled more 20's than your enemies, you may as well forget the stats to begin with, since it's either going to be the 'heroes' triumphing over a bunch of underdogs, or the DM fudging the rolls in the long run.

 

I know it was rough, but that's where spells, strategy, levelling up and squealing TWWENNNNNTTTEEEEE!!!! came in.

Besides, our best campaigns were those that had a high turnover of heroes.

 

PnP roleplaying games aren't about combats anyway. You'd have a much more satisfying combat experience playing a wargame, or just having a single player controlling an entire party.

 

What's with the shitty topic? Allowed where, General RPG - The Game? Why would there be a general ruling on Class-Race mixing? Why would you consider this a subject worth discussing in the abstract?
In real life you've got black scientists and white basketball players so even the most bizarre combinations are possible, why wouldn't they be in a game?

 

I already mentioned NWN2, so your kneejerk is unwarranted.

 

Precluding numerous race/class combinations is a cop-out allowing makers to avoid more than bare minimum balancing and it also results in themepark design in the form of land of stereotypes.
It's therefore shit.

So heroism is when all your stats are >9000 and you steamroll everything because stats say so?

So very heroic.

Also, I'm fucking tired of heroic fantasy, heroic RPGs and heroic heroes.
Too much fucking epic shit.

 

What you need are some grimdark, edgy antiheroes instead.

 

Not everything, but surely something. Fighter with low STR is fine. Fighter with low-average STR DEX CON INT WIS and slightly above average CHA is retarded to cast as a hero. Nobody writes books about the average guy who left his village in search of adventure and got killed by an angry badger 3 days later when he whiffed two sword swings in a row. Nor are there any interesting tales of rogues that can't sneak or hide or do anything remotely rogueish but happen to be really excellent bakers and eavesdroppers. None that you'd want to DM anyways. Imagine how The Hobbit would play out as a PnP game. Shitty rogue does nothing all game long until he finds a god damned artifact and abuses it to deus ex machina out of danger repeatedly. You could replace Bilbo with fucking any nameless faceless attributeless blob and the story wouldn't change the slightest bit.

Chracters, particularly player characters, need some distinctive features to make the game a game instead of a bunch of diceless larping. You need to be terrible at climbing but good at breaking down doors, or good at lockpicking but bad at sneaking or pickpocketing. Being average at everything is fucking dull. And renders every possible conflict into a DM fiat by virtue of the fact that all possible solutions are equally difficult so the only metric of challenge is whatever the DM thought it should be. PnP is fun when the easy to break door isn't even attempted and the party bungles a misguided attempt to steal some keys from it's burly guard, or when the DM doesn't think of the fact that his nigh unkillable villain is standing near the edge of a cliff and the party has a means to reliably shove him 10 feet away from them. If everything is a 50/50 roll because everyone is a normal person with reasonable abilities what is the fucking point?

 

Still better than heroes in shiny armour, but no, I want a somewhat believable setup for the PC(s) and gameplay reflecting goals beyond "helping every elderly lady cross the street while thwarting an ancient omnicidal menace at least thrice over the course of the series".

Heroes are good enough for derpy H&S games where you murderize waves of enemies most of the time.

Then you either reroll 'till you get something serviceable (not awesome, serviceable).
Besides, good system should make all stats useful regardless of class.

That's the point of rolling, no? To get different strong and weak scores centered around average, rather than making all the characters identical, no?

Since when does "normal person" mean "a fucking clone"?
Where are you from?

 

Oh, so 3d6 stats are great except when you don't like them, then you just reroll. Yeah, thats totally different than point buy or arranging the rolls yourself.

 

You cannot into probabilities, I see.

 

I always thought people who love 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D (no wizard dwarves! no hobbit clerics!) are Tolkein fetishists. I like freedom in an RPG. In fact, I prefer classless RPGs so I can come up with my own combo of powers/talents/spells/skills.

 

Dwarven mages? Hobbit barbarians? Half-orc PALADINS???

HERESY!!!

 

While your point has some merit, I don't think it SHOULD be that way.

I think characters should be defined with two things in mind, combat roles and non-combat roles. The problem with the systems I am familiar with (DnD), is that the skills are attached to the combat roles. If I want to make a lute playing historian who goes berserk in combat and wields a hand axe (some sort of DPS role), I can't do that at all - or if I can, he's gonna be super gimp... and if we are being realistic, he probably wouldn't make a good adventurer anyway.

In some cases you can, like Josh's Father Oswyn, the 60 year old cleric with 18 int and 12 or 14 wisdom. The Cleric's role in combat in DnD can be totally defensive, just healing and buff spells, and he could do that quite well.

I don't know... the downside to all of this freedom and complexity is that you can easily make a system where someone who is new or dumb can make a super gimp character. Tough beans you might say, but a game that is inaccessible to all but the most hard core, is a game that won't have a long stay on the market.

I'm completely rusty though on a lot of this stuff right now anyway. The only PnP I am playing right now is the 4th ed. Scales of War campaign. I admit that most of my thinking comes from the CRPG side anyway, and not the PnPRPG market.

 

As I see it, there isn't a correct answer to Wyrmlord's question. It really depends on what the GM is trying to achieve. Take Burning Wheel, for example. Burning Wheel doesn't have classes. Instead, you choose lifepaths to represent how your character lived up to now. For example, a thieve might have taken "City Born -> Urchin -> Coin Clipper -> Smuggler". He could instead have taken "Village Born -> Sailor -> Pirate -> Fence", and even though both characters would have skills and traits usually associated with thieves, they would still be very different. Well, the thing about Burning Wheel is that different races have wholly different lifepaths, representing their cultural differences. These different lifepaths usually include skills and traits unique to each race. Elves use elven songs, a kind of magic wholly different from human sorcery, for example. This goes much further than simply limiting classes.

And this works very well for that game, the game is bringing a focus to the characters as, in part, a product of their environments. But this isn't inherently better than, say, opening up GURPS' system so the player can invent whatever they feel like. If the group is prepared to improvise a bit on what the game is about, letting all the players have such creative input from the get go can be pretty satisfying.

 

Honestly, merely being a freak should not disqualify an otherwise physically possible character. Player characters are already freaks...making them a bit weirder won't change anything. As for "no wizard dwarves", well, that depends on the nature of your dwarves: Is there something intrinsic to dwarves that prevents them from being wizards? If so, that would make a good reason why dwarves cannot be wizards. If, however, nothing actually physically prevents this, then I see no reason why a player could not make a dwarf wizard, even if this means being an outcast from the rest of his kind.

But hey, player characters are already psychotic kleptomaniacs cast out from the rest of their kind as it is.

 

Dwarves are materialistic jews and magic is the Aryan gift, hence dwarves can't be wizards.

 

Generally, I prefer character creation to be as open as possible, but I suppose that such restrictions can be used as a way to prevent a single character from gaining a particularly overpowered combination of abilities in systems with multi-classing.

 

You mean fagulous elves are the master race?

That should be accomplished by thoughtfully designing your mechanics not waving your hands and shouting "U CANNOT!" at anything that breaks it.

 

True, it could feel ham-fisted, especially if the restricted combinations were very few in number.