Classes or classless, which system is better in RPGs?

[Azarkon]

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 class of a dragon evolves as it grows; this does not make size class a skill.

 

[DraQ]

A background is a set of past events that had some effects on your character. A class is a set of skills, abilities, mechanics, backgrounds, and motivations that define how your character functions in the present.

...And keeping those orthogonal concepts separated results in much better character system with much more expressive power.

In my example, the lore was merely a side show; the main feature I was trying to illustrate was the unique mechanics.

You could have chosen better example then. Or maybe you couldn't, because you are arguing from a flawed position.

Gaining demonic attributes isn't something you can simply label as a "skill," as skill implies that it is a proficiency, which you can learn, train, improve with experience, etc.

It improves with blood sacrifices, apparently.
But anyway, classes should be confined to concepts intrinsic to the character. Demons sitting in ninth circle of hell or wherever are very clearly not intrinsic to that character. Not class. Simple.

A ban on using edged weapons, for example, is not a proficiency.

What happens if for whatever reason I *need* to use an edged weapon? Why does vow to not spill blood (good luck doing that when caving someone's skull in with a HMMR) correlate with anything regarding my skillset? What if I want to play penitent ex rogue? With skill based I can.

Neither is channeling your draconic ancestry to grow claws and wings.

That's a trait. Completely unrelated to one's skillset.
Believe me, I am an expert.

Neither is fealty to a god or demon. Classes package many more aspects of a character than skills do.

Pre-package, you mean. Canned food is rarely pinnacle of culinary art.

The trouble with skill-based game systems is that they try to fit everything into a box

That's the problem with class based where that box is a class.
Skill based systems usually recognise orthogonality of different concepts.

 

[Azarkon]

tl;dr There doesn't seem to be a significant difference between classes and class-less once we remove the window dressing of how those traits are reified in the game.

There is and you have described it:
Granularity and level of detail.

There is no arguing that skill based isn't in all ways superior to class based, just like there is no arguing that proper aerodynamics modeling makes for a better flight simulation than aerial submarine model.

There are however situations, in real life where you don't have infinite time and budget for development, where classes or aerial submarine might be just about good enough and a reasonable compromise:
Namely if mechanics in question doesn't form as much of the core gameplay. For example in party based RPG what happens with single character's development is only 12.5-25% of how this same character development impacts a single character game - which is precisely what you have described.

Sure there is. Skill is only one aspect of class. Class is more general.

 

[ItsChon]

Oh, and for all the people arguing that we wouldn't be able to qualify something like Demonic attributes as a skill, you could always make those parts unlockable through feats or perks or whatever you'd like to call them.

 

[DraQ]

You have it the wrong way around. You can generalize your high concepts better if you break them down into more basic mechanics.

The minimal decomposition required to codify every archetype is the English language.

If you don't accept this, you are welcome to try and define a minimum set of basic mechanics that generalize to every archetype.

No designer, to this date, has succeeded, which is why in practice, no skill-based system has ever escaped the curse of cookie cutting.

You are going to codify more archetypes with their components and combinatorics than when describing each and every single one of them explicitly. There is no point arguing otherwise.
Even if you can't achieve perfection better is still better than merely good.

 

[V_K]

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.

 

[Azarkon]

A background is a set of past events that had some effects on your character. A class is a set of skills, abilities, mechanics, backgrounds, and motivations that define how your character functions in the present.

...And keeping those orthogonal concepts separated results in much better character system with much more expressive power.

Not necessarily. Law of parsimony.

But anyway, classes should be confined to concepts intrinsic to the character. Demons sitting in ninth circle of hell or wherever are very clearly not intrinsic to that character. Not class. Simple.

What's intrinsic to the character is decided by the scope of the game. No one is born a warrior or wizard. The player is spared the background quest because the game chooses to not indulge in it. You could just as well have a quest to become a warrior, a wizard, etc.

What happens if for whatever reason I *need* to use an edged weapon? Why does vow to not spill blood (good luck doing that when caving someone's skull in with a HMMR) correlate with anything regarding my skillset? What if I want to play penitent ex rogue? With skill based I can.

If the reason you cannot use an edged weapon is because "it is forbidden by a god," then using it reasonably loses you access to that god, and thus your class. If the reason you cannot use an edged weapon is because the class never trains in it, then by choosing said class, you are choosing a disadvantage that is grounded in the identity of the class, and so using it has no detrimental effects beyond that you are clueless in operating the weapon. In either case, the identity of the character is at least codified by the game and not determined by arbitrary guide lines in the player's own imagination. This is vastly preferable to a pure skill-based system, in which the player has no reason to take any disadvantage for identity reasons, and every reason to cookie cut and optimize based on the situation.

That's a trait. Completely unrelated to one's skillset. Pre-package, you mean. Canned food is rarely pinnacle of culinary art. That's the problem with class based where that box is a class. Skill based systems usually recognise orthogonality of different concepts.

No, in practice, they don't. That's the problem. Skill-based systems are rarely realized in a way that respects the significance of mechanics that are not represented as skills, and never capture the depth of mechanical originality that class-based systems regularly do. For proof of this, simply look at World of Warcraft's classes and compare it to that of any skill-based system in video games.

 

[Azarkon]

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.

Powers can certainly be acquired, if the rules for acquiring them are met. Just because you start off life as a street thug, doesn't make it impossible for you to pledge your soul to Cthulhu and gain tentacle arms as a result. The critical observation is that this is different from learning to fight with a sword, because pledging your soul to Cthulhu has other consequences beyond granting you more attack power. A combination of skill+feat cannot represent advancing in the context of a class, because skills and feats cannot be lost, and are assumed to progress only through practice and training; this is insufficient to replace class mechanics.

 

[Azarkon]

You have it the wrong way around. You can generalize your high concepts better if you break them down into more basic mechanics.

The minimal decomposition required to codify every archetype is the English language.

If you don't accept this, you are welcome to try and define a minimum set of basic mechanics that generalize to every archetype.

No designer, to this date, has succeeded, which is why in practice, no skill-based system has ever escaped the curse of cookie cutting.

You are going to codify more archetypes with their components and combinatorics than when describing each and every single one of them explicitly. There is no point arguing otherwise.
Even if you can't achieve perfection better is still better than merely good.

Then why aren't you playing freeform RPGs? After all, with English you can describe any archetype. Measuring on expressive power alone, natural language roleplaying is superior to game systems, right?

 

[ItsChon]

combination of skill+feat cannot represent advancing in the context of a class, because skills and feats cannot be lost, and are assumed to progress only through practice and training; this is insufficient to replace class mechanics.

This just isn't true. Take Underrail for example. There are a variety of feats that are acquired in strange ways, and it would be really simple to have them override previously acquired feats.

The people arguing about whether or not we'd be able to do X in a classless system or Y in a class-based system are honestly focused on the wrong thing.

 

[Azarkon]

combination of skill+feat cannot represent advancing in the context of a class, because skills and feats cannot be lost, and are assumed to progress only through practice and training; this is insufficient to replace class mechanics.

This just isn't true. Take Underrail for example. There are a variety of feats that are acquired in strange ways, and it would be really simple to have them override previously acquired feats.

The people arguing about whether or not we'd be able to do X in a classless system or Y in a class-based system are honestly focused on the wrong thing.

From a short research, all feats in Underrail are acquired by "learning" or "training." Just because you can't acquire a feat on level up, but can only train it under certain circumstances, doesn't make it strange. It's still an ability acquired through learning, and is very different from basic class mechanics like rage bars in World of Warcraft or prayers in Dungeons and Dragons, that comprehensively define the mechanics of game play for that class.

 

[ItsChon]

From a short research, all feats in Underrail are acquired by "learning" or "training." Just because you can't acquire a feat on level up, but can only train it under certain circumstances, doesn't make it strange. It's still an ability acquired through learning, and is very different from basic class mechanics like rage bars in World of Warcraft or prayers in Dungeons and Dragons.

You should've done a "long research". You can acquire feats such as "Body Horror" or "Outer Visions" through your interactions with strange monoliths and/or psychic beings. Psi-empathy, the basic feat needed to channel your Psi powers, is acquired from taking a pill and passing out.

And even if there hypothetically weren't such feats, there is literally no reason why they couldn't be added. I'm afraid I don't understand your argument. I can see someone arguing in favor of a class-based system due to personal preference, but arguing for it because you claim such mechanics couldn't be reasonably implemented in any other way is just demonstrably false.

 

[jewboy]

Classes are more gamey I think and so inherently superior to classless and as others have said most of the best RPGs had classes. I think it must be easier to design a fun game with classes than without them.

 

[anvi]

Classless always ends up broken and stupid or nerfed and boring. Classes are better because devs can tune each class to be challenging and fun which is what RPG combat is supposed to be.

 

[Siobhan]

There is and you have described it:
Granularity and level of detail.

I'd argue that's orthogonal to the classes-classless divide. Consider the case of a conjurer RPG, where at the very beginning of the game you assemble a party of demons and other supernatural servants to do your bidding while you stay in the safety of your mage tower. HP, mana, and equipment are contributed by the conjurer and thus shared across all party members. The conjurer also contributes saving throws and similar properties. At specific points you can grant a level-up to a minion, improving their class-specific traits (e.g. attack, available spells, and so on). So that's a class-based party system, but the granularity of its character system is comparable to a single-player classless system where you can raise preselected skills at level up. The only thing you gain is positioning. Make it a blobber, and you don't even have that. If you'd like, I could also construct an example of taking a classless system into the complexity territory of a typical party-based class system.

Now I'll readily admit that this is a very forced example, and in practice the classes-classless distinction is correlated with many other issues that have a more clear-cut impact on gameplay. But are we talking about the prototypical case or what the systems in principle allow for? If the former, I'm not particularly interested, but I'll ask why that is the relevant notion. And what is the protoypical case? How far can one deviate from that before it becomes a special case? The disagreements I see in this thread are largely due to everybody using their own, slightly different definitions of the relevant concepts, down to what can be a skill or an attribute (a completely arbitrary distinction from a gamist perspective). This doesn't make for very fruitful debate.

 

[JarlFrank]

Classes are more gamey I think and so inherently superior to classless

Not if you consider simulationist approaches superior to gamey approaches.

I do, therefore I vastly prefer classless to the overly gamey and artificial classes.

 

[JarlFrank]

You have it the wrong way around. You can generalize your high concepts better if you break them down into more basic mechanics.

The minimal decomposition required to codify every archetype is the English language.

If you don't accept this, you are welcome to try and define a minimum set of basic mechanics that generalize to every archetype.

No designer, to this date, has succeeded, which is why in practice, no skill-based system has ever escaped the curse of cookie cutting.

You are going to codify more archetypes with their components and combinatorics than when describing each and every single one of them explicitly. There is no point arguing otherwise.
Even if you can't achieve perfection better is still better than merely good.

Precisely. A battlemage in a class system either requires multiclassing, which not all class-based systems have, or a special battlemage class.

In a classless system, you can build you own battlemage by putting some skill points into magic and some into combat. No artificial class restrictions required.

"But not every Jack and Jill can go and learn magic willy-nilly by leveling up, it makes more sense if a character has to apprentice at a wizard's tower to learn magic!" you might bring forth as an argument in favor of class systems.

But as already mentioned in this thread, Underrail already solves this problem elegantly: if you want to be able to use psi you need to take a pill that unlocks your character's psi potential, but also reduces his maximum HP. Congratulations, you just became a wizard - without having to pick a restrictive class! Instead, an in-game action (taking a pill that unlocks psychic powers) unlocked the potential for you to learn specific abilities (magic spells). There is no reason why a fantasy game wouldn't allow that, too - you meet a wizard, do a quest for him, he is grateful and offers you apprenticeship. Now magic spells are unlocked as things you can learn on levelup. The points you invest into learning magic can't be invested into combat or diplomacy, so you're not going to be as good a fighter or diplomat as one who doesn't learn magic. It's kinda like multiclassing, except without the artificial construct of "class".

What if you want your character to have had a magic education before starting the game?

Simple, add Daggerfall-style character traits that you can buy during character creation. "Was a wizard's apprentice" could be one such trait that is bought for the value of, say, 3 skill points or whatever.

No need for classes. You can easily make all kinds of class mechanics work with more general mechanics, without having to lose the identity of your character. In fact, such a classless system would allow for a stronger identity than a rigid class system. "My character started out as a fighter but then became a wizard after he helped out a wizard who offered him a magical apprenticeship in gratitude, so my character decided to study magic." is a much stronger identity than "My character started out as a fighter but multiclassed into a fighter-wizard at level 5."

What about clerics not being able to use edged weapons because their gods forbid it? Well, have divine god-granted magic be dependent on the character's behavior. He starts using edged weapons, his gods start pulling their favor away from him until he loses the ability to cast divine magic. Choices and consequences. Things like having sworn an oath not to do X doesn't require classes. It only requires a mechanic that ensures the player will lose an ability or a bonus if he does X.

 

[V_K]

skills and feats cannot be lost

Bullshit. For example, when you get sent to prison for crime in TES, the way the game simulates you serving time is precisely by permanently decreasing some of your skills. And feats get lost, being replaced by other feats, in more or less any game with feats.

and are assumed to progress only through practice and training

Now you're just pulling arbitrary definitions out of your ass. Magic items can give you a bonus to skills in numerous games. Magic potions and spells can increase (or decrease) skills temporarily or permanently in numerous games.

 

[J1M]

Not sure why so many are advocating for classes to be unlocked via quests. For one thing it diminishes the fun of character creation, especially on a first (only) playthrough.

In order to actually plan a character or for the "classes" to involve tradeoffs instead of just bonuses the player needs a massive amount of meta knowledge about the game. Are all these class trainers going to stand around a campfire in front of the first dungeon? Or is the player forced into a very narrow play style for several hours of the game? Will anything prevent a player from picking up all of them? The player needs all sorts of tutorials to even make an informed choice. For its apparent popularity there doesn't seem to be much thought put into the idea by its proponents.

Losing the fun of character creation alone isn't worth those drawbacks for a misguided sense of verisimilitude.

If you want more in-world 'realism' for a traditional class-based character system, just restrict level advancement to a point where the characters rest for a couple weeks at the end of an adventure. Not every game plot needs to take place in one day or even one year.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

Conceptually I prefer no-classes. Class systems tend to favor mechanics that are gimmicky and suffer from number bloat progression. That being said, designing a good classes system that produces distinctive characters is far more difficult to design.

 

[Funposter]

What if you want your character to have had a magic education before starting the game?

Simple, add Daggerfall-style character traits that you can buy during character creation. "Was a wizard's apprentice" could be one such trait that is bought for the value of, say, 3 skill points or whatever.

Having thought about it over the last few days, this was the conclusion that I also came to. I dislike the idea of the player character being an entirely blank slate at the beginning of the game, and what classes let you achieve is the idea that your character genuinely existed before you started the game. They were potentially an actual person in this world, who has chosen an adventuring-based profession or whatever. They didn't just materialize because the plot needed it, and the player needs someone to control. It also helps avoid the situation where a skill-less, inexperienced person becomes savior of the world in two weeks' time.

So, a character trait/history or advantage/disadvantage system mitigates this, while also allowing the player to decide on their character's direction, and evolve based on what they need, as time goes on. If you start the game with extra mana/spell points or a history of wizarding apprenticeship, obviously you want to play a magical character of some sort, but you are not locked into playing a pure Wizard when actually what you realise you want is a sort of hybrid class, or vice versa. Many games do this sort of thing, or allow you to. Look at Mount and Blade, or playing Darklands with young characters.

 

[Jedi Exile]

I don't really have a preference. Depends on the implementation, I guess. For me, Arcanum and D:OS are very enjoyable, but Oblivion and Fallout 3 - not so much, although they are all classless.

 

[JarlFrank]

I dislike the idea of the player character being an entirely blank slate at the beginning of the game, and what classes let you achieve is the idea that your character genuinely existed before you started the game.

Except they usually don't. Most class-based games are just as blank slatey as classless games, sometimes even more so.

In Baldur's Gate, you're always Gorion's Ward, doesn't matter which class you pick. Your background and your class have nothing at all to do with each other.

In Pillars of Eternity, you are... just some guy/girl who joined an expedition. The class you pick doesn't really have any proper ties into the world.

Picking a class doesn't make me feel like the character has a history in the world.

 

[Desolate Dancer]

Except they usually don't. Most class-based games are just as blank slatey as classless games, sometimes even more so.

Wrong. If you equate class with profession, and frankly this should be the least for a fantasy game, then it would define your skillset, know-how, lore, etc... yet this is already more than what any class-less system offers. Members of the same class can/should have differing skills, despite they share the same pool or basic skills. In a skill-based/class-less system everyone is literally the same "class" with little to huge differences in skills.

Example A: Imagine your party encounters a creature that sings just like a siren and someone must counter it/decipher the meaning, and decide what to do. In a class-based game, if you have a Bard e.g. in d&d games its kinda obvious whom to turn to. How do you decide in a skill-based/class-less system, if no one has a skill called "Decipher Magical Songs", only arbitrary magical skills like the ones in TES?

Example B: You have a class that is like a 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? It is simply impossible, since if you have a bunch of finite few skills, you cannot possibly cover everything, whereas with classes you can make tidy boxes of concepts with which your players can maneuver in your game world.

In effect, by using classes you are enabling one of the most basic human behavior which is 'to categorize things and to put them into boxes', at the same time you also make it easier to design and to play your game (provided we are talking about a real RPG where role-playing and narrative matters).

In Baldur's Gate, you're always Gorion's Ward, doesn't matter which class you pick. Your background and your class have nothing at all to do with each other.

In Pillars of Eternity, you are... just some guy/girl who joined an expedition. The class you pick doesn't really have any proper ties into the world.

I don't get the differentiation here. I admit, BG is my favorite game yet I always hated to be Gorion's Ward since I hate the 'chosen one' cliché. But afaik in the travesty called PoE you are also a 'chosen one' only in this case some soul-reading reincarnating schizo, so what's the difference trope wise? In any case, this has nothing to do with class/classlessness since a class-less game can veritably use the same 'chosen one' cliché so this argument is pretty invalid imho and independent from our main issue here.

Picking a class doesn't make me feel like the character has a history in the world.

Optimally, it should, but let's just name how many things should matter (narratively speaking) in your average RPG:
- race/sub-race/nationality (if that's a thing in your universe)
- gender (and sexual habit if you're into that)
- class (or specific skills/skillset/power etc)
- faction(s) (which should depend on all the others, and there are mutual exclusions/hostilities ofc)
- alignment (I use personality-conviction instead, I hate d&d alignment)

So class is just one of many factors in an average RPG but it should be among the most important choices with the hugest impact on your gameplay.

 

[V_K]

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.