[Old-School Game] Getting Started With Characters - Character Classes

 

Classes from the MCDM game.

Mine are somewhat different 

I didn't hit the ground running, I guess, when I made my plans, but maybe that's okay since I've added one more thing: I want to make my own OSR-style game. That is, I want to use straightforward mechanics—no elaborate skill system, embellished personality system, detailed combat system, and so on, though I could use rules that do those things in an obvious and direct manner (though they don't need to be as rudimentary as, say, the alignment system for personality rules or weapon proficiencies and secondary skills for skills). The art will be in finding what level of "obvious" as opposed to "detailed" I am willing to accept. To an extent, I'll be returning to something like the WRG game exercise from early days on this blog, though I don't know if I'll be specifically using the WRG Ancients/Medieval 6th edition rules I was focusing on back then.

As good a place to start as any might be characters. Other than the decisions made in play, how should characters be distinguished from one another? I like to think that there are a few characteristics that distinguish individuals in an adventure-fiction context. There are inborn traits, which can be thought of as a character's ancestry and innate talents. In games to date, those are mostly represented by the character's "race" (or, more recently, in an attempt to move away from the "blood will tell" eugenics assumptions found among some early fantasy authors, "ancestry" or "species") and "attributes" (sometimes called "characteristics", such as Strength, Intelligence, or the like). Then there is the character's profession, represented traditionally by a character's "class" or "skills", or a lot of times both of these. In some game designs, these things get muddled up, with innate talents and ancestry being represented by whatever the game calls its profession, such as games where "elf" is a character class or whatever. While that is a defensible position, I prefer to clearly distinguish matters that are inborn from ones that come from training, that is, nature from nurture, as the usual formulation has it.

I want to focus on character classes now, though. First of all, what is a "character class"? My understanding of classes in D&D is that they represent a statement of how the player intends to approach the game, with the most fundamental decision being whether the character will use magic or not. After the original division of characters into "Fighting-man" or "Magic-user", people came up with other approaches, so that very early on someone wanted to focus on fighting "undead" monsters like Professor Van Helsing in the Hammer Films Dracula movies, resulting in the "Cleric" class, whose association with religion implied some sort of Saint-like powers, to make them useful in scenarios where the undead aren't present. Most early character classes were simple extrapolations like that, so that a "Thief" was a character intended to be like the Grey Mouser or Cugel the Clever, which is why they include a means to dabble in magic without being a fully-fledged magic-user. The "Monk" was for players who liked Shaw Brothers films. The "Ranger" was Aragorn or maybe Robin Hood, perhaps with a touch of Jack the Giant-Killer?* And so on.

All of these approaches imply a particular set of skills, but it maybe doesn't need to be that way. Going back to the fundamental distinction of whether the character uses magic or not, I'll cut the number of classes back to "Adventurer" and "Adept". To handle characters who dabble in magic like the Grey Mouser and Cugel the Clever, I'll add a compromise class that I'll call the "Practitioner". because magic, historically, has included the ability to heal, I'll include healing magic, and a character's available spells will define what sort of magician they are, rather than defining it by class. Perhaps we will define a way to distinguish magicians who are better at one sort of magic or another later on, when we discuss talents and attributes.

However, I think that there are more approaches, other than magic or no magic, that are pretty fundamental. One is often covered in older games more as an afterthought, which we might call the "command" or "social" approach. Traditionally, this is usually relegated to a "Charisma" attribute, but I think that it deserves a more fundamental place. I'll call that class the "Envoy", and a dabbler who uses a bit of social but is also action-oriented to a degree, perhaps somewhat similar to the "Warlord" class of some later D&D editions, I'll call the "Commander". I think that an Adept who is also social would be just a different sort of Adept, focused on spells of enchantment and charm, so I won't need that sort of compromise class.

Finally, some players might want a character who approaches the game from a place of knowledge and skill. While I haven't yet discussed how I think training and skill could work, I'll just note for now that a character focused on that sort of play will be called an "Expert", and there won't be a need for a compromise class as the others, as I conceive them, already include elements of this category.

So, to summarize, I see the game as allowing players to select one character class to define their character fundamentally, from the choices of Adventurer, Adept, Practitioner, Envoy, Commander, or Expert. To round out characters, I'll discuss a character's species, their talents (characteristics or attributes), and their profession (which I will disconnect from their class).

*And why that particular combination? I suppose that the idea was that characters had to have more to do than just follow tracks. Since the class was given even more wilderness and survival abilities as time went on, it does seem that Gygax and others understood the abilities as being a little underwhelming in relation to other classes.