Do you think that class-based RPGs should try to accommodate the "generic wizard who does generic magical things" class concept, or do you think it is too generic an idea, and that the game should force the player to narrow it down?Putting aside the very obvious example of D&D 5(.5)e and its wizard class, D&D 4e, Pathfinder 2e, and 13th Age 2e all have a wizard that specializes in a mix of raw damage blasting and hard-control debuffs (with the occasional buff). Daggerheart likewise has a wizard class. An indie title, level2janitor's Tactiquest, has the Arcanist as a catch-all magical caster with a broad repertoire of spells suitable for different occasions.Other games have a different approach. Draw Steel has the elementalist, focused on the physicality of elemental magic; and the talent, a psionicist who specializes in more intangible effects like time manipulation and telepathy. Tom Abbadon's ICON has no "generic wizard who does generic magical things" in its noncombat classes or its combat classes, specifically to force the player to narrow the concept down, whether for noncombat functions or for tactical combat role.
>>96734153Neither. It entirely depends on what the game is going for. Requiring it to be one or the other is ridiculously authoritarian.
>>96734153In spite of trying to shoe-horn MtG into the D&D system, Forgotten Realms is held as the default setting and all the classes are built with that in mind with the other settings adding their own conceits that are only reflected in subclasses or character options.
>>96734153As the other anon said, "should"? Not really.I do like the concept of having a generalist magic user of sorts.
>>96734153>"generic wizard who does generic magical things">has the elementalist, focused on the physicality of elemental magicThis, to me, comes down to how the universe is "coded". D&D does narrow it down into the schools. The way you interpret "generic wizard things" is how the D&D school operates.Instead of being flavored/colored like "Fire" magic or "Water" magic, the general method/role of magic is described like Divination or Illusion. In D&D you probably see a lot more crossover between schools than an elementalist preferring a particular element because instead of learning how to control a particular element, you are learning individual spells that suit your fancy. The D&D wizard is built to be a tool kit and isn't confined one or two elements.
Its subjective. Stop making retarded nogames threads
>>96734153I think it doesn't fit with the design purpose of classes in most systems using them, which is typically to provide consistent boundaries, a guaranteed set of abilities a party is expected to need, or both. That is, systems "should" decide on something that's "The Job Of Wizards" and ensure all Wizards are operating in that space by some mix of barring them from others and guaranteeing competencies within it, but instead due to the too-few "buckets" of early D&D we got stuck with pouring in arbitrary magical bullshit.In D&D proper, save 4e, this has startlingly well kept some carve-outs leaving niches for the Cleric, Fighter, and Thief for efficient problems-per-day, but routinely becomes narratively overbearing in comparison due to such an incredibly broad set of tools to affect the world with they can pick from almost fully as they please.
>>96734153I'm of the opinion that specialist mages are more thematically interesting, on top of just being easier to design. Having a dedicated necromancer, illusionist, or pyromancer are much stronger as class concepts. It doesn't need to be overly narrow, but being thematic and having limitations is a positive. If somebody wanted to have a generalist mage, a system with multiclassing has an easy answer to that, where the versatility would come at the cost of delayed progression, in the same way that a warrior+thief might. But the versatile generalist needs to have tradeoffs.
>>96734153I think a more important detail to focus on is making sure every class represents the ubiquity of magic implied by the limits, or lack thereof, of selecting magic classes and the limits on how many magical foes and NPCs the GM can include in a given campaign.If there's no limits to either of these things, that's a major implication that magic is literally everywhere, and there shouldn't be a dedicated wizard class; everyone should have magic to some degree, or at the very least have effective defenses against magic, and the "trappings" of magic should be easily recognized by anyone.It makes the world feel alive and lived in, as opposed to just being a slapdash cobbling of pop culture references to cast a net to as wide a customer base as possible, without any attempt to make anything fit together, and telling the customers to make it work somehow.
>>96734153Why the fuck are you playing games with classes?
>>96734873There are many reasons for people to run into a brick wall or fall down rabbit holes in point-buy.
>>96734979Not in good systems.
>>96734868Players having a character generation option does not necessarily have to be tightly connected to the prevalence in the general population, nor does prevalence of magic among foes necessarily track with its prevalence among the populations player characters are drawn from.Additionally, players being able to choose various magical power sources despite rarity in their characters' source populations establishes an exceptional baseline while also justifying some impermeability between roles to greatly ease balancing efforts by reducing combinatorials.>>96734985There is only so well a system can design against decision paralysis and combinatorial complexity producing deeply unintended results. Relying on end users to remove options until they can wrap their head around it is not "a good system", it is a half-made development kit being falsely advertised as a finished product.
>>96735035What do you mean by unintended results? Provide examples.
>>96734265>It entirely depends on what the game is going for/threadI think for the sake of balance it is better to narrow it down but for power fantasy games then it is fine to just have a master of magic
>>96735035Well?
>>96734873Because having a team of specialized characters is more fun than everyone being a pile of generic good stuff.
>>96735077Right, and you can make specialized characters in classless games, and it's far easier to choose what to specialize in without having a bunch of shit you don't want tagged on because you were force to pick a pre-made class.
>>96735038When all abilities are drawn from one fungible pool, each thing you can spend on acts as a separate degree of freedom with independent effects on outputs. In the simplest case of one point per option, you're dealing with a naked factorial scaling in which a mere ten points gives you over three million possible results. To navigate such explosively growing possibility spaces requires relatively advanced mathematics constructing the large polynomials of things that contribute to each game function, then navigating the N-dimensional maps for benchmarks of various output properties and cost schemes to find outliers.This happens to be the EXACT kind of problem-solving that neural network algorithms were made for.>>96735076You are not entitled to being responded to in under ten minutes. Even NEETs are rarely patrolling a single site continuously.>>96735083No it is not, because you have to weigh up rather bare combinatorials to decide what to specialize in, how, and by how much. This produces VASTLY more dysfunctional trap options than even the worst multiclassing in any edition of D&D.
>>96735104No you don't. All you have to do is choose the options that suit your character concept. A system doesn't have to have any dysfunctional trap options. Not every game is D&D. Some actually have competent designers.
>>96735107>All you have to do is choose the options that suit your character conceptAnd when they are naked fungibility, that requires weighing up what is more and less suitable and how deeply you wish to invest in each. You seem to be completely unaware of the very freedom of options you insist upon entailing a cognitive load of actually shaping them so they're mostly decent and settling on something from among them.>A system doesn't have to have any dysfunctional trap options.There are 2,432,902,008,176,640,000 permutations for just 20 fungible choices (though AIUI this is technically most applicable to character progression). A single one of those choices being irrelevant for a campaign results in 95% of them spending something for nothing. It is simply not mathematically feasible to avoid without a ludicrous amount of effort crunching numbers to dial in a flat-enough plain of outputs.
>>96735165So have you ever even played a classless game? According to your argument, it should be impossible to make a character.
>>96735167I'm not saying that it's impossible to make a character, I'm saying that at the blunter end it's vanishingly unlikely to make a meaningfully above mostly-random crapshoot fulfillment of the priorities on the player's end and to design those issues away by any reliable procedure involves upwards of a decade in university level mathematics between the design team demanding expensive computation equipment to actually use.It "feels" better because the system does not get in the way, something far more naturally fulfilled by ruleslight homebrew than GURPS. But if you want the system to carry the weight of structuring sessions and events so you don't have to offload critical fine-tuning on the end users with no assurance of any grasp on this and thus a significant risk of them being turned away because they fucked it up, the immensity of the combinatorics must be tackled with a hard solution that could genuinely involve goddamn AI companies.
>>96735250Why do you think making a character is a random crapshoot? Or that it's difficult at all? Have you tried?
>>96734153Unless their magic comes at the cost of being slower, weaker, costlier, etc., I don't think RPGs should have generalist magic classes. In my experience, generalist magic classes often end up getting the best of all worlds with none of the downsides. Meanwhile, specialists are stuck with a narrow selection of magic, but still somehow end up being worse in their own specialty than generalists. I've never had this problem with classless point-buy RPGs.
>>96735294Of course, generalist magic can be perfectly well balanced with every other option.
>>96735304It absolutely can. But most class-based level-based RPGs in the style of D&D PF and so on don't. It's not that these systems inherently can't. They just don't. I don't know why. That's the problem. It utterly baffles me.
>>96735250Well?
>>96735104>This produces VASTLY more dysfunctional trap options than even the worst multiclassing in any edition of D&D.In D&D, when you want to be good at something that isn't adequately covered by just one class, you have to jump through a dozen different multiclassing hoops trying to find all the limited bonuses and synergies to get what you actually want.In classless systems, you just pump points into the one skill or trait you need and you're gucci. It's not that hard.
I wouldn't bother, he seems incapable of understanding such impossibly complex systems as "If you want to be good at martial arts, put ranks into martial arts". Clearly D&D 3.5 is much simpler.
>>96735254>Why do you think making a character is a random crapshoot?No, I said this:>at the blunter end it's vanishingly unlikely to make a meaningfully above mostly-random crapshoot fulfillment of the priorities on the player's endThat is, the intentional design by most people in the face of combinatorics is not getting much farther toward their objectives in the possibility-space than a mostly-random crapshoot. Because it is extremely easy to end up with literally billions of finely-sliced permutations of the concept with widely spread fulfillment of the objectives, and the desired spread is unlikely to be well understood to approach. The procedures that can iterate towards this are heavily reliant on known benchmarks, which everything being fungible with everything make very difficult to establish as the contributing factors become long series of degrees of freedom.>>96735337This is /tg/, we can literally go to sleep for 12 hours with no posts and the thread will still remain for a response. Promptness is neither required nor deserved.>>96735394I don't care, there remain billions of times more mechanically distinct cripplingly overspecialized and generalized wretches in the point-buy system. It is also far simpler to remove the hoops with adding on a fungible pool of minor inclusions than to idiot-proof the combinatorics.
>>96735396>I wouldn't bother, he seems incapable of understanding such impossibly complex systems as "If you want to be good at martial arts, put ranks into martial arts"And when you want granularity in specific styles of martial arts or specific actions taken in hand-to-hand combat, the complexity balloons into billions of minutely different permutations of progression at just 13 options. How difficult do you think it is to design that to have a remotely reasonable RoI spread?
>>96735405You're just saying word salad. Why do you think it's a crapshoot? Explain without being vague. Provide examples of it being a crapshoot in a game you've played.
>>96735413No it doesn't. Martial arts covers every style. Combat stunts covers everything you might want to do. Clearly it's not difficult to design at all, since it's already been done.
>>96735405You will respond instantly or die.
I would argue even in D&D sorcerers as a class have to specialize quite heavily already.
>>96735415>Why do you think it's a crapshoot?The term "crapshoot" is used with reference to a SEPARATE character from the one made by the actual player, representing a random sampling of the raw possibility space pertaining to the design goals of said character.>Provide examples of it being a crapshoot in a game you've played.No, because you are a retard who has twice misunderstood my basic sentence structure in the exact same way. Do you even know what combinatorics, factorials, or permutations are?>>96735421>No it doesn't. Martial arts covers every style. Combat stunts covers everything you might want to do. Clearly it's not difficult to design at all, since it's already been done.Tell me what system you're referring to and explain to me how it manages a narrow range of effectiveness for points spent on the subject.
>>96735443Do you? Because you don't seem to understand that they have nothing whatsoever to do with creating a character. There is no such thing as a character not made by a player. Every character made using the character creation rules is made by a player.
>>96735443What do you mean by "narrow range of effectiveness"? You never mentioned that before nor indicated that it was a requirement.
>>96735447>Because you don't seem to understand that they have nothing whatsoever to do with creating a character.They do in describing the set of options.>There is no such thing as a character not made by a player.There is in the process of designing the game.>>96735450I don't care that you cannot identify the through-line of designing for a low skill floor by robust procedures clearing exceptionally bad or good combinations of options, answer the question.
>>96735467No. Explain what you mean.
>>96735467No, not in the process of designing the game. Not in any situation, under any circumstances, ever. Do not EVER talk back to me.
>>96735468If you can't understand it from the very post you replied to, you do not have the faculties necessary to engage the subject I am actually talking about.
>>96735476Glad you agree that there are no issues with classless games then.
>>96735474Then you are simply incorrect, because whiteroom sacks of numbers rolling at genericons are utterly essential to dialing in the game math.>>96735478No, you just refuse to accept that having a lot of options could ever be a cause of problems.
>>96735484Your position isn't supported by observation of objective reality.
classless better last post :)
>>96735530Nah, class+level gets shit off the ground.
nah classless does class gets shit on :)
Why are class-based shitters so insecure? You guys look so fuckin pathetic LOL
