>try another """"classless"""" system with """"backgrounds"""" that """"only"""" determine flavor and starting gear>look inside>the backgrounds are character classesWhy the fuck is it so difficult to make a good classless system?
>>97295894Play GURPS. HTYNPD&D. Other nu/tg/ holy mantras.
>>97295894Classless systems are a lie. More news at eleven.
>>97295894your problem is that you think you're playing different systems but in reality you're not. you're just playing different derivatives of 5e.
>>97295894Let me guess, you tried Dragonbane, Knave, Cairne, Forbidden Lands (even the name is lmao), Shadowdark etc. and were surprised when at the end of the day they turned out to be ripoffs of D&D. Congratulations for falling for the marketing scam, retard.
who are you quoting?
>>97295894My game doesn't have any backgrounds and there are no gear restrictions. Just play better games.
>all these posts seething at le D&D boogeyman without being able to name a single classless system that "does it right""Classless systems" enthusiasts are once again proven nogaems tourists, water remains wet, story at 11.
>>97295894If what you are looking for in an rpg is tactical combat you ain't gonna get it out of "classless" system and if a such a system claims to have both then it probably lies.
Most players gravitate towards familiar archetypes even when trying to be creative.
I would help, but you used a reddit cat image and post like a /v/irgin, so instead, have a picture of (you).
>tourist gets angry at cat pictures on the cat websiteCurious.
>>97295894I've never seen such a thing.Traveller careers just determine the tables you roll on for your skills. It's certainly relevant to what you'll end up with, but doesn't matter once the game starts.Barbarians of Lemuria and derivatives have careers that work like very broad non-combat skills.
>>97295970Water never has, nor ever will be, wet.
>>97295902>>97295970GURPS is a true classless system THOUGH
>>97296132gurps isn't even a system. it's more fitting to call it a design philosophy.
>>97296181It's a system, but admittedly not one I would recommend unless at least the GM has serious autism. The players don't even have to know much about the system, just that it's 3d6 roll under
>>97295894Which system, specifically?
>>97295894I am murderously certain that there exist systems that luxuriously accommodate point-buy character creation.There are entire tomes bursting with simple traits, skills, and other bits-and-bobs, just waiting for a player to kludge together an absolute abomination.
>>97295970Prowlers and Paragons.
>>97295992No they don't.
>>97296181retard
>>97295894>so btfo by a game they can't even type what it is
>>97296181What are you talking about
>>97296048There's a difference between 4chan cats and reddit cats. But of course, you wouldn't know that.
>>97296048Not a cat website.
>>97296119>"Water has never wet"Huh?
>>97297379Water is not wet>>97295894A class is just a premade set of abilities. Its an archetype by another name in a classless system.>the backgrounds are character classesUnless it has a mechanical impact whats the problem?
>>97295970Digimon Digital Adventures. it's purely classless point buy. You don't have backgrounds, you don't have equipment, you don't even have to build all of your digimon's stages the same if you don't want to.
Genesys core has careers, but all they do is give you one ability and make some skills cheap to develop
>>97295894OP is playing “““classless””” 5e clones, you can tell by him mentioning “backgrounds”.
>>97298296that's not true they give you talents which is where the fun of the system is
>>97295950>Shadowdark>Forbidden LandsClassless?
>>97295894Which system did you try?
>>97295970GURPS, Shadowrun, CoC, P&P, the list goes on...
>>97298125Classless systems don't have archetypes and the two types of systems are neither equivalent nor interchangeable to any degree, no matter how slight.
>>97298890>Classless systems don't have archetypesShadowrun is classlessShadowrun has archetypesYou are wrong
>>97295970World of Darkness, for all its flaws, doesn't have classes. A Nosferatu can be played as a sneaky spy or a giant freakish bruiser.>>97298344Genesys's talents aren't tied to the not!classes; all talents are available to any archetype. You're thinking of the Star Wars RPG that Genesys is based on.
>>97298366Shadowrun isn't classless, what the hell
>>97295894Because fully refusing to cordon off "buckets" of character-generation resources leaves you wrangling naked combinatorials, which is extremely complicated to get anywhere with without a decent education in relatively advanced math, and so softer class mechanics are a common shortcut to get it usable. Whether that be the "backgrounds" you mention that prime you for a specific area, mutual exclusivities like Shadowrun's Essence setup, or investment efficiencies like WoD products, its part in lowering D&D's barrier to entry defeats most attempts at abandoning it in full.>>97296132It's not 100% classless, because it has templates that get referred to when discussing the imposition of rails to soften the learning curve. But with how thoroughly optional they are, it's a tiny fraction of a percent, and I've never heard serious talk about imposing level-like rails.>>97296198It's less ONE system than "the d20 system", the approach to universality of just dumping options for almost anything in one giant landfill makes it utterly essential for the end users to perform no small amount of game design work pruning what doesn't fit their particular concept for the session.>>97299063Its archetypal mutual exclusivities are just classes that refuse to be called such, as the infamously-horribly-formatted mechanics exclusive to them well demonstrate.
>>97295950What has Knave got to do with 5e?
>>97299103Are you quite retarded? Please point to the classes.
>>97299199Not the anon, but I distinctly recall a hard lockout between spell-flinging and punch-wizardry, and the Essence cost of cybernetics causes a lot of soft mutual exclusivity between areas of interest. It's not exactly formalized to "you started as X Class and are thus locked to Y skills", but it very thoroughly serves the same function of niche-enforcement.
>>97299215There is no such lockout. Adepts and Mages (punch/spells) are completely compatible, you just have to pay an extra point tax. The essence/magic attributes are 'soft' like you said, but the burnout is a standard archetype--a mage that got a bunch of 'ware and damaged his magic. There is absolutely nothing resembling a class system though, and zero niche enforcement since there is a 100% overlap between 'ware and magic. The only way you could possibly argue there's niche-enforcement is that point limits (or priorities or whatever character system you're using) force you to specialize if you want a character that's not dogshit. In terms of the actual rules, Shadowrun has as many features enforcing classes as GURPS does--zero.
>>97296181tell me you have never played gurps without telling me you have never played gurps.
>>97299215So a classless game cannot have mutually exclusive decisions in what your character takes?
>>97299215To back up what >>97299258 said, the cyber/magic devide isn't really a class thing. You can be a sneaky wizard, a sneaky adept, a sneaky decker, or a sneaky street sam. You could argue that there are team roles in shadowrun (combat, face, matrix and astral) but there are a lot of different ways to fill those roles.
>>97299258>There is no such lockout. Adepts and Mages (punch/spells) are completely compatible, you just have to pay an extra point tax.I'd be willing to bet I'm recalling some early-installment weirdness on Adepts, given the clusterfuck that is Shadowrun edition changes.>The only way you could possibly argue there's niche-enforcement is that point limits (or priorities or whatever character system you're using) force you to specialize if you want a character that's not dogshit....Which is enforcing that characters pick a limited subset of niches they're filling, just without hard lock-outs/-ins such that players "can" choose to be dogshit dysfunctional generalists.>>97299344What I'm arguing is that such mutual exclusivities are "impurities" in classless character generation.>>97299357That the niches are grouped differently from D&D nor hard lock-in bundles of functions nor the rails thereof are the dominant function of the system does not change that there are niches that you're pressured to pick a lane from and stick to.
>>97299507So, basically any system that doesn't let you be a godly generalist is a class system in your eyes?
>>97299507If "you can't be good at everything from the start" is an impurity, then your pure vision is shit.
>>97299507If you're a wizard in most class based systems, you're never going to be a good fighter, your intrinsic bundle of mechanics that make you a wizard preclude it.In SR, the only "lock-out" that exists is there ware lowers your essence and therefore your magic. But you could start filling the "niche" of decker, but with enough money and Karma, end up as a combat monster who can also hack shit. What you're talking about isn't a matter of niche, it's a matter of character creation economy.
>>97299668The one thing I was thinking is that there isn't really a way to be a mage and hacker, but even that isn't true, because a jack doesn't ding your essence too bad, and you could make it up with initiate levels. So, I think hypothetical endless karma and money situation, you could absolutely just be able to do anything.
>>97299676>there isn't really a way to be a mage and hackerSure there is. You can also be a Samurai on top of that.You won't be very good at any of those, but you can
>>97299691NTA but you can be good at all of them. Even losing 2 essence is completely fine for mages since you can boost it through initiation and foci. Losing 1 is standard because most don't have 6 anyways and stuff like a datajack and cybereyes are just way too convenient to not have.Ware and decking is just a matter of money. If you have the money, you can do it. Since you're limited in karma/nuyen at character creation, you can't be good at all of them. But if you're making a character without those limits or have played a very successful one, you can do it all.
>>97299579I'm saying that a system that prevents this by direct mutual exclusivities, even if soft, is not a pure classless system. I look at it as a spectrum, with single-decision-point on the pure-class end and completely ala carte character generation on the other.Though there remains some room on level vs. point-buy progression in the latter, as you "can" have broad-impact scaling values like Exalted Essence ratings or provide points in batches like for-legal-reasons-default Eclipse: the Codex Personae.>>97299613The impurity is doing that by direct tradeoff between wares and magic. In association with the above, either in complete purity is really painful for other design considerations, with pure ala carte progression posing non-trivial difficulties in wrangling the math to prevent omni-competent starting characters being an example.>>97299668>What you're talking about isn't a matter of niche, it's a matter of character creation economy.Which is why I called it soft mutual exclusivity in >>97299215. Which as mentioned serves the function of niche enforcement.
>>97299691You read the first half of the first sentence of the post and decided to respond, that's literally what the rest of the post says
>>97299801>If I spend more points in spells I spent less points in combat, therefore mage is a class
>>97299801>mutual exclusivities, even if softPlease define mutually exclusive for me Mr. Semantics.
>>97299945That's mere opportunity cost, the direct surcharge to Adept+Mage and offsetting Essence loss for magic+cybernetics mean that having a separate Adept, Mage, and Hacker matches the same performance in their respective fields for a lower total points cost. Thus, there is soft mutual exclusivity between the three enforcing niches in a very class-like fashion.Once again, I look at it as a spectrum. Shadowrun is quite overt about bundling functions into mechanically-correlated roles that there is extra work to trying to fill several of, so even though it doesn't have a big block of "Class Mechanics" entries the system's still a ways from "pure" classless.>>97300012Broadly, that things cannot be true at the same time. "Even if soft" is to denote a technically-improper use for mere penalty rather than hard distinction because I do not know a more accurate term and would rather not write out an entire paragraph describing the dynamic in question in detail every single time I start posting in one of these threads.
Call of Cthulhu and Traveller are two of the oldest RPGs and neither ties your background to your abilities in the manner a class does. Both are skill based systems that give incredible amounts of crossover between character archetypes. Of course, I’m probably responding to bait
>>97300030Anon, put the keyboard down. You're just making a fool of yourself. The very fact that you think Adept and Mage are 'classes' instead of 'Face' and 'Blaster' shows you don't have even a basic knowledge of the system you're talking about.
>>97300046Nope, according to semantics anon, if you cannot be good at literally everything with no gaps, it's a class system. Sorry!
>>97295894Because you have to figure out a novel way to reward progression that doesn't also reward specialization within any set of predefined experience, levels, etc.This is in stark contrast to both existing systems large and small as well as the mindset in real life. People "specialize" in one or maybe a few things IRL as years go on. You learn certain skills with experience, and honestly do so far more than what we experience in games. A French pastry chef may be able to make a fine mole, but some dude that makes mole for a living can probably do it and blow your fucking mind and vice versa with a crêpe.
>>97300072>The very fact that you think Adept and Mage are 'classes' instead of 'Face' and 'Blaster'What is the actual game-design distinction? Are they not defined clusters of mechanical competencies structuring player character generation to render parties mechanically favored with barriers beyond mere opportunity cost to filling several of?>>97300074How many times am I going to have to repeat that I look at it as a spectrum where systems are on a sliding scale of how strictly "class-based" they are?
>>97300134NTA, but speaking as someone familiar with SR 5e, basically the only non-opportunity cost based limitation for Shadowrun character creation is that you can only be at most one type of awakened/emerged. The "clusters of mechanical competencies" are mostly driven by investment into attribute/skill combos.For awakened, magic is a set of substystems - astral perception, astral projection, spellcasting, summoning, adept powers, and a couple of spell variants like alchemy. Different kinds of awakened have access to different subsystems, but the tradeoff between them is mostly opportunity cost - magicians and mystic adepts have access to every subsystem besides adept powers for magicians and astral projection for mystic adepts, while other kinds are more limited but cheaper. Remove those costs, and a mystic adept with infinite karma and nuyen would be capable of essentially anything in shadowrun besides scouting/fighting while disembodied or using Emerged powers.Emerged are essentially matrix characters that rely on quasi-magic instead of tech. They get a small list of unusual tech themed powers that cannot be replicated otherwise, and may summon pet NPCs in the matrix, but the bread and butter of their "powers" is just replicating what non-emerged characters do without needing gear. With infinite karma/nuyen, an emerged character would be more or less a strict upgrade over a mundane character, having access to bonuses and subsystems that the mundane character does not, with zero downsides besides opportunity cost.Characters with no Magic or Resonance can do anything that doesn't specifically interface with the subsystems attached to Magic or Resonance, and the only difference between a character with radically different roles (driver, drone controller, hacker, combat wombat, socialite etc) is where karma and nuyen has been invested.Cyber is available to everyone, but non-mundanes get hit with a karma tax to access it aka an extra opportunity cost.
>>97300134>How many times am I going to have to repeat that I look at it as a spectrumAnon how many times am I going to have to repeat it: you’re on the spectrum!
>>97299162What do you mean "get anywhere"? Classless systems are usable.
>>97295894What system was this?
>>97297379Under a strictly scientific definition of wetness (how well a liquid sticks to a solid), water is kind of mid, because there's all kinds of solids it doesn't stick to.
>>97297298>unironically saying this on the website that spawned the cheezburger memes and longcat
>>97301566It doesn't stick to itself, either.
>>97298125>>97301566ESL hours
>>97301953Explain how those posts are ESL.
>>97301983>"teach me english saar"Not for free.
>>97297298Are you the /an/ schizo?
>>97301637It's correct, yeah.
>>97299063Nah.
>>97295894Wild Talents. GURPS. Shadowrun.
>>97296181GURPDP?
>>97298344Do you mean stuff like pic rel?That was in Star Wars line of games, when they turned the system into "universal" Genesys core, they made Talents available to everyone.
>>97295894It isn't. /thread.
My unfinished and shit system is genuinely classless.Take a gander if you're bored. It isn't good though.https://rentry.org/9yw8r9it
>>97295987Valor is classless and a 4e clone in combat terms. Very interesting design space.
>>97296508didn't reply, you lose.
>>97299162>Its archetypal mutual exclusivities are just classes thNot a thing in Shadowrun. You have absolutely no fucking clue what you're talking about. Like anon said:Shadowrun is classless.Shadowrun has archetypes.You are wrong.The fact that you think it has "archetypal mutual exclusivities" just compound how wrong you are, and showcase that you do not know what you're talking about. You don't know what an archetype is, as in the actual meaning of the words, and you have not played Shadowrun, nor, I suspect, any classless systems.
>>97299945Yeah.
>>97295894Have you tried not playing dnd derivatives?
>>97295894>Why the fuck is it so difficult to make a good classless system?LBB Traveller managed it 50 years ago. Just go play that.
>>97296181fatass loser
>OP claims to have played classless systems>does not name a single oneOP does not play gamesnow I am off to play my game, bye loser
>>97295970I really want to like cairn 2e but I can't. It is missing too much...
