Classes (Or: What is Your Character's Role)

Now, I'm going to talk a little bit about classes here, I know that some people don't like them, because they essentially lock a player into a specific playstyle: a rogue is going to backstab and hide, a wizard is going to shoot spells, what if they want to do both?  Yadda yadda.  Essentially people don't like them because it limits their freedom.

However, that being said, I've seen the other side of the rainbow too: no classes.  Take for instance Call of Cthulhu, you essentially make your own classes.  You choose your skills from a list, dump points into them, and then call your profession whatever name you want.  I've played with taxi drivers, lumberjacks, professors, construction workers, hitmen, etc.  There's so much customization, but then that also leads to problems too, for instance, what happens when you've got a group of 6 people who all took the same or very similar skills? (I've had this exact thing happen)  Or what happens if someone makes a character that is essentially worthless because they don't know what skills to use that makes them good? (I've had this happen as well)

So now the question is, how do we combat the two major problems here: the "locked-in" feeling and the "not enough structure" problem?

Well, I think that 3.5 and Pathfinder touched on it a little bit (unfortunately didn't bother to go into it deep enough to make it work though) by releasing in later books modifications to the base classes aka "Substitution Levels".  These things were awesome, you essentially traded out a power that you didn't care too much about for something a bit better/something you wanted, essentially giving you slightly more choice than just picking a class, they also used feats to help vary the classes, however feats are overly complicated so I want to leave those out (especially since we're not leveling in the traditional sense).

So how do we apply this?  Well, my thoughts are we have the base class available (like rogue, wizard, etc) and then each base class essentially has 2-3 subspecies that they can select (but do not have to), to add some variance.  Such as for rogue, there could be the "social rogue aka charlatan", the "combat rogue aka musketeer", and the "dungeoneering rogue aka smuggler".  Each one would have slightly different abilities but at the heart would still be a rogue, just with a more defined focus.

Now granted, before we can even get into that, we have to at least outline the base classes, which I am currently working on as we speak.  Also, I am trying to incorporate the Interaction Map into their design as well.

Here's the list I've got so far, along with the main abilities they focus on:

- Mage - Determination
- Shaman - Passion
- Rogue - Guile
- Warrior - Bravery
- Priest - Faith
- Tinkerer - Curiosity
- Berserker - Bravery and Passion
- Knight - Bravery and Faith
- Explorer - Bravery and Curiosity
- Alchemist - Curiosity and Arcane
- ???  - Curiosity and Guile
- Trickster - Arcane and Guile
- Ranger - Guile and Passion
- Druid - Passion and Faith

I will start working on exactly what each one means, and what it gets at the base class level, that way we can start looking into how to differentiate the class from within, like I mentioned here.