Classless Fantasy OGL (Work in progress)

It looks like I’m thinking of another big project in addition to the Worldbuilding articles I’ve started. Since I want to keep this site fresh, I figured in this case I should do a “behind the curtain” look at the design process for this particular idea.

I thought it would be interesting to try to make character generation and advancement more flexible by somehow trying to excise the notion of classes and instead allowing the player to choose the features and abilities (rage, turn undead, 1st level Wizard spells, etc) they want to add for his character. If there is a good reason to have a Wizard that can “rage” that should be possible. But another possible use of the system would be to balance a new base class. It also may lead to a better way to multi-class–or more accurately make multiclassing unnecessary.

So what I’ve decided to do is list the features and abilities the classes have at each level. Then I’ll try to work out some relative point values that seem to make sense and fit some sort of system. I’m basically going to try to reverse engineer what the game’s designers have come up with, whether they were working from a system or not.

After listing the abilities of most classes by class and level I can already see this is going to be a large task. But with the help of a spreadsheet and some patience it should be doable. I decide to focus on the iconic classes (Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, and Wizard) because they are simpler and the other base classes largely build on top of them. I also decide to focus on levels two through five. I stop at level five because I want to keep the workload easier but I’ll be sure to expand to higher levels. I’m not looking at level one for now because the classes I don’t think the point system I’ll use will fit due to each class getting more new abilities at level one that at level two.

Next, I feel I need to back out and consider what the point system will be. These points will be used at each level to buy the specific class features. Should I try to keep it small and only give a few points each level or should it be thousands of points to allow for a lot of variations in costs? Should the points be the same amount at each level or should they double at each level or should they change in some other way? Fortunately inspiration strikes and I think I can just reuse experience points (XP).

Using XP allows for a very interesting optional rule. Instead of leveling up when the character gets to the next major level milestone or leveling up when the character gets some downtime after earning a level, a GM can decide to let a character level up at any time. The GM’s house rules can be to level up after each game session with the points each character has earned or the next time the character has some downtime even if he hasn’t earned a full level’s worth of XP.

It also means that higher level abilities can be more expensive. But that means that some things will have to have higher costs if they are bought at higher levels. For example, one basic class feature is the hit die used. If using a d8 at second level will cost 500 points it can not be 500 points at 5th level because at 2nd level that is about 1/2 of the points the character will have available (earned between 1st and 2nd levels) but at 5th level that would be a little more than 1/10 of the XP point difference between 5th and 4th levels. Players would be stupid to pass up certain class features and abilities that don’t cost more at higher levels because they are so relatively cheap.

Many class features will have this issue, but in other cases it won’t make sense for the costs to vary. At fifth level a character picking up “Wizard-style casting level 1a” shouldn’t have to pay more for it because a couple of 1st level spells isn’t going to be worth more than it was at first level.

So at this point I have a chart of the iconic classes and their features and abilities from 2nd to 5th level. I’ve added a column for the cost of each item. As I look at each ability I consider if it should vary based on the character’s level for game balance. I also check the totals so they are roughly equal to a character’s XP at each level and I adjust as necessary.

The next steps I plan are to:

• Expand this to all base core classes.
• Expand this to all 20 levels.
• Consider how many points new characters should have initially.
• Start trying to develop some new characters or classes with the system to test it out.