Classes and Cogitations: Quadratic for having heard of it

Millie: "Why do you suppose superheroes are all such jocks, anyway? People who write superhero comics aren't jocks. They're even bigger nerds than us."

Ozy: "Maybe it's a form of Stockholm syndrome. An identification with, and internalization of, the values of an oppressor."

Ozy and Millie 2006/05/18 (navigate back a few for the start of the joke)

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Since before I was born, gamers have suffered a morbid sort of Stockholm syndrome through their avatars, pretending they're grunting barbarians even as they memorize page after page of feats and backstory. In fact I had barely started this blog before noting that Half-Life's nominally hard science protagonist was a rare blip in a sea of marines, space marines, ultramarines and randomarines, and even Gordon just shot shit up. Entering a realm of the mind to define yourself by physical stats seems like pretty classic Nietzschean slavishness, defining your happinness by the standards of the rabble you're escaping by diving into virtualia in the first place. I especially grit my teeth at e-"sports" aping jock leagues.

 

So where's the flip-side? Where's the nerd supremacism? You'd think D&D for example, which back in the '90s would get you physically beaten for even admitting you knew of its existence, would wholeheartedly embrace a revenge of the nerds. But balancing spellcasters vs. grunts remains a major talking point in any discussion on RPGs. As a reminder of this, last year it turned out Baldur's Gate 3 got limited to lvl 12, explicitly so as not to allow wizards their high-level pay-off.

 

Um, wizards damn well should be overpowered. Reason deserves to be held superior to emotion or physicality.

 

Everything we have, everything we can do in the real world that no other animal can do, we owe to intellect, to individuals of superior reason. Everything you wear, eat, drive or type on had to be thought before it was made. Nobody makes a computer monitor by praying at it or punching it, and don't even start on investors, publishers or profiteering companies patenting their employees' work. At an even more fundamental level, thought is existence. Intellectual superiority is existential superiority. Add some universal force called "magic" and you are only adding new levers by which to move the world - and those best suited to do so would still be those smart enough to know where to place the fulcrum. The mental intricacy and fortitude to shift the very laws of nature leaves "hulk smash" a class below by its very concept. So stop trying to equivalate brains with brawn.

And alright, I'll concede a wide mix of classes definitely adds some spice. Occasionally even I play something other than an elvish wizard/druid. But classes can also consist of nothing but spellcasters differing in their means of interaction with baser matter like jocks. It's pretty common for cRPGs to just hand fighters stupidly overpowered swords and boards for endgame viability, but I'd rather keep all classes relevant by enforcing interdependencies. Stop giving wizards "nukes" and have them work through their teammates: buffs, crowd control, mobility, clairvoyance, etc. Better yet, make nonmagical classes into mooks for casters.

 

In fact, every time  this issue comes up I can't but recall M.A.X. in which you, the player, were a brain in a jar directing largely robotic forces and an automated colony base. Spellcasters, istari, and in a wider sense "the wise" direct matter inert or living. A game with wizards should only feature sword-swinging grunts as tools for wizards.

("and high disdain from sense of injur'd merit")

Classes&Cogitations: Pet Afterthoughts

I was surprised by how much Baldur's Gate 3 downplayed combat pets and creature summoning. On one hand, cRPGs always had a problem with disposable summons replacing your party's front line, but then again Larian's obsession with teleportation obviates tactical positioning anyway, so I doubt that was on their minds. Maybe it stems from some push to minimize paperwork in D&D's latter versions (more characters = more attack rolls to tally) but if so it's a woefully misplaced concern in computer adaptations because... well, y'know, "processor" and all that. And they certainly had no problem letting me pile a dozen redundant zombies and ghouls into fights. At least some of the summons they did implement move beyond mere damage soaking.

The dryad not only has a moderately useful crowd control spell but her own summon, the fallen lover, is a decent bruiser with a shitty attack roll... which can be mitigated by the dryad's own staff knockdown, letting the power duo dogpile one target rather satisfyingly. Like weapons or other specialization choices, it's nice when "different" means more than cosmetically different.

As my playstyle gravitates away from optimization and toward support roles with lots of tricks up their sleeves, I've often encountered the "pet class" problem: at which point does the class' pet become more important than the class itself? Balance concerns multiply with every mook you summon, especially in systems with relatively low damage/health numbers like, say, D20. Summoning something with baseline 1D6 damage at low levels can amount to doubling your damage, but lowering attack rolls can easily overcompensate into uselessness.

 

Practicality aside, even aesthetically the coolness of your beeping robots or clattering skeletons can draw attention away from your actual player avatar. Animal pets especially steal the show faster than Anthony Hopkins, to where you'll find yourself playing a large bear with a small druid attached. Hell, if you've ever walked a dog around the neighbourhood you can guess how encountering a ranger with a tame magic super-wolf would play out:

"Oh, hey, nice to meet - OMG is that a big pooch that does tricks!? C'mere boy, aren't you cute, whozzagoodboy, whozzagoodboy! ... Wait, I'm sorry random schmoe with a bow standing next to the GIANT ADORABLE FLUFFY PUPPY, who the hell are ya again? - whozzagoodboyyy!"

I mean, I liked Sagani from Pillars of Eternity well enough, but I still learned Itumaak's name before hers and now remember it more easily. 

So there seems little middle ground. You either have to downplay the pet into an utterly forgettable bonus attack per round... or, and call me druidically biased, but you could also lean into the pet personality dynamic and express pet classes' characteristics through these walking, flying, floating, crawling, burrowing, hopping extensions of themselves. RPG necromancers already fall into that pattern by maintaining the undeath theme. So why not force a bit of thematic specialization and pet focus elsewhere? City of Heroes' "mastermind" villain class is often cited as great fun for exactly that reason, as each of its subclasses ran with a specific theme, be it zombies, ninjas, robots, whatever, with most of the mastermind's own abilities revolving not around direct attacks but around resummoning pets as they dropped, ordering them, buffing and debuffing.

It may be better to start thinking of summoner classes as gestalts, with the main summoner/tamer being merely the most expressive and constant embodiment of that personality. Play into summoning different goons for different purposes, like wolves for combat and foxes for sneaking, or swapping out golem arm attachments for mining/hauling/sniping or an Artful Dodger summoning different pint-sized rogues for the heist at hand. Give the various pets the odd interaction or encounter of their own, give the pack or squad or murder of bots a shifting personality based on its currently dominant composition (much like One of Many from Mask of the Betrayer.) At the same time, stick to the theme! Unless generalism itself be my theme, my wizard's summons shouldn't read like the start of a weak joke: a succubus, a dire pangolin and a zombie walk into a bar...

If nothing else, it would also be a minor step toward personifying your roleplaying avatar in terms of what it does instead of how it's dressed. And come on, don't tell me you can't think of any cute, poignant or clever ways in which pets could spice up a roleplaying campaign.

 

ey, ocupado!

 

Classes & Cogitations: Weapon Afterthoughts

By the time I got into D&D adaptations with NWN (3rd edition) weapons and their associated feats were already an overbuilt mess, and if anything proved that to me, it was going back to play Icewind Dale and finding the weaponry actually made more sense years prior.

Blame it partly on the usual one-upmanship. Every new goblin-pokin' stick gots ta be bigger an' stickier than the last to impress munchkins. Once you give them swords they want greatswords, and then grandswords and great-grandswords and megaswords and gigaswords. Once you give them double axes they want quadruple axes, and how many lightsaber blades are we Darth Mauling and Grievousing nowadays? If you haven't turned Jedis into lightsaber porcupines yet, you're obviously not trying hard enough. So let's make a few points:

 

1) Giving one class access to all weapons and weapon feats made a little sense when strictly delineating each class by one core function: hits shit, disarms traps, heals, nukes. But any more nuanced class system needs more gradations. See post #2 in this series for my case on doing away with the "fighter" class.

 

2) There's a difference between choice and redundancy. Characterizing my "dire mace" as a quarterstaff with better stats when replaying NWN's expansions a few years ago spoke to transparent redundancy in more than one dimension. In addition to power bloat you're needlessly duplicating functionality between different types of bladed weapons and so forth, which overwhelmingly invalidates weapon specialization feats for just one type of falchion/scimitar/gladiolus/whatever... and then they went and duplicated the whole mess yet again for weeaboo appeal with kamas and katanas. So let's hit that last point first. Claymores, Zweihanders, Daikatanas, unless you're specifically banking on historical accuracy to the level of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, such distinctions are cosmetic and should be treated as such. Trying to implement separate specializations in each of fifty different flavors of "yew call that a knoife" in a single campaign just invites itemization woes.

3) Homogenization is even worse. In Baldur's Gate 3 my only character who did not use a crossbow was the party's rogue, but despite abandoning most old class/race weapon proficiencies, many items still came with bonuses accessible or tailored to rogues, gith or whatever, demonstrating that complete freedom of choice wouldn't be very fun in a genre where you're expected to establish personal identity.

So where's that sweet spot between too much or too little choice? Well, the old precept of basic / martial / exotic weapons was solid, if only it hadn't been watered down. Much like the law / goodness intersection, the several axes of combative prowess (magic / range / defense / offense) go a long way toward establishing characters on a continuum in relation to each other. (A duelist for example: give it light armor with exotic weaponry; a cleric the reverse.) Problem: if completely synonymous with class choice, it's not an opportunity to roleplay. If cleric=mace and thief=dagger and wizard=staff then you may as well upgrade the weapon slot automatically as you level instead of pretending to let players distribute new cutlery among the party. Otherwise, MMOs demonstrate the logical extreme for endless, class-specific, linear gear upgrades: a mindless incremental grind for predetermined outcomes.

 

4) Weapons should be usable, even for spellcasters. Icewind Dale intrigued me not least by my casters outputting much of their damage not from limited-use fireballs but from their piddlin' little 1D4 slings. (Granted, that was largely because IWD featured a Diablo-esque quantity of trash mobs to clear, but still...) Keep Half-Life's crowbar in mind as object lesson: it wouldn't have become nearly as emblematic if you hadn't been encouraged to use it. Eliminate damage cantrips and the all-purpose magic missile. Institute spell reagents and ammunition (another good experience was rationing +l33t ammo in IWD2; black arrow, you were passed down from my father and his father, etc.) but don't fall into the trap of making everyone into a greatsword-swingin' battlemage as Larian or Bethesda do. Spellcasters should be limited to simple weapons, and also constantly falling back on those simplest of weapons for damage dealing, both to economize on precious mana or spells per day and because magic should not be a primary damage source to begin with.

 

Note much of this only really applies to party-based cRPGs or other squad management. An author or tabletop GM can tailor loot to his party's needs if he wants (see Roy, Belkar and Durkon from OOTS all getting ranged melee attacks so they're not standing around waiting for flight spells to expire) and single-character campaigns default to the player character snatching up the biggest baddest available pokin'-stick at every turn. It's when deliberately balancing a roster with frontliners, flankers and support that weapon differentiation feels most rewarding and the gamut must be best defined. Everything from whip-chains, tridents and Excalibur through simple but trusty off-the-rack spears, crossbows and shortswords all the way down to blacksmith's hammers, slings, blowguns and good old-fashioned tree branches should come with their own advantages and disadvantages, never pigeonholed to one class and never available to all.

More importantly they should play off each other: spears holding off enemies for archers to shoot, crossbows staggering enemy advance for slow-swinging halberds to wind up reach attacks, disorienting slung pebbles allowing daggers to crit, staff trip moves giving heavy warhammers an elevation damage bonus on prone targets, whatever ways you can think of weapons INTERACTING among a well-balanced party would greatly help legitimize what has in most cases boiled down to meaningless cosmetic fluff. When did roleplaying strategists forget the notion of combined arms? Blunt/slash/pierce is a nice start, but how often do you see campaigns putting to use even that basic distinction from fight to fight and zone to zone?

And if your weapons really don't work differently with different requirements and interactions, then stop claiming your game has fifty "different" flavors of sharp stick.

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P.S.:

Weirdly, you'll see single-character games like The Age of Decadence implementing basic yet impactful weapon properties (like spears blocking enemy advance) but that may have more to do with the low fantasy setting. It wasn't afraid special weapon moves would cut into the specialness of fireballs and blizzards. On the other hand, we do need to skew fantasy more toward the low end...

Classes & Cogitations, 7: Wizzin'

Like other core classes, the wizard suffers from undue overlap with later additions to the D&D-inspired RPG roster, but additionally must contend with the proper division of magic in whatever setting he happens to inhabit. D&D at least established the basic arcane / divine split early on (even if that line often lacks clear definition) but in other game universes like for example The Elder Scrolls where everyone's an all-purpose greatsword-swingin' battlemage, discerning schools of magic inevitably ends up as inconsequential fluff.

Let's reiterate that magic should not be demeaned by using it to punch stuff. Punchin' stuff is what actual punching is for. Also maces, axes and a dagger up your strap. Magic missiles water down both magic and missiles. By extension, the distinction between elemental magic (fire bolt, frost bolt, lightning bolt... rock... bolt? Rock.) used by so many games should really be done away with, as should basing magic around elemental resistances. It's been done to death, separating ice from fire never made much physics sense to begin with, and calling different colored magic missiles different spells shows about as much roleplaying depth as food coloring on a saltine would culinary depth. I'm not saying a big flashy nuke every once in a while doesn't have its place, but wizards should not be primary damage dealers. Move from "fireball" more toward "heat metal" - but then how should the various magic schools look?

 

Sure, in 1975 the wizard definition could be "all of the magicses" but now not only many spell but core class features overlap with later additions.

If you have witches, they're the ones who should be conjuring familiars.

If you have warlocks, they're the ones who should be conjuring demons.

If you have druids/shamans, they're the ones who should be conjuring animals.

If wizards are the nerds, shift them more toward animated suits of armour, alchemy, magical inscriptions, tomes and scrolls and general Saruman craftiness. "Fireball" should be a barrel of black powder, a flask of greek fire or a dragon's tonsils, and subject to ingredient availability.

 

So downplay or maybe conflate Evocation, Conjuration, and to a lesser extent Enchantment/Transmutation since they're witch/warlock/shaman fable staples.

Necromancy, on the other hand, is a pretty classic mad scientist field, though of course it depends on the setting's interpretation of life/death divine magic. Golems, homunculi, Frankensteiny creations in general remain sorely underexplored as playable gimmicks at least in video games so far. 

Illusion so obviously links real-world "magic" stage acts to fantasy for-realsies magic that it should remain a wizardly staple (see Gandalf throwing his voice in The Hobbit) but for the love of crap, downplay the mind control! If it were up to me I wouldn't keep sorcerers in the game at all, but if you do, then the charisma-based spellcasting class should more heavily emphasize hypnosis. For wizards, think smoke and mirrors, holograms and ventriloquism instead!

 

Abjuration's an interesting case, and suits my support caster preference, but the more defensive a wizard's spellcasting gets, the more he starts looking like a cheap knock-off unarmored cleric who can't heal and thinks "mace" is a can of pepper spray. Specific effects like protection from arrows or stone to flesh fall within the precept of wizardly erudition, but the more generic AC/HP boosts should mostly be left to more combat-oriented casters. Planar binding and its like see very little use in cRPGs, but largely for poor campaign writing. As a basic observation, letting wizards buff up their base stats and equipment with magic (as exemplified by Dragon Age: Origins' arcane warrior) is every bit as fraught a proposition as a fighter with dragon breath.

Divination though takes the cake for potentially amazing yet unused effects. Why not put various spins on predicting enemy moves, whether it's spells, called shots, AoE locations, dodges, incoming adds, terrain changes, really, anything? For a bonus, pair this with some limited form of quickened or reactive spells for any specifically interacting effect: if you divine a fireball, you get a reaction on protection from energy; if you divine an incoming crit, get a reactive flare or displacement. Why not tie divination to seeing enemy stats? Why not divine quest objectives via chicken entrails? Why not a spell to hear conversations in other rooms (clairaudience, they have that in tabletop) or magical radar (claivoyance, auspex, anyone?) with dialogue bonuses from that information going forward, or a substitute spell for barbarian/ranger tracking (which is also ignored in cRPGs, see #5 in this series) or discovering extra crafting ingredients, or sharing divining power with an ally to alter one dice roll a round at will, or predicting which way enemies will walk or turn to help a thief while sneaking, or fuck it, anything at all beyond Deckard Cain the Elder identifyin' geegaws!

Then you still must address confusion as to the types of magic in any particular setting. Does your fantasy world have divine and arcane and maybe natural magic? Does a certain type of magic (e.g. raising a zombie) require communion with otherworldly entities or is it merely manipulating inert matter? Is disease microbial or a curse? Does traveling between worlds require a pact with the fairies and a mushroom ring? Is magic inherent in all life or all matter in animist fashion, or is it a force pulled from a source or is it a property of a select few gifted individuals? Can spirits come back from the dead? Do they reincarnate or merely wander the halls of Mandos (or Elysian fields) until the end of time?

Any character might stumble into such quandaries in a fantasy world, but when designing a class centered on deliberately, consciously and quantitatively manipulating the laws of the natural and supernatural, those questions become prerequisites. Questions like "does Melf's acid arrow contain actual, liquid acid I can catch in a pickle jar?" are not mere trivialities to a wizard, but the very essence of his trade.

Classes&Cogitations, 6: Da Drood

Call me nitpicky, but the druid class' biggest problem is its name. When implemented, it appears to have wound up by default (in contrast to clerics) a catch-all for paganism, laden with noble savage hippie claptrap alongside a smatter of animism, shamanism and that old tree surgeon joke from MASH as the definition of druidism. Plus, much as it pains my lycanthropic self to admit it, it doesn't mesh well with what became druids' most famous class feature, shapeshifting.

Animal skin-changing (or inducing such changes in others) is a pretty common storytelling trope in most early religions, and a power claimed by many of those religions' mystics... but it's usually associated with the concept of shamanism. Granted it's a largely semantic difference, and there's plenty of overlap between Celtic druids and the widespread shamanistic beliefs of Eurasia (or the little we can glean archaeologically after Christians' and Muslims' unending cultural genocide campaign) but once D&D (and its copycats) decided to expand via classes actually called "shaman" etc. then the skin-changing or skin-walking or inhabiting the bodies of animals should mostly have migrated over to them.

And it's not like you wouldn't have plenty to work with to flesh out a druid class without (or with heavily reduced) shapeshifting, even from my meager knowledge of Celtic religion. The idea of druids forming secretive cabals out in the wilderness (to protect their oooohhh-spoookyy forbidden knowledge) was actually historically true as far as I know, and combined with a similarly secretive aversion to the written word and reliance on oral tradition this could make for some pretty memorably conspiratorial druidic cults without anyone ever growing a single extra hair. But aside from living outside the main community for the sake of secrecy, the druidic priesthood was concerned less with wild animals than with natural cycles of life/death or the seasons (to the point of obsessing over the turning wheel as universal motif) and come on, what director worth his salt can't make a visually stunning scene out of wagon burials?

 

Speaking of oral tradition, while more modern religious education may be carried out in organized edifices with written stores of official dogma and objects of devotion or study, earlier religions around the world routinely localized their stock of lore squarely in the pin-head of the tribe's one official witch doctor. That one, in turn, would keep an apprentice or two. While for monks, clerics, paladins, etc. I've constantly been emphasizing the need to flesh out their monasteries, churches and other trappings of their order, for the wilder types much of their existence would revolve around the direct master-student relationship. If you want a brief but lovely example of that, run a mage through Old Mebbeth's quest chain in Planescape: Torment. In fact, quite a few of that game's backstory interactions centered on long-term apprenticeship (Dak'kon / Ignus / Ravel) for good or ill...

Calling upon animals to help could still be in the druidic wheel-house (but I'll get to the Conjuration school when I talk about wizards) alongside light and darkness, seasonal effects, maybe calling upon dead souls to inhabit animals if you want to stretch it a bit, augury whether based on the behavior of animals or on entrails, empowering warriors, you name it. Let's not forget that rather infamous druidic predilection for human sacrifice, which I've found conspicuously absent from cRPGs. For some strange reason.

 

Where you split the difference between druids, witches, shamans, voodoo and other "natural" or "spirit" magic as opposed to organized churches depends on your particular game's system, but to ensure a difference, split you must. If not, well, look at something like NWN2 and tell me whether druid/shaman/warpriest/etc. actually feel like different classses.

 

In practical terms, druids work best as a summoning and crowd control class (brambles, ice, stone, sunlight) and many of those spells beautifully complement that Celtic turning wheel motif, through waning/waxing growth and decay, changes and cycles. But for physical control to stand out, games in general need to give up their obsession with telepathy and mind control, and that's a topic to be revisited some other time.

Classes&Cogitations 5: Flavor of the Monk

Well, this one should be easy. Lucky all those other classes' tedious analysis of roleplaying and mechanic interconnection is superfluous in the case of our next two options.

If you want to pretend you're Arnold Schwarzenegger, play a barbie.

If you want to pretend you're Bruce Lee, play a monkey.

Done. Who needs RP when you've got fad worship?

Enter the Dragon came out two years before D&D's 1975 release with the original monk, coincidentally about the same time Kung Fu was first airing. Conan three years before its '85 release; enter barbarians and supposedly a decisive retool for monks into full-on karate kids. Neither class fits particularly well into D&D's basic rock/paper/scissors late-medieval wargaming origin with its discrete armor classes and weapon proficiencies. Granted that's not a bad thing. For the game to grow, it needed some gaps and bridges in those class distinctions. Still, if latching on to the latest Hollywood craze managed to fit that need, it can't have been less than 90% dumb luck on the part of Gygax&co. But hey, D&D's a half-baked hodgepodge of pop culture tropes even on a good day (note we just had a major video game adaptation based on the notion that Lovecraftian face tentacles are trending well on Facebook) so don't expect any improvements from Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro.

It's up to their many spin-offs and imitators to make good on bad ideas.

For a relatively minor question, ask yourself how you're gonna balance the economics. If heavier armor is better and more expensive (as it sure as hell was historically) then how exactly will you insert ber-serk front-liners without obsoleting your tin can brigade? You might not question it now, but the "naked caster" problem cropped up in a big way in pre-WoW MMOs, especially with PvP (read: griefing) enabled. And if you have any interest in creating a coherent game world, then cost, bulk and solidity will have to be re-examined. If all it takes is one reagent-free cast of stoneskin for my IWD2 halfling monk to out-tank my dwarf fighter, you've got a problem.

 

Barbarians filled a more necessary niche for offense-oriented fighters back when the fighter was the sword-and-board heavy defending light and medium wizards and thieves, and I always liked how the rage mechanic pushed you into all-out offense, to finish the fight before your timer runs out. But if the barbarian is an offense-oriented fighter, that does raise the question of difference from a fighter built for offense... and the answer is once again the rage ability... and the class has just sort of stuck there since its inception. Moving past that requires more investment in noncombat skills and feats, but let's postpone that until we reach the ranger.

I've also never seen monk weapons truly implemented in cRPGs. Historically, there were plenty of non-military farming implements and such which could be used in battle, like pitchforks, sickles, scythes, hatchets or nunchuks (I'm'a thresh yew up, boyyy!) and it makes perfect sense to associate these with clerics, monks and other non-martial classes. Fixating on kung-fu movie slapstick to the exclusion of such options also cuts a potential vein of roleplaying continuity, of monastic communities with the villages connected to them. Does your monk's quarterstaff skill come from defending himself with a walking stick on pilgrimages? Did you learn to wield a sickle while defending downtrodden villagers from heathen raiders who chased them to your abbey? Or rather fuck that RP noise because your stun skill requires you to be empty-handed or gives you a +2 ToHit for having your middle finger free?

Really, in terms of RP, the monk's problem is the same as the cleric's: fleshing out those creeds and sticking by them. To what force is your order devoted and will that come up in the campaign? Who wrote your rule and does it entail asceticism, tithing, paid sacraments, ritual prayers (possibly working as buffs) vows of silence or nonviolence (and if so what are your conditions for breaking them) is your order apolitical or subordinate to a certain clergy or god-king, where are your monasteries, your relics, do you need to report back to your abbot, are you responsible for your party members' sins? Do you support yourselves by brewing wine or beer or hold some sort of royally-guaranteed monopoly on some trade goods, and if so will those skills show up when negotiating in taverns or let you wrangle an audience with the minister of trade? You don't need to hold yourself to every single such detail, but I'll be damned if you ever meet a monk in a cRPG with more personality than "I know kung fu" and monasteries, while frequent, tend to be explicitly disconnected from the playable monk class.

 

It's not like barbarians get much better treatment either. How does tribal life ever impact your gameplay? (I'm especially reminded of Dragon Age: Origins' introduction, reading all those lore entries and dialogues about the Chasind... only for none of it to come up ever again.) You will inevitably visit a barbarian village in every cRPG campaign, and while there you will just as inevitably participate in exactly one activity: a trial by combat to decide the new chief. Chief of what? Who gives a shitting bull. Again, where is your tribe from, what are your hunting grounds, do you migrate with the herds, do you harvest seasonal fruits, are you seminomadic between winter lakes and summer pastures (and will those skills come in handy in feeding the adventuring party?) do you raid other tribes or have traditional enemies (like the other barbarians you meet during the campaign) do you raid civilized outposts and are therefore a criminal, if you lack citizenship in any major political entity how does that affect your status? Remember, the law throughout history has "solved" many crimes by convicting the nearest foreigner, and as a barbarian, hey, that's you! And while we're at it, do you know how to read? It's especially funny that RPG barbarians are so often portrayed as grounded, pragmatic realists or even de facto atheists, when primitive nomads are actually superstitious as fuck! Everything, every single damn thing is either good luck or bad luck to them, either an evil spirit or a divine blessing.

Finally: the ranger, which seems to have suffered a great deal of derailment. In cRPG scripts, ranger means unaffiliated (or flatly anti-social) woodsman with a bow, but the class' original inspiration, Tolkien's latter-age Dunedain, were a deeply, multigenerationally loyal caste with specific genetics, in fact an organized (if overtly decentralized) hereditary guerilla force, and the "dour-handed rangers of the north" hacked and slashed their way through LotR's last battles with their swords. There's a lot of unused wiggle room in game writing for rangers as distant appendages of various power structures. Granted, much like barbarians' heavy melee offense, ranger range combat just fits an otherwise empty niche in core archetypes. A better spread of fighter/thief classes (as seen in more recent RPGs) picking up more range focus frees rangers from the sniper pigeonhole. But then if they're no longer "I know bow fu" then what exactly does a ranger do? Doth a ranger... range?

The basic D&D classes provided all you needed in a dungeon crawl: one to hit shit, one to disarm traps, one to heal and one to abracadabra whatever couldn't be hit to death. Every class added after that tends to devolve to yet another flavor of "hit shit" especially in computer games which are great at clicking things to death and infamously terrible at every other aspect of roleplaying. Interconnecting lore and player actions is one problem, sure, but all three of these classes require non-combat skill use to make them stand apart. You remember, moving quietly, spotting, all the myriad skills lumped under "survival" and everything else crucial to moving this genre outside the dungeon, will it ever be used? Does it matter that your barbarian can stride across the tundra if all the action takes place in a 10x10 room with an orc guarding a treasure chest? Does knowing how to build a smokeless campfire ever help the party? Or skin a deer? Or pick berries that don't taste like burning? Or train/use carrier pigeons? Or shave a bone spear or record your deeds in scrimshaw? Is there anything for your monk to grapple or balance across, or any tests of mental discipline to pass? Can your ranger track a party of kidnappers across the plains of the horse-lords and commune with said horses?

Because if the answer to "can I do anything besides hit shit" is consistently NO, then you may as well call them all fighters and be done.

Classes&Cogitations, 4: What's my motivation?

Paladins and Bards represent D&D's growth from pure dungeon crawl to actual "role"-playing beyond the role of rock, paper or scissors, each leveraging the alignment wheel's law and chaos to make the player think about following a particular ethos. I can't speak for how well it worked in tabletop, but as to the internet age I invite you to tally up the amount of air time bards or especially paladins take up in cRPGs, as well as fan works like DnD-inspired webcomics. However, designating a particular class for heavier roleplaying is at best a crutch. I was pleased to see extra dialogue options for my IWD2 paladin, but if roleplaying really is intrinsic to the game genres named after it, RP choices should pervade any class choice - perhaps not equally, but comparably.

Given that I spent my previous post in the series arguing clerics need tighter links to their deities (shifting divine spellcasting overall toward lawful) paladins should probably just be folded into the greater cleric class, limited and defined by devotion to specific lawful good (or non D&D-equivalent) deities. The other option is to embrace the definition of paladins as knightly orders with a specific mission (combating the saracens, guarding the roads to Jerusalem, etc.) but let's face it, fleshing out such distinctions with sufficient nuance to supply meaningful choices is beyond both the scope and skill of most cRPG campaigns, at least while every game's writers are already devoting most of their time to angel vs. demon lore.

On the bard side, the interpretation of chaotic know-it-alls as jacks of all trades runs into the unnecessary overlap between the ever more prolific playable classes which I decried at the start of this series. The more you implement classes with specific personalities, the more redundant you'll find the one class which can duplicate any (or all!) of their functionality on a whim. See the endless arguments about bards being under/over-powered, from OOTS's Elan to players soloing the original Baldur's Gate campaigns as bardic one-man-bands, to my own defense of their multifaceted support or condemnation of all-purpose scrappers. On the other hand, a class based on musical/recitative performance was always a great idea, as bards/skalds/minstrels/meistersingers/Orpheus/Marsyas/etc. hold an irrefutable place of honor in historic fantasy. They just need to be re-centered on that core (see Pillars of Eternity's chanters) and downplayed in other ability. The harder question is implementing sufficient art or socialization to supply RP choices for social butterflies, without derailing an entire campaign. Does your game actually have anything for a bard to do bardically? No? Then leave it out, and stick with rogues/wizards/clerics.

 

Both classes were party-friendly (to aid their appeal) but their songs and auras' limitless team-wide use, changed at will, was always a bit of a stretch. Personally I'd rather see auras reinterpreted as a single party buff selected after resting, active until next rest. A commitment. Songs should be more unpredictable, reactive to each encounter, novel situations triggering the bard's memory or artistic inspiration, giving him an array of recitations apt to the stimulus at hand, from which he can select one. Bonus points for building up one's repertoire via prior RP choices.

Other classes aren't as hard hit by this roleplaying tie-in.

Campaigns don't usually bother with drudic RP aside from a single-note refrain of "nature good, tech bad" but their neutrality in the D&D alignment wheel gave more leeway. I've never seen the NE/CN/LN eco-terrorist angle truly given its due (especially disappointed by BG3's shallow good/evil choices at the druid grove) but at least it's better than every single bard being a CG Errol Flynn.

Monks and barbarians are better discussed in terms of shallow pop culture fads, but it bears mentioning here that monks' distinction of ki from divine energy was pure 1980s Hollywood exoticism, and has little place in a coherent cosmology. If you want unarmored paladins, fine, but just like paladins and clerics monks need to be more strictly defined by their devotion to The Rule, whatever that may be. A monastic order is more than a self-defense course.

Classes&Cogitations, 3: The Power of -BLANK- Compels You!

D&D Clerics' niche has in roleplaying terms been divine magic, and in practical terms healing. Wizard = fireball, cleric = cure wounds. Offense vs. defense. Done deal. As the game grew around them, clerics have declined in appeal vs. classes which can offer cure wounds PLUS turning-into-bears or cure wounds PLUS lockpicking.

 

But first you need to decide on the difference between arcane and divine. The best distinction I would impose is that divine power stems from the world, the universe/multiverse as it is, while arcane alters and warps its nature. As a side effect, this does paint divine as intrinsically shifted toward lawful and arcane toward chaotic, but if you look at roleplaying history (bards vs. paladins, for example) it does basically fit the class warfare narrative we can assume would permeate a magical world. After all, gods are already in power, large and in charge, making the rules by which others must live, and mages are nobodies trying to climb the magico-social ladder. It does also fit the cleric core function of healing, returning things to their proper function. Power over the afterlife (resurrection, necromancy) would still fall on the divine side of that line, if you assume afterworlds to be the nigh-absolute stomping grounds of divinities, where players can only operate with permission. It does also imply the abjuration school should be moved over to the cleric side, or at least that part that negates magic.

But even if you manage to settle that question, distinctions within the divine magic classes remain tenuous. The original cleric fit D&D's roots as medieval strategy wargaming, and was pretty solidly a christian-inspired priest with a license to kill. Druids as their pagan counterparts received a more slapdash treatment representing the wild days before organized religion, ignoring the word "druid" represents a culturally rooted priesthood in itself, which had less to do with wild animals than the passing of seasons and natural cycles. Shamans, if/when implemented, should have picked up the shapeshifting angle, but I'll deal with those classes some other time. Don't get me started on monks.

To resolve the overlap, I refer you back to my comments on prestige classes: either start with one basic class and branch out or establish clearly delineated base classes with less branching. A druid would be a cleric of Cernunnos/Freya/Hestia/Dionysus/whatever, but if you insist on keeping some divine spellcasting nondenominational, clerics themselves need to play up the worship angle to stand out. Very early in this blog I addressed their weird relationship to their deities, usually represented only as a spell battery to be tapped at the cleric's whim, as a talisman to be rubbed for spell-per-day, placing no restrictions and making no demands of the player. But if you're dependent for your mojo on some sapient cosmic entity, its personality should impact your own available choices!

If you notice me shifting the definition of clerics more towards paladin alignment restrictions, that's hardly accidental, but that and bards will come next time. I will say that I've never liked clerics' universal access to heavy armor, which segues nicely to my final point: god personalities.

I've ranted on this topic before. RPG gods tend to be rather dull, with rare examples shining for defining a range of proper action, not merely spheres of influence over the natural world. If clerics are to refocus on theistic worship as representatives of one personified cosmic force, then everything about them should be amenable to that deity's restrictions, from spells to armor to quest options. The "basic cleric spell list" needs to be severely truncated to separate spell domains more widely and shift availability to individual deities. Just one or two bonus spells don't really convey the difference between Poseidon and Set. Healing, while it should probably remain a cleric universal for pragmatic reasons, need not all be equal. There's room for slow regeneration, shielding, lifesteal, reactive healing vs. certain damage types, etc. The deities domains themselves should rule the efficacy of cleric magic, strengthening or weakening with weather, day of the week, time of year, terrain, or any other relevant factors. And if you really insist on chaotic deities, their clerics' access to magic should reflect that unpredictability, randomly becoming stronger or weaker or entirely unavailable from day to day, fight to fight or round to round.

 

In any case, while the cleric may not need to be entirely done away with like the fighter, still it cannot occupy the same broad category as it did when it was a quarter of the class list. As it no longer needs to be THE party healer, it should be less one class and more a divergent array of theistic praxis, synecdochical means of bringing a specific god along with the adventuring party. (Which, of course, means you need more interesting gods.)

Classes&Cogitations, 2: Thief vs. Fighter

It rained on my eclipse, so let's stay indoors and talk about RPGs today.

 

Of the four most basic D&D classes, two would be easy to update for a better fit within a wider system: thieves can stay, fighters gotta go.

There, simple, see?

Done.

...

No, not done, obviously I plan to talk more about it. Case ya ain't notice, I doth prose verbose!

Combat greatly expanded with every iteration: more weapons, more rules, threatened areas (doin' the Opportunity Tango) and ranges, positioning, etc.

Healing grew into multifaceted support and protective abilities.

Magic spells acquired metamagic, multitudes of effects, schools, memorization mechanics.

 

But thievery? I've seen three editions of DnD so far adapted to PC, plus various imitators, and the stealth/disarm/pickpocket package remains largely unchanged. In fact, in contrast to all the other classes I'll be discussing, thieves don't need updating so much as backtracking from the more backstab-oriented rogue of 3E+ to 2E thievery. When thieves were the default medium armor and light weapon class, it made sense for them to also be the squishier alternative to fighter muscle. But with the addition of barbarians, rangers, monks, bards, swashdruids and whatever, it makes a lot more sense to refocus the rogue on traps and sneaking and shift assassin or sniper builds onto the later, less defined classes. Downplay the thief's combat ability to middlin' (between casters and fighters) and let it own its original role. Situations like NWN2 (where Neeshka was my most reliable damage dealer) or Solasta (where my evasive little Shadow was my most resilient frontliner) tread too much on more inescapably physical roles' toes. Thieves should be a utility class.

Fighters, on the other hand, are so poorly defined as to lack any validity among later additions. Everybody fights! Moreover, when weapon choice so consistently features in characters' identities, defining any one class as "all of the weapons" is a non-starter. Let the barbarian, swashbuckler, paladin, ranger and other more specialized fighters own their roles by removing the jack-of-all-trades capable of duplicating them at will. And hey, there's still room for heavily-armored fighter subclasses/kits/archetypes like shield defenders or some sort of pike/halberd-wielding interdictor - so long as their niche is defined with others in mind.

 

Don't get me wrong, if this were primarily a puzzle-solving stealth-based genre with rare fights, it would likely be the thief that needs to be split into locksmith / cryptologist  / pickpocket / burglar / mugger / confidence artist / Richard Nixon. Fighters could just be generic hired muscle. But as cRPGs at least rarely or never go in that direction, let the one own its niche and prevent the other from owning too many niches.

Classes&Cogitations, 1: Prestige

Before I get into D&D fighters/wizards/etclerica, let's talk about prestige classes, and let me preface this by saying I'm mostly worried about cRPGs, where such classes add a bit of replay value and another facet to your character's identity: a big choice to make. Though I don't play tabletop games, I doubt I'd see the point in a medium where the potential for divergence and customization is whatever the GM will allow. Nevertheless, as a cRPG player, let me admit from the start I fundamentally like them. As an idea. As a symbolic transcendence or apotheosis for your character. As a goal to work towards. As they're actually implemented... well... not so much.

 

Biggest problem: redundancy. In their earlier editions' incarnations, half tended toward hybrids of magical and nonmagical (arcane-this and eldritch-that) which merely end up watering down both of their core constituents instead of acquiring any specific flavor of gameplay, and ultimately would have you wondering "why didn't I just play a bard?" The rest were either bland and overspecialized (dwarf defender) or stupidly munchkin-ish (dragon disciple) that I couldn't see myself using them.

 

Fast-forwarding to last year, Wrath of the Righteous gives the impression that classes in Pathfinder have proliferated to truly absurd numbers, differentiated from each other only by a single overpowered ability (like my Witch of the Veil's combo teleport/invisibility) or gaining freebies like hexes while surrendering little to nothing compared to a base archetype of wizard or druid. That infinite redundancy is even more pronounced when comparing base to prestige classes, as base classes like Woljif's "eldritch scoundrel" duplicate prestige classes (e.g. arcane trickster) without the need for purposeful character development.

In fact, while I complain a lot about DnD 5e (and with due cause) I've liked both Solasta and BG3 replacing prestige classes with the old 2e BG2 "kits" differentiating each class at level 2. Oversimplified as everything is in 5e, subclasses nonetheless fit the basic idea of taking a major decision about your character's progress after creation and adding some replay value. Prestige classes also erred by splitting your level advancement, stalling the build-up (and frequently overcompensating in return) conflicting with progression rather than complementing it, watering down, disrupting the flow rather than building on it. That itself stemmed from their growing naturally out of multiclassing.

But all those hybridization options worked on the assumption there would be gaps to bridge between core fighter/wizard/cleric/thief options. With every druid, barbarian, bard, etc. added to the base roster, the justification for juggling your basic class later in the campaign asymptotes to "I just want to play a dire wolf with a pointy wizard hat" which desperate sartorial need can be served better by a single gear/spell proficiency feat. You can certainly have your prestige classes... if you're willing to keep the level 1 choice low and split off into higher specializations later. Conversely, offering fifty different base classes from character creation makes it hard enough to give them individual personalities without piling on duplicates at level five. Make up your damn minds. Either go back to the core handful with prestige specializations in a huge tree, or keep numerous core classes with less branching, and later customization coming from feats and skills.

For the rest of this series I'll ignore the issue altogether and assume subclasses are the better option, but keep the prestige class redundancy problem in mind, as it also applies to adding ANYTHING to the existing roster, from fighters to swashbucklers and druids to shamans.

Classes&Cogitations, Part 0

"I killed the devil, I took his soul

I took his kingdom, I took his throne

I raised his army of the dead

Looked around before I said: more zombies, more zombies!"

 

Ameliah&Nef - The Zombie Stare (officially adopted TSW fan music)

 

 

My run through Baldur's Gate 3 proceeds apace - which is to say pace by pace with frequent backtracking and not very runny at all. Nevertheless dropping Mooners' Trousers or whatever gave me a rise to Level 10 and my spell list has gradualy been including more attrition-mitigating summons like dryads and... zombies.

 

Now what's wrong with that picture? Oh, right, I'm a druid. In older D&D adaptations the druidic party line was hating on undead for disrupting the circle of hakuna matata and whatnot. Regardless of whether that's necessarily the correct druidic roleplaying angle, it was one more quirk that made them stand apart as a class, gave them some personality. Now, along with being robbed of their animal companions, summons being downplayed, everyone using crossbows, etc., the Spore subclass' zombies are just one more bit of forced homogeneity making druids feel like shittier clerics who need a shave.

It's not just stupid but gratuitously stupid. You could've implemented corpse-based Spore Druid summons without making them humanoid, just raising a fungal mass from a corpse, an inchoate, slithering pile of rot. Same practical effect but fully in keeping with the circle of life, death and microbes and remaining thematically distinctive. In fact you even had the easiest possible reskinnable 3D model for it in the form of jellies! If you're gonna do it, why do it the stupid way?*

Though really by now it's one more drop in the bucket. By the time I got into computer adaptations of third edition, Dungeons and Dragons' class system was already a hopeless mess, and the problem has only compounded over the past twenty years with redundant prestige classes and re-redundant core classes and overpowered free-cast spells and fighters and rogues getting more and more magical and keeping familiars in your pocket and so on and on and on. Don't get me started on losing the alignments.

But let's admit that was inevitable. The original classes were based on rock/paper/scissors medieval wargaming and broadly enough defined as to cover an entire game with only three or four playable categories. Expansion mandated redefining the original fighter/wizard/thief/cleric themselves more narrowly, but fans' refusal to give up the old nomenclature while constantly demanding new gimmicks has yielded nothing but pointless bloat, simplistic token divergence and meaningless overlap.

So (though I'm sure the subject has been re-hashed on endless RPG forums) I'm starting my own** little series on the D&D-inspired RPG class system, and keeping it going... until the winds of Pandemonium waft my attention elsewhere, I suppose.

___________________________________

* Mass appeal. *Siiigh* yes, I am aware that zombie movies are rather popular.

** Pointless commentary bloat, token idea divergence and overlap, yes, yes, I know. Wer-wolfes are immune to irony though, so bite me.

Adaptive Class-Based Radiation

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is proving relatively good after its attention-grabbing, deliberately shallow first act pandering to snowflake cretinism. Aside from its own problems however it does also showcase some ways the Dungeons&Dragons, twenty-sided dice-rolling system is stretched unavoidably thin. On "core" difficulty, the game's obviously padded for length by raising the level (and especially armor class) of all monsters until they're almost impossible to hit, forcing reload after reload until you're blessed by the randomizer. I'm sure fanboys must already be revving up to call me a scrub noob loser who just doesn't know how to stack hit chance bonuses. For shits and giggles though, I've been playing around with my newfound lich powers and "repurposing" monsters to throw them against their former fellows... with the conclusion that no, bullshit, my stats aren't the problem. They cannot even hit each other!

Now, while yes, I did pick monsters from a zone abounding in high armor class for that demonstration, they're hardly statistical outliers in a game where only statistical outliers count.

You might notice their outlier status in another sense: cyborg implants in a fantasy game. Fictional universes incorporating both tech and fantasy more or less need to be built around that schism between top-down creationism and bottom-up rationalism. Golarion, much like Toril, comes across as an intrinsically top-down setting with feudal governance and precepts of morality flowing from multiversal constants of law and goodness. Which is fine... so long as you stick to it. But every time some genius sputters forth the a-may-zing idea of shoehorning a wacky computer-hacking side trip into Middle-Earth, or any other anachronistic garbage just as an episodic adventure with neither heads nor tails to be made of, it cannot come across as anything but the mindless junior-high fanfiction primadonna bullshit it is. We don't need more modron mazes.

Inability to hold to a theme is neither creative nor a virtue. You're not thinking outside the box. You're just a kindergardener throwing transformers onto the chess board because formal operations defy your undeveloped brain.

But worse than both those issues is the class system.

Fighter, wizard, thief, cleric. For a couple of decades that was the rule, during which time the odd druid, bard or barbarian could fit the interstices between those archetypes. However, the proliferation of new, redundant, overpowered or otherwise nonsensical classes around Y2K was, if memory serves, one of the principal causes for many to abandon D&D in favor of... among other things, Pathfinder. Can you see where this full-circle revolution is headed?

My character is a "witch of the veil" which is to say a generalist wizard with several free spells from feats. It also gives you infinite casts of combo invisibility / teleportation, two of the most powerful spells in the game even individually, once a round... as a swift action. Yeah. At level 8... yeah...

While of the scores of such subclasses available in Wrath (tantalizing as they are, I'll admit) not all might be so laughably broken, they do demonstrate the difficulty of expanding the class roster while clinging to the old archetypes. If you want to build a class around something as game-breaking as that, it can't also be a rogue or enchanter.

New classes were needed, undeniably. The system needed to grow. But, in order to clear room for new growth, sadly the old growth must be pruned. Fighters can't be masters of all martial trades and still leave room for classes specializing in rapiers or halberds. If you want a combination rogue / wizard as a basic class, then there's no point in the arcane trickster prestige class. If you want witches and oracles and skalds and shamans, then you need to redefine, to limit wizards and clerics and bards. Druids can't be nature magicians and shapeshifting autoattackers and healers and crowd control and summoners and nukers if you intend to build individual classes around each of those roles. At least not without scaling back.

Slapping a couple of overpowered bonus feats on old clases and calling them new isn't getting anywhere. And yeah, I know I'm not saying anything which hasn't been rehashed a million times over on RPG discussion boards for the past thirty years... so why are we still stuck here? D&D cannot grow, even rebranded as Pathfinder, while fanboys cling to the nostalgia for old labels, the one-size-fits-all fighter/cleric/wizard/thief which prevent finer definitions.

We need to hold to the precept of tactical cRPGs... but we're also twenty years overdue to adopt new systems in place of the thirty years outdated, roll-to-miss, fitfully anachronistic, generic baseline.

Either overhaul it for meaningful complexity or let it die. And, sad to say, the past couple of decades have proven that D&D's own munchkin fanbase will prevent a meaningful revolution.

 

There must be better tabletop systems out there waiting for a computer adaptation.

P of E, Wizardry, Skills and Bills and Version 3

To my great shame, the first computer roleplaying game I played was... not. It was Blizard's original Diablo, and though I'll gladly defend its excellent atmosphere, ambience and general immersiveness, it was anything but intellectually taxing. My first exposure to the Dungeons and Dragons routine was Neverwinter Nights. I played a druid. For its expansion packs I played a wizard, an abjurer to be precise, and gloried in cockblocking the various spellcasting bosses with my superior knowledge and forethought, staying one move ahead of them. For NWN2 I played a halfling druid with such a low strength score that he had to buff himself in order to wear his own armor, much less carry anything else. I refused to shapeshift and made myself a pure spellcaster shifting the tide of battle with well-placed buffs and summons, nothing so crude as direct slappity-slap.

I'm a nerd. I play characters which out-think their opponents. Out-thinking is out-predicting. I loved the third edition D&D prestige class requirements. Remember those?

I've never been particularly crazy about prestige classes themselves, mind you. Usually they limit or water down a basic class rather than build on it, though I was pleased with their implementation in Dragon Age: Origins. In the NWN games I liked the prestige class requirements more than the classes themselves. I liked having something to play towards, purposefully building my character toward some grand apotheosis. I liked that my characters should aspire to be more than they are, not merely spinning their wheels on the leveling treadmill but purposefully becoming more than those around them. Transcending. Predicting that transcendence.

Predicting's also half the point of choosing a spellcaster in the first place, relying not on fighters' simplistic all-purpose cudgeling of everything in sight but a minutely preened and rarefied selection of arcane tools fitted to specific purposes. I never felt the slightest inclination to play a sorceror. I am that thing which predicts, which memorizes spells every day. I'm smarter than you. I hated seeing favored souls and spirit shams get inserted into the game, idiot-friendly versions of clerics and druids. Much as The Order of the Stick avowed, however, the ultimate insult to spellcasting, the vilest injury to the honor of the wise and intelligent, was the warlock, an overpowered fighter in all but name, endlessly spewing magic arrows without regard for circumstance. Warlocks belong in Diablo, an "action" version of a genre which no longer deserves its name.

I don't even play D&D, aside form cRPG adaptations, yet I immediately and quite firmly adopted the mindset of the snobbish spell-memorizers. Suits me just fine.

Last year, Pillars of Eternity promised largely to bring back the late '90s, to re-create the basic gameplay of Baldur's Gate 2 in a more mature setting with better mechanics. It succeeded for the most part. Its stat system was much better thought out than D&D's has ever been, with no conveniently inconsequential "dump stat" like charisma. Its melee engagement system and vulnerabilities made for some interesting fights. Unfortunately, its skill system fell far short of what it should have been, failing to fully flesh out the combat.

Fffff... There's an obvious decline toward the lowest common denominator in D&D's spellcaster regression, from thoughtful wizards to sorcerors who don't plan ahead to warlocks who just piss magic missiles all over the place. Unfortunately Pillars of Eternity's spellcasting falls decidedly into the sorceror / warlock camp. PoE druids are spirit shamans getting access to every possible spell at every level, with shapeshifting handed out as a complete freebie. Wizards technically had to memorize spells, but they dropped like candy and the daily spell repertoire was so vast as to never require swapping.

If you're gonna bring back the good old days, then bring back that good old nerdy spellcasting and character progression. Choosing a particular spell to cast should cost you something. You should be forced to pine at some point or another for the alternatives you passed up in favor of your current strategy. Every choice in character progression and combat strategy should come with a cost, a weak point, a missing half, a caveat, an opportunity for you, the player, to feel like the most idiotic speck of slime on the planet for being so stupid as to not have correctly predicted your necessities. If you want to burn with the Art, then the Art should burn you.

Baldur's Gate 2 was based on second-edition D&D, with no prestige classes. Thus PoE lacks prestige classes, any purposefully chosen path of advancement. PoE was made after the audience got accustomed to dumbed-down spellcasting in late third edition. Thus the spellcasting's simplified into all-purpose freebies instead of actively selected counters and silver bullets. Somehow, while trying to bring back the best of the old D&D-inspired cRPGs, Pillars of Eternity managed to combine the worst of both worlds, at least as far as character development goes. The less said about instant endless re-training the better. Lucky PoE's end-game was salvaged by good writing, because as far as building up my character goes the leveling and combat had started to feel utterly meaningless.

Dungeons and Dragons has been the most representative role-playing game out there, but fourth edition was by all accounts an idiotically dumbed down caricature of itself and fifth edition seems only marginally better, if at all. Most products cater to the mass-market, which means catering to utter cretins by removing any requirement for planning and foresight. However, it hasn't been so long since I played Neverwinter Nights that we old-school niche market of nerdy spell-memorizers have completely died off. We should be seeing some RPGs tailored to players who like to think, to plan and predict and investigate and prepare and strategize. D&D seems to have cast its lot in with the idiotic majority, attempting to go pop. Adapting it will likely yield nothing worth playing, and it's not like we see anyone bothering to adapt D&D for computers any more.

We need new systems for old gamers. PoE was a breath of fresh air but it shied away from a true incarnation of old-school magic schooling. We need games with wizards, not sorcerors or *shudder* warlocks. Ick.

Bubbles and Rogues

"We were aiming for the moon, we were shooting at the stars
But the kids were just shooting at the buses and the cars"

Modest Mouse - Bury Me With It

Bubbles!
Aren't they pretty? They're also quite the example of overkill, since just one would usually be enough. Anyway those pretty shiny bubbles are just one facet of EVE-Online's peculiar addition to MMO crowd control, warp scrambling. See, as I mentioned before, EVE is an old game containing many mechanics meant to compensate for the limitations of technology... increasingly outdated technology. It does a pretty decent job of faking continuity, but the cracks remain visible. Solar systems are separate zones "connected" by stargates (loading screens) but other measures had to be taken to limit the number of players within sight of each other at any one time.

On such would be the warping mechanic, the not quite instant teleportation allowing faster than light movement within each solar system. If you're at asteroid belt 14, you move from 'roid to 'roid with your ship's sub-light engine which might top out (yeah, empty space imposes top speeds in EVE) at a couple hundred meters per second. To reach something like a planet or another asteroid belt several million kilometers away, you engage your vessel's miraculous warp drive and are treated to some whooshing noises as you teleport across the interstellar void. Each ship has a warp core, with a numeric strength. This can be lowered by offensive abilities. If your core's at least at one point of strength, you can warp, escaping any danger in your local area. If not, you're a sitting duck.

As an aside, if anyone's heard of EVE these days it's as "the" PvP MMO. By dint of the increasing lack of any MMORPG worthy of that categorization since EVE's launch, this can even sound true. The industry's regression into endlessly copycatting World of Warcraft has left EVE at the peak of what little's left of the old niche market. However, while it may offer more meaningful PvP by comparison with WoW-clones' stilted, predictable small-team arena fights, its working definition of the term differs quite a bit from the glorious clash of competing forces of players it tries to portray in its advertising.

A year after EVE came out, I left it to switch over to World of Warcraft. I joined a PvP server. WoW was originally advertised and designed as a Warcraft game, which meant offering a unit's perspective of that hectic RTS battle royale we'd learned to associate with Blizzard's games. WoW at its launch was meant to offer a world-sweeping conflict and towns with shifting battle lines. Towns had NPC guards but could be assaulted or infiltrated to assassinate NPC vendors and questgivers and set the other faction back and the greatest goal in the game was storming an enemy capital to kill a faction leader NPC.

However, as the months dragged on, it became obvious that Blizzard was ratcheting back all this PvP instead of building on it. NPC vendors respawned too quickly for killing them to mean anything, towns could not be taken over for your faction's own use and killing faction leaders had no effect whatsoever. All that remained was griefing. Though killing other players served no purpose whatsoever, not even some material reward for your character, anywhere you went in the game world you could be sure that the first little cretin from the opposite faction who came upon you would try to kill you for no other reason than to ruin your day. And since PvP had been reduced to griefing, the designated griefer classes like rogues acquired more and more goodies to let them beat down unsuspecting victims with impunity.

EVE is not a PvP game. It's a griefing game. Though it too initially headed toward depletable resource and territory control, it lacked this functionality at its start, so PvP combat rapidly devolved to destroying other players' ships with no further purpose to the action. In other words, griefing. Thus, instead of the dreamy SciFi fans it had attracted during its pre-launch hype campaign, it began to accumulate more and more brainless, hyperaggressive backstabbing little wastes of air to whom such activity appealed. Griefers. As it transitioned from a flexible skill-based game to a class-based one, it only reinforced the definition of PvP as not a goal-driven contest between dedicated forces sacrificing themselves for a greater cause, but as an interaction between attacker and victim. It acquired designated victim classes (flimsy mining and support ships) in addition to designated griefer classes.

This was largely inherent in the warp mechanic from the start. A warp scrambler is an ability you'd only choose for your ship if you intend to kill someone. It prevents escape. Griefers target only designated victims who will not have such items equipped. To attract the rabid little shits to whom such gameplay appeals you not only have to offer them sure wins over players trying to do something constructive within the game's economy. You have to ensure their ability to grief others with no risk to themselves.

World of Warcraft's greatest escape skill wasn't featured on the classes most likely to get targeted, on healers and mages. The "vanish" skill was handed to rogues instead. In Planetside 2, the only thing which can kill an invisible sniper is another invisible sniper. In TF2, spies not only one-shot other players but were handed options to instantly disappear upon doing so.

So, while EVE acquired invisibility, the most efficient cloaking devices were handed not to mining or transport ships (blockade runners aside) but to bombers and cruisers. The warping mechanic itself has become amusingly convoluted, with short-range warp modules for slow-moving battleships. Transport ships were handed some defensive warp core bonus. Those deployable bubbles in the image above, however, block all warping within them, regardless of core strength.

All, of course, except for that of a griefer special, interceptors, which have complete immunity to warp scrambling. Vanish is a rogue skill.

In one of my earliest posts I said I'm not going to stop calling WoW-clone hunters huntards. The choice of playstyle says a lot about a player and those whose minds stretch no further than hitting things (really, really hard) are probably dumber than those drawn by more complex role definitions. The most disgusting mindset, however, is that which predominates any PvP game, that of the griefer. Not only are they incapable of working towards the grander goals which define true PvP beyond deathmatch, but those whose only focus is hurting others also by definition lack the fair-mindedness to accept any consequences for those actions, to take a death for the kill they inflict. Any game which begins to bank on catering to them will only implement more and more methods of legitimized griefing and cheating in order to keep them satisfied.

Invisible, invincible, unstoppable, using teammates as disposable bait to leech killing blows on weakened enemies yet never aiding in team gameplay, the rogue / assassin archetype has been at best extraneous to multiplayer games and more frequently vastly detrimental, not only for its direct negative effects on gameplay but in encouraging developers to cater to those who would play the "griefer special" class. While it's more frequently included from the start, it can also more gradually arise as a result of game mechanics like EVE's warp scrambling which separate players into designated griefer and victim class choices.

Rogues

a.k.a. duel-wielding rouges
(sorry, couldn't help myself, pet peeve)

There are two problems with the 'rogue' archetype in RPGs. One is the WoW-clone interpretation of rogues as just people who stab things... really, really hard. The other is the more basic D&D alignment issue, the image of rogues as flighty, shortsighted, and greedy.

As far as MMOs go, the problem isn't with the archetype itself but with the oversimplification of the genre. Rogue or not, all anyone ever does in a WoW-clone is stab things. Everything revolves around damage meters. In a real MMO, PvP would create much of the demand for the currently absent roguish trickery. Infiltration, distraction and sabotage should be the main purpose of a sneak, not just popping up to stab people in the back. Scaling walls, laying traps, disrupting spellcasting, relaying information about enemy movements or disabling mechanical constructs like golems or siege equipment should all take the place of simplistic stabbity-stabbity. Oddly enough, one of the most out-and-out copyish of WoW copycats in terms of gameplay, LoTRO, also features a delightful break in that pattern. The 'burglar' class in LoTRO is not a damage-dealer in groups. Instead, its purpose is to debuff or disable mobs, manipulate aggro and most importantly initiate group maneuvers.
In PvP games, the sheer 'OMG overpower-ness' of invisibility can quickly lead to the expansion of the archetype past stabbing. The main role of the rogue class in Savage 2 was to plant bombs by enemy buildings and to dash around forcing enemies to chase him. In EVE, cloaked ships were an essential part of corporate warfare as scouts. In TF2, spies are the bane of engineers, undermining both enemy defense and offense by destroying sentry guns and teleporters. Even in WoW, in the earliest PvP instances, i spent a fair bit of my time as a druid simply keeping an eye on enemy movements while prowling around as a stealthy little cat.

However, the problem predates WoW-clones. Computer RPGs in general suffer from limitations in the kind of flexibility which would allow for trickery, from an emphasis on simple brawling. Both rogues and mages are trickster classes but trickery is almost irrelevant when the object of the game is to kill everything. A frequent source of frustration is attempting to sneak around an encounter only to be interrupted and brought out of stealth by a cutscene. Other times the problem is that characters in a computer RPG always move together, which means rogue stealth is always undermined by less stealthy characters. Most times, there is simply nowhere for a rogue to use his skills. Even games which nominally include traps and pocket-picking only do so as an afterthought, with the rewards meaningless compared to the time investment, while scouting ahead means nothing because there is no choice but to kill everything to get to a boss anyway. Even if all the above are not true, even when it is posssible to steal, sneak or bluff one's way past encounters, the rogue's role is undermined the the outdated mechanic or experience gain and levelling up. Character advacement is at the core of RPGs along with moral decisions. When advancement depends on experience gained through killing, well... shoot 'em all and let the gods sort 'em out.
The one RPG i've played which truly integrated stealth was VtM:Bloodlines. Killing was only a means to an end, giving no experience or loot in itself. 'Trash' mobs were created to be bypassed. Many missions gave even better rewards if performed without ever killing a thing.

This also brings me to the second issue, that of true role-playing, the moral character and mentality of rogues. The main reason why stealth classes hold no appeal to me in most games is that they are treated as petty thugs, sneaking around mugging people for their spare change. One of the few breaks in that routine is Vampire: the Masquerade's take on one its vampire groups, clan Nosferatu, forced to continually remain out of sight because their appearance would give them away. I like the image of the Nosferatu as spies, information brokers and secretive masters of the underworld.
It's a quick reminder that James Bond is a rogue. In the real world, the sneakiest sneaks, the ones who can make all their bluff checks at airport security and always keep an eye on what porn sites you've been visiting, are kept in pretty tight check by various power structures like national governments and organized crime. They are brainwashed into obedience, unable to break away from whichever group has their nuts in a vise. They are Lawful, even if they don't obey the same laws as the rest of us, from Odysseus to ninjas to Mata Hari and the 007s of the information age. There is no reason why spies, brainwashed wind-up toys dutifully serving the whims of military or commercial overlords, should not play a much bigger role in games' stories.

Aside from that, it's the origin story of the rogue that always grates. Every rogue in fantasy games is a gutter-rat that was forced by harsh conditions to steal to survive, yadda-yadda chaotic good heart of fool's gold. Why not a trickster like a stage magician, certainly adept at the kind of sleight-of-hand that defines the rogue archetype? Why not a blackmailer, unable to sneak anywhere but trading information to get the upper hand on others? Why not an eaves-dropping courtier or a mechanical genius specializing in traps and sabotage instead of stabbing?

Clerics and their pet gods

I've never been happy with the way divinities are handled by role-playing games. For a cleric / priest / choirboy in any D&D inspired computer game a choice of deity, if present at all, is purely cosmetic. There is no fundamental difference between the religious and the nerdy approach to spellcasting, and there is so much that could be done to change that. The biggest issue is that players get control over the deity they like. They are not subject to the whims of a cosmic force, there is no interaction and 'gods' are merely tapped as a resource for spellcasting on the player's terms.

I'm reminded of one particular example of an alternative style which vastly improved the game experience.
Once upon a time, there was a delightful little browser strategy/RP game called Aventia. Long-time players could apply to the game's designer to become deities, god of what-have-you, founding their own religious orders. Regular players would choose to worship this or that god. Occasionally, your god might smile on you, gifting you with a bonus to your resource harvest, a unicorn or demon to lead your army, etc. You could also pray to the player-deity and be rewarded for your roleplaying with divine favour.

There is no practical reason why this could not be done in other games, especially in persistent-world games. Game-masters, if they're paid staff whose salary would give developers more leverage in policing their actions, would be decidedly preferable to actual players but there are a number of ways in which players could 'ascend' and have their divine actions limited through game mechanics.

I'll try to separate the possibilities and possible issues into bottom-up and top-down mechanics to deal with player-god interaction.

Top-down
The main duty of a 'god' or other superior being would be to drive player activity. Ideally the GMs or whoever fills the role of gods could be trustworthy enough to be given free reign in their actions, limited only by gameplay mechanics in enriching the game world through various events. More realistically, there would have to be hard-coded limits. Plagues, blights and other buffs or debuffs could be handed out from a mana pool. In this respect a divinity would be a spellcaster who interacts with the game world mainly through effects on other players.
Manifestations would be another possibility, with the divinity having limited time in the game world as a gigantic monster like a dragon or an otherworldly demon being summoned by cabals of many players faithful to him. A manifesting deity could be limited by a simple timer, a "war hunger" mechanic requiring it to kill players in order to remain in the game world, a constant supply of spellcasting reagents, etc.

Bottom-Up
The main concern for players interacting with a deity would be the cost/benefit estimate. While gods will get much of their satisfaction simply from being placed in the socially enviable position, their faithful must see some profit from the arrangement in the immediate future.
Interactions would most likely take the form of worship and sacrifices. Building temples, performing rituals, sacrificing goods, trying to summon manifestations of a particular deity, all could make for very entertaining group activities and could also form the basis of a divinity's mana pool.
These activities could also easily be leveraged into PvP scenarios. Have players build a shrine to a particular god in a city full of unbelievers, have them sacrifice the high priest of another deity, become high priests and open themselves to assassination, require holy water to be made from the hearts of heathens, there are endless possibilities.

The most important aspect isn't even making gods interactive. It's giving them a bit more personality. A god of the sun or moon should get stronger or weaker as the day drags on, and his influence should be weakened by cloud cover. Disciples of different religions shouldn't just get a couple of different spells, but have their spellcasting work by different rules. "Good" gods should force players to do noble deeds to get divine rewards. Evil gods should occasionally turn on them.
Most importantly, players shouldn't get to cast whatever divine spells they want whenever they want. Acts of god(s) should be powerful, impressive, useful or dreadful, sure, but they should not be subject to the whims of the faithful. When a player sacrifices a boar and prays for lightning to strike down his enemy in the next fight, he shouldn't have the certainty of success.

There are two main ways in which gods could be made a more important part of a game. One would be a faction-based game where gods define each faction. The other is a standard fantasy MMORPG, and here it's trickier making sure the gods do not become factions. The emphasis should still be on player-run societies. Limitations would have to be placed on the number of players or land area which can be affected by divine powers so that player guilds worshipping the same god are encouraged to vie for his favor, preventing the god from being the focus of a faction. The ideal situation would be something like the Trojan war myth, with gods taking sides in human conflicts.

Other ideas:
Demigods! In a game with some sort of permanent death and a birth/lineage system, gods could party down like Zeus and Odin scopin' hotties at a kegger.
Divine death! Ok, so gods don't generally die in the same way as everyone else, but they do get retired from play sometimes. See Uranus, Ymir and most every other god associated with a creation myth. You could have entire sections of a game world built on the corpse of a god.
Oracles! There were constant scandals in the older attempts at true persistent worlds about GMs giving away information to player guilds. So make it part of the game. Have players becomes oracles of a particular deity and get inside info or celestial spy reports by huffin' some peyote.
Prophecies! Remember all those fake wishes given out by genies and all the double-entendre prophecies that trick mortals into wagering their fortune on living forever as a potted plant? When you've got a computer game's development team on your side, you could dream up all sorts of tempting promises to make players chase pots of gold over rainbows or give them a scare. Example: "the kingdom of Leetkidburg shall fall" - turns out it gets made into a cave city and gets access to unimaginable wealth of metal ores, and the mayor of Leetkidburg gets to curse whichever rats abandoned the sinking ship instead of meeting their fate.

That's about all i have for now, but there is so much to be done with the idea.