Classes, races, and attributes

I worked at a front line online game company for neary a decade as a programmer. One day, we rented an entire showing of "The Lord of the Rings" when it first came out. That was great fun, just our crew in the entire theater. Now, I had never read any of Tolkien's books, but I was aware they were written in the 40's.

As we were leaving the theater. I turned to one of our line producers that was walking next to me. I asked him "The entire online game industry is just completely cribbing off Tolkien, aren't they?" He just smiled.

A lot of things are the way they are just because "That's how RPGs work."

It doesn't have to be that way, of course. My problem with attributes, classes, and races is that they, by their very existence, force your character to be pigeonholed into a single path of ability and usefulness. If you want to branch out and try something different, you have to create an entire new character instead of being able to reuse the components of the one you already have that the new path shares with the old one.

Now, one concept that I do really like is the trinity, the concept of tank, healer, and damage dealer working as a team. Of course, for simple encounters, that team could be all one person... but as the encounters scale up, players need to be more specialized in their roles. But there should be nothing stopping them from putting the role they've been doing "on hold" and training to do one of the other roles. Now, if you WANT to have a completely separate character doing that other role for “role playing reasons”, that is your right. But you should not be forced to do it that way.

This sums my feelings up in one sentence: "Forcing a player to choose a path before they even know what they are doing is bad."

Pretty much every advantage I can think of in forcing a player to choose a race and class, and by extension their associated attributes can be countered by one question: "You can't think of a way to do that without forcing a player to choose a class and race?"

My two favorite arguments for classes and races are:

"But if you let everyone do anything, they will all just use the most powerful skill." To which I say "And who's fault is that, exactly? The guy who chose the dagger over the sharpened stick? Or the guy who designed the choice?"

"Choices must have consequences!" To which I ask "Why? It's nearly impossible to choose perfectly. Let them fix their mistakes."