A D20 Fantasy RPG Without Class(es)

Awhile back we decided to remove the cleric—and by extension druids—as an adventuring class, as it made absolutely zero sense for a deity to grant someone steady access to divine powers, only to have him run around the wilderness and explore ruins, using said gifts for personal gain.

I suppose you could make it work if every adventure aligns with his deity’s wants or agenda, or just sideline him when it wouldn’t, but the main reason people pick clerics is for support, but thanks to the very simple implementation of Vitality Points and alchemical healing potions in Dungeons & Delvers this was no longer necessary (though divine healing was still handy due to how much and how quickly it worked).

(I should also note that healing wasn’t a default ability for clerics. You had to choose Domain Talents and if you didn’t pick Healing Domain, you couldn’t heal at all. You could pick it up, later, but there wasn’t a way until level 5 or 10 when you could otherwise even temporarily gain access to it.)

In the 2nd Edition of Dungeons & Delvers, due to changes to Wound Points, the addition of a “soak” mechanic and armor now just reducing damage, we had to nerf both divine and alchemical healing, which meant that dropping clerics had even less of an impact than it otherwise would have (which was already really negligible).

Mind you, clerics will still be in the game, just more of an NPC archetype that can dole out blessings, information, get rid of demons and such, and provide adventure hooks. Though, I can still see a sort of class included for those occasions where a cleric tagging along as a PC makes sense or is even necessary, I just can’t see many cases where it would, though.

Warlocks were dropped for a similar reason, in that you make some vague pact with some vague entity and basically get free magic to do whatever you want with, whenever. Presumably, opposing your patron would cause issues, but the only time I can recall a patron having any sort of meaningful presence during a campaign was when I ran a Sundered World game many years ago and the guy playing a warlock had to give his patron something for more Boon points.

We did consider a few mechanics that would have at least incentivized a warlock to keep in touch with his patron, including one where you only got magic points back by doing stuff for it, but then you have to try and devise a bunch of goals and activities that make sense for the patron, and then assign reward values to them. It also creates an issue where, why would the warlock tag along if there was no benefit to it, and why would he utilize his limited magic powers just to explore ruins and such?

As with clerics, warlocks can still have a presence in the game, but are better suited providing information and adventure hooks, or functioning as adversaries (which makes more sense due to infernal and star pacts). That said, I could see various entities giving a player access to a magical power here and there in exchange for something. Kind of like an intangible magic item that can have a varied cost to use, or limited uses. But this doesn’t require its own class, just a sort of reward category like treasure and magic items.

Paladins were kind of tricky at first, but we found a way to make it both conceptually and mechanically distinct from what I guess you could call the typical “fighter but with some cleric powers” model. I still think that the end result was essentially a fighter with a bit of extra oomph—Holy Strike at 1st-level lets you hurt anything evil with any sort of attack—but they’re also getting relegated to largely NPC status because I see them being chosen for a higher purpose then scouring the countryside in search of loot.

Though, as with warlocks I can see a PC being possibly gifted or blessed by a deity, angel, or virtue, likely temporarily, especially if in pursuit of a suitably worthy goal.

Barbarians and rangers also overlap with fighters but since neither just gets free powers from an external source I think they can still work as adventurers. We managed to make them conceptually and mechanically distinct as well, and while initially there were a bunch of levels where you could choose a fighter Talent to avoid just duplicating everything several times, in 2nd Edition we managed to divide both even more so this was no longer necessary.

For example, fighters have a Bleeding Wound Exploit, which requires that you roll high enough and the target to fail a Toughness save to negate the Bleeding condition. Barbarians have something similar, but it instead auto-triggers while in a Frenzy.

However, this might have been largely a waste since currently you basically have two sets of combat stat progressions: warriors and, well, everyone else.

But one of the issues with more-or-less default D&D is that, unless you’re playing 4E or the gay-and-gray-goo derivative, wizards tend to have limited magic. This isn’t an issue by itself, but when you couple it with monster math at the least strongly influenced by level and anemic combat progression you end up with a character that can maybe do a few things in a given day before being rendered mostly-if-not-completely useless.

In later editions where everyone could have skills and they weren’t hyperspecific—ie, build fires—sure, the wizard could have been useful for the occasional lore check. Maybe. You know, if you happened to research a specific subject and it came up, but taking up the sword was a terrible idea due to the unlikely chance of him landing a blow against anything with an Armor Class north of the single digits, especially if his hit points were south of doubles (and if they weren’t while at his best, it would probably only take a single hit to drop him below that).

Some people think this is fine, suffering from the bizarre misconception that wizards should for some reason never get better at attempting weapon attacks or, even more absurd, that only fighters should ever improve in this regard. However, when you’re out adventuring and magic can’t solve everything even when it’s available and you have the time to utilize it without getting smacked around, it makes sense for a wizard to learn how to defend himself in a more mundane manner.

In 2nd Edition we decided to give everyone a scaling attack bonus, similar to what you saw in 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons, which was just a more elegant way of demonstrating a character’s improved weapon accuracy over 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons’ THAC0 reduction. This makes sense because combat is an inevitability and so everyone should improve by varying degrees over time.

However in playtesting wizards still sucked abysmally at hitting anything, and even with Drain re-rolls could run out of Willpower pretty quickly. So we decided to just give them a rogue’s Attack and Defense progression, the reasoning being that these sorts of wizards aren’t shacked up in a tower studying and experimenting, but out and about much of the time.

And this might come as a shock to, I dunno, adherents of THAC0, descending AC and nonsense pseudo-Vancian magic, but this hasn’t broken or even slightly unbalanced anything.

See, rogues still get Sneak Attack damage, though we’re going to change that due to Wound Points being reduced overall. More importantly, they get more skills, bonus skill points, and abilities that can enhance skill usage and/or make them harder to hit and pin down. They also get +2 Wound Points each level, which doesn’t sound like a lot but then wizards only get +1 and fighters only get +3.

Speaking of fighters, they start with a +2 to hit, get +1 each level, have a starting Defense of 12, a +1 bonus to all weapon damage rolls (which scales by level), get multiple attacks starting at 5th-level, and have access to Talents that make them even better with weapons. Besides that, fighters will typically have a higher Might score and so are more likely to deal bonus damage and less likely to suffer penalties while wearing heavier armor types.

This means that, yeah, the wizard will have an easier time hitting stuff—and this is really how you’d want to more or less balance out math, using the normies as a baseline as opposed to the warriors—but even at 1st-level the fighter is going to hit more often and hit harder (and be more likely to trigger weapon traits that require a high attack roll).

But this got me wondering as to whether entirely separate classes are even necessary. What if there’s just a generic “adventurer” class, something like this:

At 1st-level you choose two or so Talents or Perks to help steer your character towards a concept—and you could pick just one from two different categories—and then at each level you get to pick another.

Want to be a “fighter”? Pick a Talent that makes you better with a weapon or weapon category, something that makes your armor or shield do a bit more, make you tougher, etc. Want to be a rogue-type? Pick something that gives you more Skill Points, bonus to one or more skills, bonus damage and effects when ganging up on an enemy, etc.

Dungeons & Delvers already has very flexible multiclassing: when you gain a level, you can either increase the level of your starting class or pick something else. In this way it’s similar to 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons, except that you don’t gain everything that a class does at 1st-level. For example, multiclassing into wizard doesn’t automatically grant access to a spellbook and a bunch of spells.

This required us to create a section that specified what sort of stuff you do get when initially multiclassing, so as to avoid characters just dipping into, say, rogue, and then gaining Sneak Attack right away, or fighter for an immediate Damage Bonus (which could otherwise stack if you started as a fighter and jumped into barbarian, and vice versa).

That wouldn’t be necessary, here, though we’d need to find a way to incorporate certain class features like a fighter’s passive Damage Bonus and Multiattack. Currently you have to hit x level in fighter (or ranger or barbarian). Without classes, we’d need to make Damage Bonus and Multiattack Talents with some sort of prerequisite, though they might feel like “feat taxes” from 3rd and especially 4th Edition, options that you basically always took because of how good—and, perhaps, mathematically necessary—they were.

But we could also just do away with Multiattack entirely. We’ve already been considering letting you use a Swift Action to try another attack, and it’s not like wizards have options to cast multiple spells per round without burning through an absurd amount of Willpower points.

The Damage Bonus makes sense and helps further differentiate warrior types from everyone else, but perhaps characters can get it automatically when their Attack Bonus hits a certain point (similar to how in 3rd Edition you got extra attacks over time), but then you need a way for a warrior archetype’s Attack Bonus to get higher than everyone else’s (which, comparing fighter and rogue progressions, could be as simple as saying that every 5 weapon Talents grants a +1 to hit).

Or rework the Talent trees. Currently all fighters get extra attacks and damage bonuses automatically, and Talent choices instead can make you tougher, harder to hit, or activate special attacks with weapons when you roll high enough. All we’d have to do is make the other options compelling enough to compete with a passive damage bonus, which could be a bit easier if we restrict it to a specific weapon or weapon category.

Could even set it up so that first you need a sort of Weapon Focus Talent, and then later pick up the Damage Bonus, so there’s a bit of investment that rogue and wizard types might not be willing to commit to.