I was discussing this with one of my friends today. Sometimes players feel a bit ‘forced’ into certain skills with their characters, that may not necessarily match what they have in mind in terms of who their character is and what he/she can do. Simply because it is on the character sheet and what they want isn’t.
What if we completely skip picking a class, but simply come up with the ‘concept’ of a character, and pick (or design if needed) skills accordingly. E.g. a trained army scout could have some fighter-like skills, but also e.g. be a trap expert.
Then, while leveling up, add skills that reflect your experiences during the fiction. So instead of ‘poof, you now know how to do X overnight!’ you get a skill that actually has a base in the fiction. E.g. if you encountered a lot of traps recently, maybe you become more aware of how to deal with those and you become a trap expert (just taking this as an easy example, could be anything).
Skills would still either come from a playbook or (if something new needs to be designed) would be structured exactly like any other DW skill. Just not prescribed in advance. And of course you would want to avoid your players all having the same skills, but I wouldn’t expect that to be too much of an issue.
Aside from the ‘do whatever you and your players find fun!’ argument, have any of you guys ever tried such a ‘system’, or do you know of a game that does something similar? What are the advantages and disadvantages of such a ‘hack’?
The problem with that sort of setup is that everyone needs to be on board with the same tropes.
If you have someone who doesn’t understand the whole fantasy rpg setup, they won’t have any idea what their “concept” should be.
Now, that said – I have made a scifi PbtA game that used tiered skills for +s – say you have the Communications tier and also the Signal Jamming skill in that tier you get +2 to jamming someone’s communications.
Yeah I was going to mention Class Warfare despite not having tried it myself yet. Sounds right up that alley.
Sun Damage Omen Class Warfare really is a great suggestion because it’s very close to what Gerke Bouma seems to be thinking of. The way I think about the classes is very loose. While it seems like a good idea to get a feel for them early on, you can easily introduce compendium classes, even right away, to push play toward what the player really wants to do.
I think a lot of players might be surprised by how much fun they can have just by embracing the standard classes. Don’t get me wrong, obviously I love to tinker with the game but part of the joy of Dungeon World is letting it take you on a journey without forcing too much on it. Finding out who the character is in play is really neat.
I actually heard about Class Warfare but hadn’t look into it – Turns out it was something completely different than I thought based on the name.
It seems a nice way to achieve most of what we were talking about in structured way, taking away most of the potential for discussion (in the negative way) we anticipated when doing this, including things like HP, damage dice, etc.
Thanks everyone for the suggestions!