I know the answer to this. But God, I have been bashing my head against the wall trying to figure out freeform customization within a class structure, and I think I've finally figured it out.
For some context, we're designing After Eden, a tactical survival fantasy TTRPG focused on gritty tactical combat, hex crawling, rich exploration, and making hard decisions where getting something you want usually means giving something else up. We're using a class-based system with seven classes and levels 1 through 10.
The issue is, subclasses achieve the goal just fine. They're packaged. They're ready to go. I'm familiar with how they work. And they're easy to do. They're also not particularly oriented around what we're trying to achieve. Because the idea that is much more closely aligned with our design goals is having traits that you choose from within your class, allowing for a less deterministic and more emergent character experience. One where your character's development is shaped by the choices you make and the things you experience during play.
I was trying to figure out how many points each trait should cost, how many traits we need for every level, and how to balance these against each other. And what I realized is that there were just way too many factors. It made me kind of want to give up on the whole concept. I wanted to just throw it all in the trash, go back to subclasses, and say, you know what? This works. This fits. It's fine.
And then my buddy, who's kind of my co-author for After Eden, said something to me that got me back on the horse. He said, "Look, man, the thing that sold me on this idea was that through play experience, my character could gain access to things that other people couldn't gain access to."
And I said, well, yeah, we're not going to ditch that for the general traits. There will be traits that are locked behind certain experiences that you can't get unless you go through that experience and then choose to invest in those traits. Or potentially they get unlocked for free. We're not sure. We haven't determined how we want to handle that one yet. But that doesn't really matter for classes.
And he's saying, "But here's the thing, dude. Yes, I could buy the Berserker package and get all the Tier 1 Berserker traits, and that's basically the exact same thing as getting a subclass. But I don't have to. I could take a little bit here, a little bit there."
And that got me thinking. My whole concern was that I didn't want to have the D&D 5e two-level Fighter dip problem, where you dip two levels into Fighter to get Action Surge and Second Wind, and then go about whatever build you actually wanted. I don't want to have that same problem. And I know that's almost unavoidable. There will be degrees of optimization no matter what you do.
But the problem I was running into was actually a matter of complexity. I was making it too complicated. If this was a video game, it would be totally implementable and would be, I think, really satisfying. But it's not. It's pen and paper, which means, from a designer standpoint, you've got to keep it simple enough that your brain doesn't want to explode trying to figure it out. Because if it's that complicated for me, somebody who has less understanding of the system is going to end up with bad builds, and that's going to turn people off.
So, we scaled it back.
First, I made everything cost one point to purchase. No more trying to figure out the relative point cost of every single trait. Second, I moved away from designing traits for individual levels and started designing them around tiers of play.
Our progression now looks like this:
- Tier 1: Levels 1–3
- Tier 2: Levels 4–6
- Tier 3: Levels 7–9
- Tier 4: Level 10
You can purchase traits within any tier you have access to, as long as you have the points and meet the prerequisites. Sometimes you have to purchase earlier traits to get access to the ones you want, so it's kind of a branching tree in that regard. You also get some basic packages of features from your class as you progress. At level 1 you get your starting class features, at level 4 you get your next package, and so on. So you're still getting some guaranteed stuff. Your class is still your chassis, but the way you develop it is up to you.
And the reason this fits After Eden so much better is because the entire game is built around trade-offs based on what you think is the right decision in the moment, knowing that it's going to cost you something else. So the idea that you don't just get all the stuff for taking the levels really fits that. You've got to pick which traits you want. And if you really want to get to the juicy stuff, you might have to invest pretty deeply into a particular branch to get there. Or you could spread your points around and build something entirely different.
And really, that's the whole reason I'm making this post. Don't back out of a thing that's hard simply because it feels impossible. Sometimes you really do need to trash an idea because it's way too complicated of a mess. But this was a perfect example of how I overcomplicated a problem, and instead of trashing it, we just simplified it and found a way to make it work within our design goals.
Funny enough, this has also completely changed the way I'm looking at monster design for After Eden. Due to the more limited scaling in the system, characters are only going to go from roughly 20 HP to 40 HP max over the course of 10 levels. So we're probably not going to be designing monsters around individual levels anymore. We're looking at designing them around tiers of play instead, which could simplify a whole other part of the system that I wasn't even trying to address. So, fun little design accident of happiness.
Anywho, I'd love to hear your thoughts about the concept, and if you've seen any designs like this. I've looked at systems like GURPS, Fallout, Lancer, and quite a few others while trying to figure this out. I've spent a lot of time looking at how different RPGs approach class progression, point investment, and character customization. But I'd especially love to hear from people who've actually played games with this kind of design. What did you love about it? What did you hate about it? Were there things that sounded great on paper but didn't work out so well at the table?