Reply To: D&D officially turning Forgotten Realms sights away from Euro inspired campaigns

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One of the things I dislike about class based systems is that I think they are encourage people to focus on their class rather than on their characters. The classes are there to facilitate your character, not the other way around. I also don’t like classes that have a built in Role-playing requirement and I avoid them where possible.  It’s not that I don’t want to Role-play, it’s exactly the opposite – I don’t want someone to tell me how I must Role-play my character, that’s for me to decide.  To me when you build a character you design your character first, including their beliefs and motivations, then you choose a class to suit that and you Role-play it based on the beliefs and motivations you have in mind for them.  You might also change those over time as the character experiences the world and has their views challenged. But what I find most people do is they choose a class because they want those abilities and then they design a character around it. I’m not saying that people who do that are wrong, but I do think that way is far more limiting, tends to provide more 2 dimensional characters and ultimately people start requiring that character classes be created to support what they want to play.  This in turn means more source books are required and as a DM it can start to get unmanageable. As a player you only need to read the source book for your chosen class.  As a DM you have to read the source books for every additional class in the game as well as those for the region you’re in, plus the Players Handbook and dungeon masters guide AND any adventure

 

At the moment, my personal favourite character creation method at the moment is actually the Lifepath system used in Modiphius’ 2D20 system. It doesn’t have classes, you simply trace out a life path leading up to the point at which you start playing. You select homelands, life events and previous careers which then open up or enhance different skills. There’s an online tool that takes you through the process that you can try. You might not understand what everything means but you can see how open it is.

https://conan.modiphiusapps.hostinguk.org

There are extra source books for Conan, such as Conan the Thief, Conan the Mercenary etc and these add new background elements that you can choose. I think the game sorely needs them because the basic Conan book actually has a fairy limited selection of options for some aspects of your character. For example each character has a story, but in the basic book you can really only choose a War Story, the other source books add new story types. But I really like this because that’s how I have always made my characters, even in D&D; I have chosen a class based on who my character is and what I want them to be good at rather than deciding who my character is based on their class.