RPG Design Patterns

Provide a means to quickly assign a group of abilities to a character and, at the same time, protect character niches to ensure each character plays a meaningful role within the game.

Profession, Occupation

Class Tree, Skill, Template

A class is a collection of flaws, gifts, skills, and/or handicaps that are given to a character when his player elects the class. In the “pure” form presented in this pattern, a player is allowed to choose only a very few classes for his character, perhaps only one. After this choice, his character is not allowed to “wander” outside the confines of what his class choices allow. In some games, classes are applied only during character generation, but this is not always the case.

The class pattern accomplishes a number of important goals. First, it partitions off a subset of the rules so that beginning players only have to look at the rules directly pertinent to the characters they are playing. Second, it greatly reduces the number of decisions that have to be made by a player in creating a character, thus making character generation faster. Primarily, though, it partitions characters into specific “professions” so that character abilities overlap those of others to only a minimal degree. This helps ensure that each character has a useful, unique role to play within the game environment.

Some games “soften” the Class pattern to increase flexibility at the cost of diminished niche protection. For example, a game using the Rank pattern could use classes as a means to specify what skill ranks a character may gain “cheaply.” In a game with this design, a player can have his character wander outside his class “boundaries,” but only by suffering some additional cost or penalty.

Games whose primary characters tend to have many similar aspects are more suited to the Class pattern than games whose characters naturally vary widely. This is because games having characters with a large number of commonalities need to put special emphasis (and niche protection) on the characteristics that distinguish one character type from another. For example, in a game where the central characters are all New York City cops, all characters are likely to have some abilities in common (namely, those abilities normally taught at Police Academies such as firing handguns, unarmed combat, etc.). So, you might want to clearly distinguish between the special categories of Detectives, Beat Cops, SWAT officers, and Forensics experts. On the other hand, games allowing characters with radically different abilities need not be so concerned with niche protection, since the players themselves are better able to define their own unique roles.

Another area where the class pattern is appropriate is in games where you want to reduce the number of player choices. For example, in designing games for young children, you may decide to keep the number of player decisions to an absolute minimum. Here, you might be best served by the basic Class pattern.

Use the Class pattern when you want to

1. minimize the number of decisions that players need to make when generating their characters,
2. allow players to learn only the subset of rules pertinent to their characters,
3. protect character niches so that characters with different classes play different, meaningful roles within the game.

Note that if you are primarily interested in reducing the amount of bookwork needed to initially generate a character, the Template pattern satisfies that goal. If niche protection is unimportant to your game concept, you might want to consider that pattern instead.

The Class pattern can be extremely confining to some seasoned gamers without additional flexibility built into the system. This is understandable, because one of the main reasons gamers play role-playing games is for the freedom these kinds of games promise. The basic Class pattern purposefully reduces character flexibility to attain benefits that might be better achieved in other ways. So, careful consideration of alternatives should be made before making the decision to use this pattern in its “pure” form. For example, a great deal of flexibility can be gained in a class-based system through the use of the Class Tree pattern.

Since classes generally provide an overall benefit to the character, some means of limiting the number of classes a given character may obtain must be provided (unless a game’s classes provide sufficient drawbacks to balance their benefits).

One of the primary motivations for using the Class pattern is to clearly delineate character niches. So, it is important to avoid making other design choices that might interfere with this partitioning. For example, in a fantasy game, granting wizards the ability to heal would trespass on what is often considered to be the domain of priests. Simplicity is another key reason for selecting the Class pattern, so it makes sense to remain consistent with that goal and keep the classes themselves from requiring players to make very many additional decisions. Once again, if you find it hard to stick to this principle in practice, you may want to consider using some other pattern instead.

The following might be an example of a class in a game containing medieval thieves:

Bandits often group together to form ambushes on caravans and wealthy nobility. They constantly try to invent new ways to trap and overcome opponents normally considered too powerful to defeat. Of course, they frequently set up their surprises in ravines and mountain passes, but imaginative ploys always inspire these thieves. They realize that only a limited number of ambushes are safe at a given spot before some real force shows up.

Skills: Stealth, Setting Traps, Climbing Walls, Horsemanship, Tracking
Weapon Proficiencies: Wielding medium hand held weapons, Firing crossbows, Using large entrapment weapons

RIFTS has 22 “Occupational Character Classes,” including Borgs, Headhunters, Vagabonds, Techno-Wizards, and the like. Each class has attribute requirements (see the Attribute pattern) that must be met before selecting the class. Once selected, the class bestows a specific list of fixed skills on the character. The classes also provide lists of additional skills from which the player is expected to choose a specified number at various “levels” (see the Rank pattern).

Rolemaster Fantasy Role Playing has 9 “Professions,” including Fighter, Thief, Magician, Cleric, and others. These classes each have “Prime Stats” requirements that specify minimum attribute values that must be met to gain the class. Each class provides spell lists (for spell casters), bonuses of various sorts (such as for armor and weapon use), costs for raising various skills (see the Rank pattern), and a number of “Training Packages” (each of which is essentially a group of skills) along with how much each package costs should the player elect it for his character.