Guidelines for building new classes?

[d6todamage]

Are there any guidelines available (official or otherwise) for building new C&C classes?

[Treebore]

Not that Serl is willing to share, but he only offered up his opinion on how to determine XP costs anyways. Just use the existing classes and XP costs for them and I bet you will do fine. Plus there are lots of classes already built by others around. Like if you go down to the "Other Games" forum (I have no frikkin idea why it was moved there) you will find a C&C Players Companion that already has a lot of new classes in it. Plus tons of other ideas.

[Omote]

I think it was rumored that TLG would eventually release it's own supplement that would cover such things. At one time this was part of the CKG, but never materialized in that tome.

~O

[Peter]

Not that Serl is willing to share, but he only offered up his opinion on how to determine XP costs anyways. Just use the existing classes and XP costs for them and I bet you will do fine. Plus there are lots of classes already built by others around. Like if you go down to the "Other Games" forum (I have no frikkin idea why it was moved there) you will find a C&C Players Companion that already has a lot of new classes in it. Plus tons of other ideas.

It also contains a method for building classes in the Class Construction chapter, but is untested and may need some adjustments. There is also a Class Deconstruction chapter, which is my attempt to figure out how the Trolls calculated the XP.

[moriarty777]

There is an article which is appearing in the first issue of the Ballista which might do the trick if class building is your thing. It (the issue) is in the final stages of layout and editing right now but the specific article I am referring to is done and already laid out in the context of the rest of the issue. I probably need about 6 - 10 hours to finish it offf and I am really tempted to call in sick at my job in order to get it done sooner than later.



M

[serleran]

I have provided at least three ways to build classes. One was to break down XP costs, which I am no longer going to provide, for various reasons but mostly because I was asked to not give it away. The second simplest way, which some liked, and others wanted "more" was to break down abilities into "tiers" and allow X number of "points" to be used to buy them -- when originally posted, I did not explain the whole thing, so it led to some thinking that multiples of likes could be obtained, such as HD or combining BtH (this was later explained, but I still missed it when submitting.) In any event, the third is not so great as it was basically just done using the PC game Morrowind as inspiration -- all classes get the same XP costs, and then X primary abilities, Y secondary, and everything else is tertiary... each explains what that means; this last way did not emulate the classes as written, whereas the others did. However, none of these works well with the 4th print PHB where some abilities have been renamed, altered, or whatever.

However, none of that matters. My current line of thinking in this regard is just to jot down the abilities desired, and then see how many there are. Put a little C next to combat-oriented abilities, and a S next to spells; for everything else, put a M for miscellaneous. I consider a HD of d10 or d12 to be C; heavy armor and numerous weapons allowed to also be a C. Now, comes the gritty stupidity of "feel" as opposed to "science." If there are more of one type than another, start with the XP of a similarly themed class -- that is, a character with 3 S abilities (spells, bonus spells, decipher script, for example) would be akin to a wizard or illusionist. If there are about equal numbers of ability types, such as 2 S (spells and bonus spells) and 3 C (BtH = fighter; all armor; all weapons), then use whichever of the two like classes has the highest XP requirement, for any given level.

Yeah, I know, it is far from perfect, but it is different from the previous methods. Heheh.