Classes and Races...again

(tl;dr: fluff and mechanics should support each other & vice versa)

So recently I started lurking over at The Gaming Den. Normally I peruse RPG.net, but the other night I was actually reading /tg/ rather than just saving pictures and they linked to the Sins of 4e thread. I hadn't kept up with 4e after it was released, so hearing its "ending" was news, but the list of its flaws was more interesting.

Especially the "Racial Determinism". This one stuck not because its any more valid or problematic than the others, like the narrow classes say, but because its some friends have been dealing with in their derivative of dnd 3.x. Its almost too extensive to be called a rewrite, with rebalancing everything core, to the point fighters are competitive with casters (madness, I know). But having settled on the core classes and leveled out the +0 LA races, they too were looking at what races were best as what classes.

For background, this is power gamers trying to balance a system; one tenet of their design philosophy is "if option X is mechanically weaker than Y, then players don't really have a choice", which is their way of saying a choice between "playing my concept" and "being effective" means your design has failed since concepts should be equally valid, i.e. one isn't mechanically penalized over another.

With this view, the analysis had results ranging from:

• Everyone with +(X stat) is good for this class; do we want to narrow this?
• Only (Y race) is good for this class; do they need a nerf so other options are competitive?
• (Z race) is only good at one class, but on par with others for it right now; how do we make them decent for others while not making them so good to be the only choice for this one?

If the system favors this, is it design failure or design aweseomeness?

 

And this may smack of obviousness, but the common point to me is that racial determinism isn't a bad thing, but inherent to these kinds of rules; Frank Trollman, these friends, and anyone who can do math are in total agreement here. The issue is if the optimized builds support the setting and genre tropes. you don't even have to make it so everyone is good at everything, just so the people who should be are (and labeling who's good at what clearly and correctly goes along way to not trapping newbies).

My friends' goal was to have a few core races for each class, and a few classes for each race, so there were options. But ones that made sense, as there were comments like "dwarves are good fighters, but they should be decent paladins and clerics...ok even with this buff they're not wizards, but I don't think anyone cares" or "elf barbarians are good now; is this a problems or ok?"

Restrictions can help define the setting; in allot of specific games like DnD, the issue is not being able to do things that you can in the source material, but in general games like HERO system, not regulating things can destroy the feel of the world too. In summary, as always, fluff and crunch need to match or things get wonky.

In the grim darkness of the far future there is only ...Rainbows!
(Though if thats the feel you're going for, go for it ;)