I’m abolishing classes.

(Sorry, this is a long post, because it’s probably the biggest change I would make to this game, so it needs to be.)

Classes are limiting. They pigeonhole characters into a specific role¹. I remember reading fantasy stories and imagining what class the characters would play. In almost every case, I’d realize the characters were all just fighters and wizards, with the occasional thief thrown in², despite each of them having very different skillsets³.

As I was growing the ideas for this series, I looked to the internet to learn why role-playing games have classes. As usual, the internet proved I was not the first to come up with the idea of getting rid of them. I found one strong argument for them. Classes give new players a path to follow. The alternative is to give them skills and powers from a huge menu to choose from. So basically, it’s the same logic that marketers are said to use when suggesting restaurants to have shorter menus⁴. I don’t like it, but I do understand it. However I feel like there could be other alternatives that would please everybody.

That said, if I was told that classes were non-negotiable, I would still change them. In my class-based version of Fantasy Quest, there would be five “roles”: fighter, spellcaster, dungeoneer, scout (wilderness), and expert. These roles would all have a basic skill-set that would be customized with a menu of additional skills.

Skills

In Fantasy Quest, the heart of who your character is and what they can do is detailed in your character’s skills. Unlike fifth edition, this isn’t just some general areas of knowledge plus animal handling and athletics. Skills in this game include everything that a character class is capable of, from combat to spellcasting to burglary, and everything else.

Each skill has a rank. The rank of the skill determines how much your character knows about how to complete a task using that skill. In many cases, the rank will translate directly to a bonus to be added to a die roll. The skills are also associated with abilities, which means you would also add an ability score to that die roll. This means that it is possible to attempt some tasks that requires a skill you don’t have, by simply using your ability score as the bonus.

There is no proficiency bonus here. The proficiency bonus is the skill rank, and it differs for each skill. You gain ranks in skills by spending experience points as your character levels up, but I will discuss that in another article.

Commoner Skills. Skills like those used in fifth edition will be known as commoner skills. These are things that aren’t specifically related to adventuring. Commoner skills are all based on skill checks, as described above, there are no special features given to characters who rank up in those skills.

Some skills, especially the knowledge skills, will be more specialized. For example, your history skill isn’t just a general history. You learned about the history of one culture, plus general world history (from a specific perspective). If you need to know some specific detail about another unrelated culture, you can’t use your skill bonus. But if you need to know how that culture fit into world history, you can.

Languages. I want to treat languages as commoner skills, as well. Characters could have non-fluent skills in a language, allowing them to attempt communication with a die roll even if they don’t know the language well. As a language nerd, I would also expect dialects to come into play in this. I would also consider reading and writing as different skills for each language. It was historically common for people to be able to do one without the other. However, I don’t want to turn Fantasy Quest RPG into a linguistics game, so I’ll leave that for something to think about if this ever becomes serious.

Adventuring Skills

The skills that characters actually need for adventuring would be called adventuring skills. These are the features that classes give you in fifth edition, as well as just general rules, except that you don’t need to buy into them as a package.

Combat Skills. Combat skills will be used for two things: to determine your attack bonus and your armor class. There isn’t just one general combat skill. Your character must learn specific weapons and fighting styles. Having multiple combat skills makes backgrounds more interesting, and gives more opportunity to balance the backgrounds out at level up time.

To explain that last bit further, just think of the number of skills a support role might need to rank up in, compared to what a combat role would rank up in. If the combat background only needs to rank up one simple combat skill, then there’s no reason to have to specialize in combat. If anyone with a combat skill can use any weapon, they can just take a support role and gain combat as well as the extra skills.

So combat skills are divided into types of weapons, and types of armor. To create the equivalent of a generic fighter class, you would need at least three separate skills: swords, bows, and heavy armor. The sword skill gives you a bonus to attack with any long-bladed weapon, from short swords to scimitars. The bow skill lets you use longbows, crossbows, and so forth. The heavy armor skill gives you an armor class bonus when wearing heavy armor. I would assume that the heavy armor skill also gives you light armor skill capabilities, but it might cost more to buy into the skill in the first place.

A fighting character does not get a general attack bonus. A sword and bow specialist won’t have an attack bonus when using a pole arm or a spear, at least not more than what their dexterity ability provides. I don’t see this as a problem, because it gives the characters more variety. You don’t just have generic fighters anymore, you have archers, swordsmen, spear-men, etc. In addition, your spellcaster can choose to spend elective skill buy points to learn how to use a sword, even if they don’t have enough buy points to learn the rest of the fighting.

Spellcasting Skills. I will delve further into spellcasting and magic in another article. But for now, I want to explain how spellcasting skills work. Since combat roles need to buy into two or three different skills as they advance, I also need to split the spellcasting skills into a couple to balance that. These skills would be a a magic power skill and a magic theory skill.

The magic power skill specifies how well you can cast spells. You rank up in this skill to learn methods to turn magical energy into spells. Thus, each rank in a magic power skill gives you more spell points you can use every day. I suspect this skill will be a generic one that applies to every type of spellcasting, since the spell point accumulation will be the same for each of them. This skill also determines your spellcasting bonuses and difficulty classes.

The magic theory skill specifies what kinds of spells you know. Each rank gives you access to more spells of higher power. It also tells you which list of spells you can choose from. You can rank in arcane magic, divine magic, sorcery, illusions, and other kinds of magic.

Separating these two skills adds a few options which aren’t available before. First, you can learn multiple types of spellcasting at the same time by investing in two different magic theory skills. Thus, you could have both wizard and cleric magic. Second, you can now have power to cast spells you don’t have access to and vice versa. This last doesn’t seem like a benefit, but it can be used to create new character ideas, perhaps leading to useful arcane knowledge checks.

Note that not all spellcasting will follow the same pattern. Fifth edition warlocks, for example, have a different sort of magic power skill that doesn’t follow the same spell point patterns. But that skill would provide additional abilities gained by calling directly on their patron.

Other Special Skills. There’s more to adventuring than combat and spellcasting. The special abilities that make each class unique will also become skills. Older editions had clear level progressions for things such as pick pockets, turn undead, and so forth. Fifth edition classes have heavily complicated these features, turning many of them into something like feats one receives at certain levels, with only vague connections between them. One of the worst problems my players had when I ran my first fifth edition game was keeping track of all the special abilities their classes had.

It is going to take work to turn them back into skills that can be leveled.

Some of the skills, or groups of skills, which will be needed for these include:

• Barbarian rage
• Barbarian totem abilities
• Bard performance abilities
• Cleric repelling of undead⁵
• Druid wild shape
• Monk ki powers – which I would redevelop as a new type of spellcasting
• Paladin auras – which is also possibly spellcasting
• Ranger tracking and survival skills
• Thief and assassin skills
• Sorcerer metamagic

Powers

There is one remaining bit of classes that don’t work with skills. Skills are incremental, allowing for increase in power as the character advances. However there are a few times that classes provide special abilities that don’t advance. There are also feats. These are special abilities that the player can buy once.

I don’t like the word feat. A feat is an accomplishment one achieves, not an ability to be re-used. For now, I will refer to these as powers, based on the usage of that word in super-hero fiction.

In Fantasy Quest RPG, you buy ranks in skills when you level up. If you prefer, you may buy one power instead. Powers would include things that class abilities and feats handle in fifth edition. Some powers may have prerequisites. One option I would add is the ability for a non-spellcasting character to add one lower level spell they would be able to cast once per day or so, without spell points.

Paths

Okay, so what about the “alternative that will please everybody”? Here it is.

In Fantasy Quest RPG, instead of classes, there are optional paths. Instead of picking from the menu of skills, you can pick a path for your character. A path defines the whole kit of starting skills, both commoner and adventuring skills. They will also define how those skills advance with each character level. You don’t need to worry about checking new skills for prerequisites, or deciding when to spend experience points, because the paths all fit. Or, as you get more experience playing, you can decide to go off the path and start advancing the way you want.

Paths would be more specific than fifth edition classes. You don’t need subclasses, because you can just replace certain optional skills with others of your choice. But, there would be a lot more paths to choose from. They would be categorized into groups similar to the traditional classes to help the player decide.

For examples, here are a few paths I might have:

• Combat
  • Soldier – heavy armor, martial weapons, military knowledge
  • Warrior – general combat, athletics, battle techniques
  • Martial Artist – weaponless combat, acrobatics, mind-body skills
  • Ranger – ranged combat, hunting skills, nature knowledge
• Spellcasting
  • Arcanist – arcane magic, esoteric knowledge
  • Monk – divine magic, religious knowledge⁶
  • Druid – divine magic, knowledge of nature
• Expert
  • Thief – light weapons, thief skills
  • Bard – light weapons, music skills, people skills
  • Scout – hunting skills, nature knowledge
  • Healer – divine or arcane magic specializing in healing, medicine and nature knowledge

Custom, homebrew and setting-specific paths should be easy to make using the existing paths as a template. And you don’t always have to ask your game master to make them for you, or get permission to do something different. You simply replace provided skills for the background with others of the same cost.