A topic that came up in the TNP Discord recently (piggybacking off of the last blog post) was how to determine the roster construction in an RPG. In my previous designs, there were effectively 6 "classes," built off of a chassis of picking whether you were a (martial) warrior or a (spell) caster, crossed with whether you used light, medium, or heavy "armaments" (effectively, armor, in a damage-reduction role.) This mapped pretty closely to the vanilla World of Warcraft classes, but was actually built off of the classes I had sketched out for a presumptive (at the time) Diablo 2 follow-up; Mage, Warlock, and Cleric being the light, medium, and heavy casters (respectively) with Rogue, Hunter(? I think?), and Knight being the warrior classes.
4th Edition D&D started off with a similar ethos to where TNP is now, so let me explain that a bit. 4e was essentially trying to take the pre-existing D&D classes, and map them onto what I refer to as "the intersection of a role and a power source." So for example, Clerics (being a holy healing class, generally) were given the 'Leader' role and the 'Divine' power source.
(As I've probably said before, power sources didn't matter much, until you get into bolting specific feat perks onto your powers; generally power sources informed what your default trained skill would be, as well as your class skills -- this being more or less what got carried over to TNP, mechanically.)
So, with the first PHB, 4e introduced 3 power sources: martial, arcane, and divine. Since the book contained 8 classes, the intention was to (more or less) have 2 classes for each of the 4 roles; famously, this didn't work out because the "martial controller" was nowhere to be found in the designs (until the Hunter subclass, in Essentials.) But the formula for how to "fill in the grid" in 4e was already taking shape; PHB2 added the Avenger (striker) and Invoker (controller) classes to fill out the divine power source, which already included the Cleric (leader) and the Paladin (defender) from the first PHB.
The 2nd PHB also codified Druid away from being a "divine" spellcaster, making the 'Primal' power source its own thing, for really the first time in D&D. The design was kind of kludgy (owed mostly to the fact that Druid is kind of a hybrid, "do everything" class insofar as it's roots in 3.x editions of D&D) so pinning Druid down into the controller role felt sort of forced; to wit, the Essentials and post-Essentials versions of the Druid took the class into completely different directions and roles.
TNP essentially came at its roster construction from the same place as 4e: taking what came before it, and trying to fit it into a defined framework -- namely, class dice. With the earliest iterations of TNP, every class was based off of a single die (either d4, d6, d8, d10, or d12) meaning that a "slate" necessarily needed to have at least 5 classes (whereas every power source in 4e ostensibly should aim to have 4 classes, one for each role.) TNP pretty quickly expanded from one slate into two, and as soon as the 2nd slate was finalized, it began spilling into a 3rd. This is how we got to the current roster of 15 classes.
With the decision to implement a 2nd class die (instead of having just one, for every class) TNP would have had to either expand to a 4th slate, or contract down to just two slates -- in order to keep the class die utilization "balanced." Instead, one slate was kept as single-die classes, while the other two were used to make up all of the 10 combinations of class dice. Similar to 4e trying to fit Druid into a single role within the Primal power source, TNP ended up with "class categories" to try and fit classes into a 'role' within their slate -- which would then make for mechanics/progression that could be mimicked on classes within the same category, on other slates. For what it's worth, I think this works very well on the 'Skill Expert' and 'Jack of All Trades' categories, but is a little shakier for the others.
So why do I bring this up?
Well, it's beginning to seem more and more likely/obvious that there will be an "after TNP" game, in my design future. That said, I think it is worthwhile to ponder, what sort of constraints or framework should be used when deciding what classes to include or exclude from the designs.
TNP has 15 classes, and with subclass mechanics taken into consideration, it tries really hard to at least cover the design space of (if not necessarily faithfully reproduce or "pay homage" to) the 40-odd classes/subclasses presented across the span of 4th Edition (the Psionic classes being the notable absence, in TNP.) Compare that to 5th Edition, where they've started with 12 classes, and more or less just built onto those (adding the Artificer and Blood Hunter, later on) mostly with things that are recognizably prestige classes from 3.5, or (arguably, such as the sprinkling in of Warlord mechanics onto the Fighter class) inspired by 4e.
You can even go back to something as seminal as Final Fantasy 1, to get a sense that 6 classes is kind of the bare minimum; compare that with the "core 4" in D&D of Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, and the 5e version of "essentials" making Bard the de-facto 5th class. (You could make a case that this maps to "one class for each ability score [excluding CON].") TNP, by its nature, necessitates 5 classes being the minimum -- although if the framework is shifted from class dice to anything else, this could quickly change.
The question I'm posing to myself is, how many classes would I want, in a follow-up to TNP?
I definitely (if I haven't made it clear in my last few posts on the subject) want to make something smaller in scale, so a straight reproduction/port of the TNP roster is probably off the table. Based on everything we've gone over in this post, 5 seems like the absolute minimum, with 12 probably being the ceiling; ultimately the framework (or "grid") will likely determine what the right fit is.
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Scheduling is a bit jumbly lately, but I would expect the next post to be between June 15th-19th, with the 3rd post this month coming after the 24th. Stay tuned!
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