Custom Classes: Building Classes that Fit the Character

When I first started playing Dungeons & Dragons back in high school, I carried my Player's Handbook with my everywhere. My Dungeon Master, who was my closest friend's dad, presented me with a brand new PHB after it had become clear that I was serious about continuing to play, and that book was all that I really paid attention to for quite a while. By the time I was DMing my own homebrew campaigns in college, my friends would play a game with me that went like this: they would throw out a page number or subject, and I would tell them, from memory, which subject or page number corresponded with it. "Deity information," someone might throw out, and I would reply, "pages 106-108." We even got to the point where individual spells and their page numbers became a part of the exercise. It was not a great game, necessarily—saving a few seconds leafing through the index isn't exactly rip-roaring fun—but I felt comforted that I knew the basic info by heart.

As I've said in earlier posts, I'm more interested in role-playing and storytelling than I am in the finer points of running a simulation. I'll admit that I eschew some parts of the rules while playing altogether. I don't make players track the number of arrows they have, for instance. That detail can allow for some hardcore strategizing, but like the human index game, it's not really fun for anyone. The same goes for amounts of water and trail rations while traveling. If it's only a few days between destinations, I'm not inclined to ask players to subtract food from their inventories, or even collect it in the first place. Worrying about these little details works against immersion more often than not. And to those hardcore gamers who might insist that I'm weakening the game, all I can say is this: I hope you've got a great mechanism for tracking your characters' needs to empty their bowels. It would be a shame if you had to make an emergency bathroom break in the middle of a fight.

So why all this talking about rules? What's the point of delving into mechanics if I'm telling you my approach to the game is all about creativity?

Because one of the best ways to engage your players and help them make their characters truly unique is to create custom classes with them.

At some point while developing the early stages of this campaign, it became clear that all three of the early players wanted to multiclass. I know that there are lots of opinions out there about multiclassing, but most everyone agrees that it weakens your character relative their potential sticking to just one class. (I'm not talking about prestige classes, just taking levels in multiple core classes.) I had also asked each of the players what they wanted from the campaign, and everyone said a variation of the same thing: "I want to feel like a badass."

So there was a conflict between the rules—the class features the players wanted would weaken them—and what they wanted from the gameplay—feeling anything but weak. There were lots of potential solutions. The easiest would have been to power down the average level of enemy. I could also have started them at a slightly higher level than initially planned. But when players want to multiclass, it's really just an expression of wanting to create a character that the game doesn't offer on its own. And that's why custom classes were the best solution.

Below, I'll outline the classes I've developed for my party and some notes on what sorts of considerations went into picking their abilities. In a future post, I'll share the full custom classes and the methods I used to create them.

One of my players wanted what essentially amounts to a rogue with magical abilities. I've heard a lot of players wishing for something like this, which is why I imagine Wizards of the Coast developed the "Arcane Trickster" subclass in D&D's 5th edition. But even the Arcane Trickster is largely a rogue with a few cantrips, which is hardly the shadowy sorcerer that players like to imagine. So for Ell, the half-elf anarchist assassin, it was a matter of creating a rogue with enough magical ability to hold her own in a few different circumstances.


I understand the reasons that a stealth expert with powerful spells can unbalance a game. But for Ell as a character in particular, the combination makes perfect sense. Ell is the kind of character who prepares carefully for every situation. She trains her skills, practices close-quarters combat, and reads extensively. Of course it makes sense for her to put time into learning magic as well if it would give her the edge. So to create her custom class, I took about 70% of the perks of being a rogue and about 30% of the abilities granted to wizards and rolled up a class perfect for the thoughtful, cautious type. Wizard was the obvious choice for Ell—she needed to learn magic in the same way she had learned to sneak around undetected. Because the combination made sense for the character, it was only natural to assemble the class this way. And that's the goal with creating a custom class. Finding the unique combination that suits what they do and how they do it.

Consider the way that people learn a trade in real life. Two different writers may have completely different goals, methods, and products. But in a context like D&D, they would share a class. One of those writers may have more in common with a politician while the other is more of an academic, but they still share the classification of writer. Similarly, consider the world of sports. While a massive hockey player and a nimble baseball player would both be considered athletes, they are completely different in their pursuits of their professions. My point is this: the character comes first. If the class system does not accurately describe what they do and how they do it, the character should not be penalized for that. A truly unique character likely has elements of several classes rolled into one. So why not take the time to create an accurate expression of that character?

Joining Ell in the party is a goliath named Gerald. Gerald was born a human, but for reasons unknown to him (and to his player, for the time being), he was imprisoned and transformed into a goliath—a large, hulking humanoid with rocky flesh. When I asked Gerald's player what he wanted to choose for a class, he said he was torn between a barbarian and a spellcaster. This is a huge conflict according to the rules. But what governs Gerald's character is chaos. He has had no control over his past, over his imprisonment, or even over his physical transformation. A barbarian is a fantastic expression of that chaos, but his player wanted Gerald to have access to spells as well. Something about his transformation had endowed magical abilities upon Gerald. And so we created a class which reflected all of this.

Gerald is a combination of about 65% barbarian and 35% sorcerer. His magic, unlike Ell's, is natural. To play to Gerald's unique background and his barbarian combat style, we chose a somewhat strange mechanic for his magic: Gerald can only cast spells while in his barbarian rage. We also adopted the barbarian "Wild Surge" concept from the 5th edition handbook, so that every time Gerald enters rage or uses a magic ability, he has to roll a d100 and abide by the table's result. [I expanded the Wild Surge table with a handful of extra effects to raise its number of effects from 50 to 100—even more chaos to deal with.] The table has some harmless effects, like, "You are surrounded by faint, ethereal music for the next minute." Others aid in combat, like, "You instantly cast magic missile as a 5th-level spell at a target of your choice." Still others hinder Gerald: "For the next 1d6 rounds, you are reduced to first level." And some are downright silly, such as, "For the next 1d4 hours, you are unable to use adjectives." These effects all serve to reinforce the chaos of Gerald's character. His magical abilities are simultaneously strengthened and weakened by the addition of these effects. And of course, none of these effects can occur unless Gerald is enraged, which adds even less control to the situation. As with Ell's, this custom class fits Gerald perfectly. (It might be the case that it fits only Gerald, though that's neither here nor there.)

The third to Ell and Gerald's party is Dez. Dez has a complicated past; she has been an assassin and a cleric, having filled both roles to help advance the interests of her family's kingdom. A combination rogue-assassin is not exactly standard fare in D&D, not least because there are practically no overlapping skills between the two. But again, Dez's character is not beholden to class categories. She has good reason to have spent time and effort honing the skills required to be both a silent killer and a healer / champion of her god (in this case, the Silver Flame deity from the Eberron setting). And so Dez's class is about 60% rogue and 40% cleric, granting her the stealth and infiltration skills necessary for a sneaky bounty hunter and the protection and healing abilities of a cleric. Dez is the kind of character who makes decisions based on her gut feelings, so the strength that both rogues and clerics have for reacting to dangerous situations (be it escaping or healing allies) play perfectly to her personality. 

With Ell and Gerald, the custom classes built on their focus as a character. Ell received the bonuses of a rogue and a wizard where those classes reward players for being proactive. For Gerald, the chaotic elements of a barbarian and a sorcerer combined to grant him more power for rolling with the punches. Ell's roguish abilities grant her increased sneak attack and provide advantages for carefully-selected spells. Meanwhile, for Dez, the focus is reaction. Dez can use the rogue class's advantages to avoid taking damage, which the cleric's concentration on defense aligns with. On the cleric side of things, Dez's background as a healer comes from her attempts to fight a plague affecting her home. But simply healing seems not to have an effect on the sick. So Dez's cleric role helps her in her crusade against the plague while her rogue role helps her in investigating where the mysterious disease is coming from. I'll say it once more: the class suits the character, not the other way around. 

So the heart of custom classes does involve consideration of the rules, but only insofar as it's important to consider what aspects of the class are reflected in the character. On the surface, Dez and Ell are both playing magic-wielding rogues. But their custom classes are actually very different. The value of the classes I worked with the players to make comes from the fact that they uniquely reflect the characters using them. If I have a single mantra about running tabletop games, it's this: make the world for the players and their characters. [That's exactly why I'm running this campaign without a predetermined questline. I'm making everything for the players in response to what they want.]

As I noted above, I'll be posting the details for these custom classes in another article soon. At the time of writing this, I've completed two of the three characters' intro sessions, and the third will be completed in a few days' time. I'll also be posting soon about the value of individual intro sessions, and expect another update soon on the addition of our fourth player and his character. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming!

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For Starters: The Map

The first time I made a map for my D&D homebrew setting, the result was . . . functional, but not very attractive. And by "not very attractive," I mean that I cringe when I see that thing now. It doesn't look like a fantasy map. It looks like a square with some colors and words on it. Witness the ugliness here: 

My first homebrew map.

Obviously, I'm not very proud of this thing. But it was very important to me to have a map. I needed to have a place that I could visualize, somewhere for the adventures I was trying to create to be able to take place. I think most every game master relishes the opportunity to develop a map, and I'm not an expert at either the design or the geography, so I'm not in much of a position to give advice about it. That said, I want to talk about something important I've learned about maps.

First, let me share another map. This one was created for the campaign I ran on the radio. Like the continent map above, it is lacking in visual appeal. I needed this one for a different purpose, one which gets me closer to my important lesson about maps. For this map, I took a simple map of the city in which the campaign was set and divided it up into districts. Here is the map for the port city of Torga:

Torga, broken up into its ten districts, plus nearby ruins.

Because this campaign was run on the radio, the visuals were not so important (which is fortunate, because I probably couldn't have managed it if I'd had to). However, it made clear to the players looking at it that Torga was not just a city to explore. It was ten distinct places which together made up the city. Within each district, they found shops and people and sometimes murderous ghosts and once, a blind barkeep who thought all animals were goats. And I have to say, I was absolutely pleased when the players could fluently communicate about each of the districts. They had come to know the city by its component parts, its individual flavors. That made the city seem larger and richer. 

One important detail about that campaign: the player characters were all members of a criminal outfit which largely focused on nonviolent crime. The slang-like names of the city's districts helped to color their language with the sort of vernacular we're used to in crime movies and shows. Details about the districts added to that feeling—the district known as "The Field" was so named because it was a largely flat area, but also because it was the most wealthy part of town. Thus, to the thieves in their gang, "The Field" was also where they did most of their work. (You work in your field, was what I was going for.) This sort of characterization of the city helped cement the criminal status of the players. 

The districts accomplished another goal: the city's population was extremely fragmented. I tend to include political struggles in my campaigns, and Torga was no exception. Keeping the city broken up in terms of districts and people kept the feeling that Torga was a house divided. Torga also had an extremely strict police force, which served to make the players feel persecuted and oppress much of the city's poor population. The players' statuses as criminals in a city which seemed oppressive added to the feeling that they were righteous in their rebellion. (That sense of being right even as they committed crimes regularly opened the door for lots of fun philosophical issues throughout the campaign.)

Finally, the ruins scattered around Torga achieved something else important. Three of the ruins around the city had been abandoned generations before to form one larger city which the earlier inhabitants had hoped would become more prosperous. But the abandoned towns hadn't fallen apart right away, leaving mostly intact towns around Torga. In the case of one of those towns, Trass, the ghosts of hundreds of orcs killed in their beds for refusing to join the conglomerated city kept living in the ruins, which weren't ruined at all. (This allowed for some great horror scenes, as the player characters explored a town which was perfectly intact and haunted by tortured souls.) But the important thing that the players learned from these ruins which were always visible on the horizon was that even Torga's past was fragmented. Hell, Torga's warring political factions named themselves after the abandoned towns around them out of loyalty to their ancestors' values—and the map, showing one city split up and surrounded by ruins, reinforced all of this. 

Now I'm going to show a map which tries to do something very different. I spent a lot of time preparing a campaign which was going to be a Western-horror story built into my D&D world. Brief background so that the Western-horror thing makes any sense in a D&D-world: I developed an island dominated by a desert which was somewhat rich in precious metals. This meant that the inhabitants of the island had to live without much agriculture and predominantly on herd animals and mining. Quickdraw archers became the stand-in for gunslingers. And the horror component arose as the campaign's archenemy altered reality in disturbing ways and sent waves of undead against the island's settlements. Unfortunately, we only managed about three sessions before the group disbanded. But I still had spent many long hours working on the details of the island, its inhabitants, and especially its map. 

The map of my Western-horror setting, drawn by an NPC in the story.

When I made this map, I put far more effort into visual appeal. I wanted my players to see the map and be genuinely excited that they would get to explore it. The things I discussed above about characterizing the campaign through the map are active here too—I tried to name each town in a way that sounded both Western and fantasy. As a result, the towns have names like Hangman's Slab, Hart Springs, Red Hawk, Ruby Range, and Sunset Ridge. 

There are a couple features on this map, though, that do more than characterize the place. As you can see, the top of the map is labelled "Our Island of Ramsey." I had this map printed and gave it to my players while in-character as an NPC who had called the island home his whole life. The NPC who created the map had been a ranger for most of his adult life, riding the island to fight back against outlaws and marauders; this gave him the opportunity to create his own map of the island during his travels. Like this NPC, the player characters were lifelong residents of the island. With a large title calling the island "our island," I tried to give the player characters (and the players themselves, for that matter) some ownership of the place. That was especially important given the archenemy's goals, which targeted the entire island. Similarly, in the lower left corner of the map is written, "To my friends, with the best of luck." This is a minor detail, but it reminded the players every time they referenced the map that back home in their little town of Hart Springs was a community that supported them and needed their help. 

One last note about the Ramsey map: while I had always developed my cities in detail before getting down to mapping, I decided with Ramsey to try something new. Instead, I developed only the small town the player characters began in, then mapped the whole island, and finally finished by figuring out what those other towns were like. This gave me as the DM a few benefits which I want to share here.

• Creating the town's profile—who lives there, how many people live there, what industries the town relies on, what the government looks like—after building the map allowed me to factor the geography and location of the town into what the town is actually like. Fort Weaver, for instance, is nestled into the mountain range so that only one side of it is open to easy attack. From that point, I was able to decide that the city cared deeply about defense, even to the point of paranoia. Fort Weaver became a sort of police state fueled by constant fear. Hangman's Slab, on the other hand, ended up characterized by its access to geographical assets. Its close neighbor, Hyder Bend, lies at the meeting point of the ocean and Ramsey's only significant river. Hyder Bend is also one of the two ports which face the larger continent to the west. But Hangman's Slab lacks the ease of shipping associated with a river, and it has nothing to attract sailors from the west. It became a penal colony over time, using its relative geographical isolation to keep prisoners from the rest of the island. Using these kinds of details about location can make it far easier to develop interesting details about cities.
• I'm pretty terrible at coming up with interesting architecture. To me, buildings are mostly just buildings, and I envy those game masters who throw impressive, unique structures into their campaigns. To address this deficiency, I look for interesting building designs in fantasy art. The internet is chock full of amazing artwork in fantasy realms. I avoid outright stealing others' ideas by trying to combine several inspiration pieces or coming up with my own additions to what I find. To bring this back to the map discussion, take a look at some of the drawings of what the cities on the map look like. Each settlement has a distinct look, whether in terms of building shape, layout, or what kind of defenses the city has, if any. As noted in the bullet point above, I developed the city's profile after creating the map. So I chose those images for the towns and then challenged myself to explain why each settlement used the kind of buildings they did. Hyder Bend, for instance, features tall towers. I decided that Hyder Bend was a powerhouse in the stone and masonry industries, which allowed the city's inhabitants to create massive stone towers cheaply. I also decided that the city had only a small stretch of land which was stable enough to serve as foundation for buildings, making it even more important to make the most of the limited building space. As a result of these details, Hyder Bend became a tight, bustling, city more like New York City than the settlements around it, which resembled ranches. And despite my lack of architectural talent, I had a handful of cities with distinctive building styles by working backwards from inspiration. 
• I won't necessarily say that I think my Ramsey map is pretty, but I'm certainly more proud of it than I am of my earlier maps. I spent at least twenty or so hours in Photoshop working on just that one big map, and I was proud enough of the outcome at the time that I printed an extra copy of it to hang up or frame. (I'm very pleased to say that the map I'm working on for my current campaign—the one this blog revolves around—is far better than Ramsey in every way. Look for details on that map in an upcoming post.) I think that what excited me so much about my Ramsey map was that it did something none of my previous maps did. It conveyed a tone visually. The continent map above—the first one—gave enough of a place to work with so I could build my world. The Torga map with all of its fragmented districts conveyed a tone which was important to the campaign. But the Ramsey map took tone one step further. It looked like a map someone living there would make. It looked like it had lots going on at the same time (this has always been important to me as a DM; even if your campaign revolves around your players, the world does not). And most importantly to me, it looked like it was a place ripe for adventuring. I think a map should answer questions, but ask a few too. And the Ramsey map told you most of what was out there and where it all was, but it didn't tell you some of the things you wanted to know. What happened to Old Paradise, and why did they need a New Paradise? Who would want to live in the Boneyard Marsh? And what is the deal with Red Hawk, nestled into that dark forest? The tone I wanted with Ramsey was that there were lots of stories and adventures waiting out there, and the visuals of the map suggested as much.

The mantra for today: maps create tone. Be careful to create the tone you want. 

I'll be posting some images from my nearly-finished map for my current campaign soon, along with some how-to advice that's been helpful to me. Other upcoming news will include a basic rundown of the campaign setting and a look at the three custom classes I've created with my players for the campaign. 

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Introduction

I've been running tabletop games for about a decade now, and I've run into a situation which I'm sure many players out there are familiar with: I no longer get to play with the people I started with. My high school D&D pals are long gone. My college groups for D&D, Don't Rest Your Head, Exalted, and some games we developed from scratch are now scattered across the country. And while I couldn't be more excited to game with my new group, I miss being able to talk at length with my old players and game masters about our games. With this project—the one you're reading now—I want to open up my newest campaign to my old gaming buddies, and I suppose also the public. 

So what can you expect from reading this? 

1. You'll be seeing some of my creative process. I'm not great at tooting my own horn, but I can say this with confidence: I work differently than most game masters. The people who have played my campaigns can attest that I put a tremendous amount of effort into building a detailed game world, and I'm proud of the unorthodox ways I go about that. You'll be able to see this from reading onward, but here are some brief examples from my history as a game master:

• I ran a radio show for three years in which I DMed a D&D campaign over the airwaves. There are some unique challenges in running a game which relies entirely on audio and involves no visual components, but our show maintained a high number of listeners throughout its run.
• I've written hundreds of pages of documents to exist in my game worlds, including personal diaries, court transcripts, entire books, articles on a handful of topics, and even a children's book which I also illustrated. 
• I developed a unique system of casting magic spells for D&D which relied on the use of about 175 glyphs, allowing the wizard using them to create infinitely complex and customizable spell effects. The ingenious player who used these managed spells ranging from causing an NPC to spit out a different flower depending on which word he spoke to creating a mermaid-duplicate of himself to stripping the immortality from a demigod. 

2. I'll explain the methods I use to develop some of my game world and why I use those methods. You'll learn pretty quickly that I'm a game master who favors storyline and immersion over combat and rules. I generally believe in allowing the players to completely decide the direction of the story; I offer only the interference that a real world situation might. I think that this gives the players a far better experience than being guided along a story I've already determined the ending of. Part of why I'm inclined to document the development of this campaign is that this time, I'm taking my hand completely off the reins of the story. The direction the players march in will be the direction I focus my attention on, adding details and depth as I sense where they want to go. This will be an experiment for me, and I'm interested in documenting how this goes.

3. Finally, I'll be sharing the stories that my players and I create together here. For this particular campaign, I've developed a custom class for each of my three players (more on this in my first few updates). I've also decided to create a large expanse of territory for the players to cover, consisting of 17 distinct towns and cities, from the metropolis of Woodhearth to the hamlet of Cloud's Landing. My players are each interested in forging stories across the territory, and I hope that the diversity of the region and the many options available to them will allow for a sprawling campaign with plenty of interesting notes to share here. 

So that's the gist of what will be going on here. I hope that what I share here will offer something valuable to you gamers and game masters who prefer story and detail over min-maxing characters. (No offense to those folks, of course—different strokes and all that.) And thanks for reading!