Monster Mechanics

October 31st, 2011

Hello everyone, and welcome to another Dark Designs. This in particular article is going to be a little bit different from most of my articles, because while I know what the topic is, I’m not quite sure yet what I’m going to say about it, or what my “take-away message” is going to be. This is because, while normally a Dark Designs article involves me imparting some kind of design- or DM-based wisdom to you, today we’re going to be taking a close look at the design of a specific “mechanic” that we’ve been getting fairly comfortable with here at Necromancers of the Northwest: the “Races with Class” class.

At a glance, this certainly doesn’t sound different from most of my articles. After all, a few months back I devoted no less than four articles to talking about how a “Races with Class” class was designed (I will be coming back to that, by the way, I’m just allowing a little more time for people to write in with the suggestions I asked for in the last article). Similarly, I’ve been spending all my non-theme week articles lately talking about looking critically at one’s previous work and using that as an opportunity to learn and grow as a designer.

But again, the key here is not the subject matter, but the approach. The four articles about making a “Races with Class” class were primarily a description of how I go about it. Pure exposition. The articles about introspection were lectures as well, talking about things that I had already determined for myself about Marchen der Daemonwulf, and how that influenced decisions in the creation of Marchen der Daemonwulf II. This article, however, will seek to investigate a concern that there is something fundamentally wrong with the “Races with Class” design.

Personally, I’ve always been rather proud of those classes, and thought that they were rather clever, even if they did build on the work of Savage Species. I’d only ever heard positive things about the classes when they were From the Workshop articles, and that matched my expectations fairly well: they may not have been the most groundbreaking of classes, sure, but they were fun and functional. Then we started putting them into actual .pdf books (specifically A Necromancer’s Grimoire: Secrets of the Witch and A Necromancer’s Grimoire: Faces of the Rakshasa), and suddenly everything I hear about them is bad. The source here is different, though: on the books, I’m hearing from reviewers, rather than general readers. So, do they have a point, or is this just another case of “If the reviewers hate it, it’s probably good,” like my experience with movies?

I honestly don’t know, but it’s design-related, and I anticipate that it will be an interesting enough journey to warrant your attention (if not this will probably never see actual print), so why don’t you join me and we’ll find out together.

First, a very brief explanation of what we’re talking about. A “Races with Class” class is a character class designed to allow a player to gain all the powers and abilities of a Monster Manual monster, essentially allowing players to play as the chosen monster. For the most part, it works like the classes from the 3.0 sourcebook Savage Species, mostly because in my experience Savage Species was pretty well-designed, with the major flaw being that 3.0/3.5 level adjustments were often a little more penalizing than they strictly needed to be. The key change for our “Races with Class” classes is that they continue on to a full 20 levels, adding new powers that fit the monster’s theme.

I’ll be the first to admit that this probably isn’t the most groundbreaking design ever to be printed with the OGL logo. On the other hand, not everything is about innovation. Good design is far more about being fun to play than it is about doing something new for the sake of novelty. The impetus for “Races with Class” came from the fact that Pathfinder doesn’t truly have a Savage Species equivalent, and, in fact, just said “Eh…use the CR as your level and it’ll probably work out fine.” This was true in some cases, but laughably broken in many others. Without any real support for monster PCs, your best bet for playing, say, a succubus, was to find a DM who wasn’t going to look closely at your character sheet, and then deliberately pull your punches so much that it hurt, just to avoid unbalancing the game so much it spiraled out of control.

So, before we go on to look at the criticisms that have been leveled against the green hag and rakshasa “Races with Class” classes (and, by extension, the other “Races with Class” classes), let’s take a moment to clarify what, precisely, our design goals were for them:

1. Be a faithful representation of the monster, including its abilities.

The more I do “Races with Class,” the more I find myself willing to fudge this one a bit, on the small details. It’s probably not a big deal if their Hit Dice come out a tad bit different, or maybe breaking a special attack down into bite-sized chunks leaves a vestigial, less powerful version of an attack (such as with the medusa’s gaze). But it’s important that they stay pretty faithful, or it’s going to feel like a cop-out. If the succubus, for example, halved the Charisma bonus and took away most of the spell-like abilities (and the level drain, and all sorts of other things) and just left you with wings and a pretty face, you’d feel like you might as well play an elf with a high Charisma and say you were a succubus.

2. Keep the class from being ridiculously overpowered.

This is sort of a tightrope balancing act, because, as mentioned above, the monsters that really need this treatment the most are far too powerful for their supposed level, and so need to be watered down a bit (this is done by adding “dead levels” that don’t even add a Hit Dice to simulate a level adjustment, rather than by subtracting from the monster’s total abilities: you still get the whole package, you just have to wait longer for it). On the other hand, the Pathfinder Bestiary gives the green light for playing the monster as-is at its CR, which means that if you “water it down” too much, players are going to feel gypped. There are definitely classes (cough—succubus—cough) that came out a little more powerful than I’d like, but they all come out less powerful than using the monster straight from the Bestiary, and I don’t think any of them are likely to totally wreck a game.

3. Be fun and exciting to play.

This is a goal in all game design, and despite being listed third here, it’s definitely the most important. Since a large part of what the class does is already dictated by the monster’s existing abilities, this primarily comes into play when designing the “paragon” abilities for the remainder of the 20 levels, which we strive to make as flavorful and interesting as possible. The rest of the “fun” mostly comes from ensuring that the class is balanced, and that its abilities are spread out as smoothly as possible.

So, where do the problems arise? Why don’t we start by examining some the criticisms of the green hag class from Secrets of the Witch? You can find the review in question here, but I’m going to go straight to the highlights, at least as I understand them:

PCs should not have spell-like abilities, or at least, not at will.
The Strength damage that the green hag deals is a nuisance to track.
The class does not allow multi-classing until the player is a “full” green hag.
The hag class does not get spellcasting, nor witch hexes.
The hag class isn’t as modular as some other classes.

Wow. That’s quite a laundry list. So, let’s see what we can do to straighten this out. The first thing that I notice is that the first two abilities, and to a lesser extent the fourth, have to do with the content of the green hag stat-block, more than the class itself. As far as the spell-like abilities are concerned, there are a number, all of which would be available to a player that chose to use the Pathfinder Bestiary suggestion of just having the green hag character at its CR. Most of these spell-like abilities aren’t terribly impressive, however, and the one specifically called out was invisibility, which the green hag can cast at will at 8th level. Now, of course, it’s true that at that level, a ring of invisibility, which will do the same thing, will cost most of your treasure (20,000 gp out of 33,000 gp), but I think claims that the ability is irreconcilably broken and should never be allowed in a game due to its power are somewhat overstated.

Strengh damage falls largely into the same category. Yes, Strength damage can be a bit of a book-keeping headache, but it’s something that green hags have, and to cut it out would make the class less “green hag-y,” to my mind. The class starts getting the ability at 6th level, replacing a more benign (but sometimes more effective) one-turn -1 penalty to attack and damage. At this point it deals 1 point of Strength damage, and when it does get upgraded, it only ever does 2. Admittedly, the Bestiary green hag has a more direct Strength-draining attack that does its damage via dice, and that got included, and then later there’s potential to damage Dexterity or even Constitution, so, yeah, maybe it can get a little complicated. Something to bear in mind next time.

Honestly, though, I don’t think it will be that big of a deal. If you’re tracking Strength damage every combat, it’s going to quickly become second nature, and pretty soon you won’t even notice it. In fact, the major complaint the reviewer seemed to have was that the in-book discussion on handling the class in the game said that because NPCs and monsters tend not to survive their first encounter, the long-term nature of Strength damage would be less of an issue. He seemed to take this as an excuse for the amount of bookkeeping involved, but, in fact, bookkeeping wasn’t a major concern for me (as the plethora of different draining abilities indicate, it perhaps ought to have been). Rather, I was talking about game balance, where I think I make a good point: a green hag’s Strength damage isn’t any more broken than, say, a ray of enfeeblement.

As far as spellcasting and hexes go…green hags don’t have them. In the Bestiary, I mean. So, finding a way to add them into the class as a whole didn’t make much sense: it’d be like giving a succubus a heat aura: I can see why you might, but they don’t actually have them. It wouldn’t be a very true adaptation, and, besides, with the spellcasting at least, it would conflict with their existing spell-like abilities. The hexes I could probably have added on in the second half, true, but 9 levels of spellcasting? You’ve got to be kidding.

Of course, then one considers the complaint that it’s not as modular as other classes. Could I have made it more modular? Could I have made it so that the green hag presented in the Bestiary was but one of many possible outcomes?

As much as I hate to admit it, the answer to this is a resounding “yes.” I’m not sure I could have managed to give the class proper spellcasting, sure, but I could certainly have found a way for hags to “trade in” spell-like abilities or Strength drain for hexes, or, if nothing else, other, more interesting spell-like abilities.

It would have made the class vastly more complicated, and would have greatly expanded what “Races with Class” classes actually do. But, then, maybe I’ve been resting on the laurels of those classes for a little too long, gotten a bit too comfortable with them.

Ultimately, I don’t think it’s a failing of the class that it wasn’t more modular. I feel that it accomplished everything that it set out to do, and it did a fair job of it. Considering that it takes up 8 out of 41 pages (that’s about 20%) of a book that sells for $2.49, I’d say that it’s a perfectly acceptable class. Had I taken the time to flesh it out into a super-customizable mega-class, other parts of the book, such as new hexes for witches, or alternate familiar abilities, or the new coven spells and feats, might have had to be cut, and, frankly, the green hag class was probably the least important part of that book, mostly thrown in as an extra. So, from a practical perspective, I think that I did the right thing in this case.

As a quick aside, because I can see that I won’t have time to go into detail about the rakshasa class, the main complaint here (besides access to spell-like abilities, and lack of multi-classing) seemed to be that the book in question presented rules for playing as one of the original Bestiary rakshasas, and then provided monster stats for nine new kinds of rakshasa that were wildly different mechanically and really only connected flavorfully. The common trend of thinking seems to be that we should have somehow managed to create a single 20-level class that allowed a player to emulate any of the now 10 available rakshasas, despite having wildly different abilities and a CR range of 6 – 17. I’ll admit, in retrospect, that the book might have been more cohesive if it just focused on the new monsters, but I also wanted some support for the original rakshasa as well—after all, if the book is about rakshasas, someone who bought it only to find that there was nothing in it that dealt directly with the original rakshasa monster would be understandably disappointed.

Anyway, back to my point: from a pure design standpoint, the classes could have been more engaging and I intend to bear this in mind in the future. From a “getting published what we want to have published and giving you the best overall product,” and “can’t spend too much time or energy on any one book, or else we won’t be able to meet our deadlines” perspective, I don’t feel either class warranted the extra attention that is being called for by their detractors.

But, because this is an article about a journey, and not just a lecture, I’d really like to know what you think. Did you buy either of these products? Were you happy with the classes? Have you actually played either of them? How did that go? Would you have liked to have seen a more expanded and modular version? Would you have liked it enough to sacrifice other content in the book? Stumbled on this article by mistake and never even played Pathfinder but have an opinion anyway? Please shoot me an e-mail at ariggs@necromancers-online.com and let me know what you feel.

Have a great day, and thanks for reading.