Let's open our conversation for "Beyond the Torchlight" by walking through some of the design concepts that I am using as my basis for this project. I have not designed an RPG system before, but as with any project I believe you have to start out answering the question, "What problem am I trying to solve"?
The problems I am trying to solve stem largely from my time playing D&D 5e. It is after all the most popular play system, and both of the groups that I DM for prefer it over other systems.
After now playing the same system for almost ten years and having to manage the various skills and builds across dozens of books, I have found that D&D puts an unreasonable burden upon the DM to try and run a game with any sort of balance. D&D by its nature tends to lean into this concept of the "optimal build" and we have all seen the Reddit or forum posts with people asking how to build their next character. While that is fine, it tends to be a bit of an exhausting exercise. It also presents an inherent imbalance at the play table in two specific areas:
- It creates an unreasonable unbalance between the players and the DM. If you have both experienced and unexperienced players at the table, you will inevitably have a situation where the unexperienced players feel frustration because they are not "effective". Worse, they will not understand why they aren't effective.
- The optimization mindset also tends to reward combat focused character creation. There are entire feats or classes in D&D that don't get used because they are not "optimal", and you are once again left with an imbalance in the gameplay. Generally I feel that combat and roleplay should be equally represented in a TTRPG.
So the starting point for this design concept is to eliminate classes and races in the system. Players can choose to play as a dwarf, an alien, a cowboy gunslinger, or any other race they can imagine, but those races and classes do not provide any distinction over another.
The design goal is to tell your character's story through the campaign and not have the story of your character brought to the campaign. The adventures, gear, scars and stories made at the table will be what ultimately differentiates your character from another player's.
Now, there is some importance to be placed on where your character came from. They aren't nameless blank slates. Backgrounds are important and we are playing an RPG after all. We do need to create a character, and there should be tools in place to allow players to develop the character. Those character creation tools will ultimately help to define a character and their roll within the town that is created. That creation process will also provide guidance for the player on how their character may act in certain situations or determine what sort of skills they have available to them. The goal though is to have that background matter more in adventuring and social situations and less in combat.
This system will be designed to encourage a "West Marches" style of play and your character's background will be influential in establishing your "non-adventuring" life inside the town. Your character for example could be a blacksmith, a baker, a cleric, or anything else that may be found within the functioning world of a town.
The classless system doesn't by itself solve any of the problems that I have with various RPG systems, but I do think it does avoid creating some problems from the outset, namely the "optimal build". I am hoping that by removing classes and races the players can have a narrative thread to start their character not from "who their character was", but rather on "who their character will become".