If you’re walking in on the middle of this series, there’s an index here.

This is a big task and one that I won’t fully flesh out in this post, but rather scratch out the principles. Just like proficiencies, I’ll get to the actual lists later. I’ll start with commonalities:

• No hit dice increase after 9th level, instead gaining individual hit points.
• Paladins and Rangers get spells at 9th Level, Wizards, Priests and Bards from 1st Level.
• Thieves gain followers at 10th level if they build a secret hideout, Rangers get followers at 10th level but don’t need a stronghold, Priests at 8th and can still build a stronghold from 9th level regardless of if they build a temple, Fighters at 9th Level if they have a stronghold. Bards can build a stronghold and attract followers from 9th level. Wizards and Paladins specifically don’t get benefits from a stronghold, or followers.
• There’s a wide variety in terms of class ability, and abilities are not considered equal. Spell-like abilities are clearly more valuable, though, and proficiency-like abilities (rogue skills for example) are not considered very valuable. On average, though, classes have 2 downsides and 5 upsides, which is something we can shoot for in developing these out.
• HD appears to have been chosen solely for a wide selection of polyhedral dice use. There’s no discernible reason why bards, priests and warriors are all styled as able fighters but have d6,d8 and d10 respectively. I feel like HD should reflect whether your priest or bard is a warrior, not the class itself.
• Spell progressions are unique across classes, but somewhat arbitrarily, with priests capping at 7th and wizards with no caps.
• Racial and ability score restrictions are throughout and seem arbitrary and silly.

So, what can I pull from this:

Advancements are irreversible choices, made at each level, chosen from a class picklist, consisting:

• Proficiency slots
• Proficiency-like abilities that balance with spells in some way
• Spells with downsides to balance with proficiency-like abilities
• HD size increase
• HD number increase

And at 9th level for all classes:

• Attract followers
• Begin building a stronghold
• No more new HD
• Maybe new proficiencies

Picklists are interesting, and limiting in a way that eliminates the need for downside traits. If we say you simply pick three at first level, or even that you get these two at first level and pick a third, we can do away with downsides.

But downsides are well established in Second Edition design. And I like downsides, just not as sticks, but as carrots. I wonder if these downsides can be folded into the alignment or ethos system, and perhaps incorporated into experience, to maintain this aspect, but also build up the parallel systems of alignment and ethos in terms of importance. If that is the case, I’ll set this aside for later.

I’m not sure I want to nut out the class details until I’m sure this sketch makes sense in the entire framework. So, I think next I’l look at heritages. This has been a part of the Advanced Fantasy Dungeon Series! Let me know your thoughts on this approach, whether I’ve overlooked anything glaring, or anything of the sort!

Idle Cartulary

8th April 2022