Designing a Class: The Tactician (Patreon)

Hey folks! Matt here regaling you with tales from the Game Dev mines. We’ve left R&D behind and are now well and truly in production, we’ve hired two more full-time designers and a new Executive Producer, so the game is really getting done now!

R&D allowed us to prove out the basic concepts. Each class gets a Heroic Resource, that’s working great. There’s no attack roll (or rather, your attack roll IS your damage roll), that went through a lot of iterations that led to the Power Roll, but that’s working great. We cut Endurance as a stat because we realized we weren’t using it for anything, and between Might, Stamina, Forced Move Resistance, Number of Recoveries and Recovery Value, we already had everything we needed to differentiate various flavors of “hardy.” We tweaked everything constantly and you were there for it. Remember when we had Health AND Stamina?! 😀Remember SURGES?!

All through this period we built and used various Prototype Classes. We knew, ‘this isn’t the real Tactician,’ or Conduit or Fury, ‘but we think the real version will work sorta like this….’ There was no progression, you couldn’t level up, and often we’d overload the prototype with abilities we knew a 1st level hero wouldn’t have, but we wanted to make sure we could deliver on the fantasy of the class with cool mechanics. And that often meant building something like a 3rd-level version of the class.

We also had Prototype Character Creation. We started back in 2023 with just pregens, each a synthesis of an ancestry and a class. There were no choices back then, we just made an Elf Talent or a Dwarf Conduit with ‘stubbed in’ or temp versions of the different ancestral abilities. 

We needed these things to test the core rules but it meant we were also testing out the various ways we could implement these ancestries and classes. So, again, by the time we started on the real things, we weren’t starting from zero.

The last few months, James worked on Character Creation. Ancestry, Culture, Career, your Inciting Incident, then your Class and your Kit! We now have five real classes built out from 1st to 3rd level, complete with several subclasses each. Those have now been in testing for a while and we’re adding new options to each all the time.

We’ve got almost 90k words written just for the Heroes book! 178 pages in Google Docs! Does that sound like a lot to you? It does to me! 😀

We learned a LOT through this whole process and the game feels really good to us now so, armed with new designers and a new producer, it’s time to make classes FOR REAL.

The Tactician Meeting

We knew we wanted to start with the Tactician, it's our Warrior, or Fighter class and these are generally the most mundane and therefore the most boring classes in games that feature them. If we can make our version exciting and fun, we’ve really done something.

We only want to build out the first three levels for now. Let’s pick 5 classes (Tactician, Conduit, Shadow, Fury, Elementalist) and build their first levels, give each class “a few” subclasses, then we’ll take what we learn from that and expand those classes, and start building new ones. 

We sat down for our Tactician meeting, but as we talked we realized we didn’t have a good yardstick for “how much damage should the Tactician do? How tough should they be? Should they get a lot of movement abilities?” We had ideas! But we didn’t want to operate in a vacuum and spend the next few weeks constantly adjusting values as more classes come online and we realize “we gave the Tactician too much FOO,” or “too little BAR.”

We needed robust guidelines for what each class was good at and, by definition, what it was only OK at. So instead of designing the Tactician, we spend that day developing a Theory of Classes. Here’s the result.

“Stickiness,” by the way, is a term we use for the concept of “once I’m next to you, it is hard for you to get away.”

This chart is purely an aid for our own processes. These are not rules. I think there may be a tendency for some folks reading this to take this chart and then start grading the finished product on how close we got to these values, but that is not why we did this. We did it to help guide us when building out the initial version of each class. Each class has to live and die on its own merits and that’s going to mean the distinctions between them will blur. A low-DPS class might have a high-dps subclass, who knows? We discovered, for instance, that even though we thought each class ‘should’ have unique values on this chart, that the Talent and Elementalist all had the same ratings for everything.

That was interesting! So we talked about it and decided “that’s ok. They’re just two different ways of filling a similar niche, gameplay-wise. They are very different fantasies and they have very different mechanics.”

So that was Day One. We thought we were going to sit down and brainstorm the Tactician, but we spent the day building a Theory of Classes. No problem, we’ll do the Tactician tomorrow!

The Real Tactician Meeting

Well, that didn’t happen. 😀 ’Tomorrow’ became the day we realized we needed a map–a theory if you will, and maybe more than one–of Class Progression. How many abilities do you get at each level, and from how many options are you selecting those abilities? For instance, we know you get one of your two Signature Actions from your Kit, and the other from your Class. But is there only one signature action for each class? No! There’s a variety and you pick one!

Our game only has 10 levels (because we like the idea of players actually getting to max level) so this wasn’t an ENORMOUS amount of work, but it was work! Happily James had already mapped out something like this last year, so we had a good starting place. All we had to do was figure out “what’s changed since we originally wrote this down?”

By the end of the meeting we had a Theory of Progression (it’s more a hypothesis) and that was Day Two. SURELY the third day, we’d finally get to work on the Tactician?

Tactician Meeting Final_FinalFinal_09

Yes! We did! 😀After two days of vegetables we could finally have dessert. The design team (Me, James, and Djordi) plus Gertz and Lars sat in a discord call just thinking about who the Tactician is. What they are about. What their subclasses should be. It was a lot of fun! We had to do an enormous amount of work to get here (basically the entire last 16 months) but we are finally getting to the fun part of design: making for-real classes!

It’s worth talking about why Gertz & Larx are in these meetings. A few reasons. First, Gertz is MCDM’s executive producer. But there’s only really one project right now, so that makes him the MCDM RPG producer. And it’s James’ job as the Lead Designer to get the game done, so Gertz spends most of his time helping James by making sure tasks are being tracked and properly assigned and things that need to get done don’t slip through the cracks. So his presence is useful in every design meeting.

Lars is the art team’s producer, so he’s the one reminding us that there are art costs to some of the things we’re talking about and have we considered that? Both very useful people to have in a design meeting.

But also, they are both players. When the rest of the design team talk about the player experience, we’re summing over decades of play on both sides of the screen. When Gertz or Larx chime in, they’re usually bringing up something that directly affected them in a recent test, and this is super valuable! 

Anyway, Talk About The Tactician Meeting!

Oh sorry. Yes, yes! The Tactician meeting!

For the purposes of this Patreon post, I’m going to use Djordi’s Miro Board! You may be seeing a lot of the DMB in the weeks and months to come. 😀

I think it’s important to understand; Djordi uses Miro like I use excel. I don’t just do actual design in it, I think in spreadsheet cells. I use Excel to take notes, organize ideas, way before I sit down to do any real design.

Djordi uses Miro the same way. Sometimes he uses it for real, final design (or, near final as it has to be turn into words and paragraphs) but often he uses it as an Ideation Board, just collecting all the ideas we have, with visual references where appropriate, and sometimes he just uses it to keep notes in a meeting! 

We started by talking about what we thought we already knew about the Tactician. It’s our “Fighter” or “Warrior” class, but it’s also heavily inspired by the Warlord from 4th Edition. We don’t think those are two different classes in our game, we don’t really use roles the way 4E did. We talk about Defenders and Strikers and Leaders, but in a much broader sense. A lot of classes have bits of every role in them, just dialed in to different values.

So we know we want the Tactician to have a Mark (“Attack that one!”) that grants bonuses for allies who attack the marked enemy. This is one way the tactician can “conduct” the battle.

And we know we want the Tactician to have a Taunt (“Come at me, bro!”) that penalizes an enemy if they attack anyone but you. Ok so far so good.

We know we want the Tactician to grant allies extra attacks, and extra movement.

And we had a couple of existing ideas for subclasses. Djordi made these notes during the meeting.

I think that “RULE” note was something Djordi wrote down after we said we need 5 different powers we believe in for each proposed subclass, otherwise the idea wasn’t strong enough to support a subclass.

I think we called the Mark Specializer the Knight-commander and Taunt Specializer the Knight-protector, but actually I think we had a lot of different prospective names for potential Tactician subclasses. The Troubadour-warrior, the Warmaster. And we often thought; if there’s an Archer archetype in this game, it’s probably a Tactician subclass.

The fantasy of the Weaponmaster seemed strong to us; the one who bristles with weapons, the one who, when the guards stop the party and say “leave your weapons here” it takes them 10 minutes to disgorge all their blades. But we weren’t clear on what that meant in our game.

After some brainstorming Djordi pointed out that “Mark Specializer” and “Taunt Specializer” aren’t really archetypes, they’re mechanics. That is true! So we zoomed the camera out and talked about the different fantasies of being a Tactician. This is where we ended up. I apologize if this is hard to read, it wasn't really laid out for a patreon post.

So! Three archetypes, which correspond to subclasses. The “Lead From The Front” Tactician who is always at the front–the vanguard–of the battle. The image there is Aragorn leading the Army of the Dead. The “Lead From The Rear” tactician who we think of as “conducting” the battle like a maestro. Hence “mastermind.” The GIF there is from the A-team, a really bad TV show from the 80s. 😀

And then the last archetype, the guerilla warrior, down-and-dirty trickster commander. The Commando Commander! Which we named the Insurgent. The icon there is photo ref I grabbed…I dunno, fifteen years ago? For my PC hero in Djordi’s 4E, Suicide Squad campaign, THE CONDEMNED. He was a Warlord PC that I switched to an Assassin a couple of sessions in and he served as an example. But the soldiers of the Black Company would also be a good reference here.

Once we had these high-level archetypes we could start talking about what abilities might make each Tactician feel like their archetype when you play them. Those are the green post-its below each archetype.

We quickly hit on the idea that the Mastermind archetype was probably also the Archer archetype. Makes sense, right? The Lead From The Rear tactician directs the battle from the rear by firing arrows at those enemies they want the team to focus on.

James suggested that there might not be a Weaponmaster tactician, they’re all weaponmasters. So instead of making one subclass where we constantly have to come up with new weapon-based abilities, which we knew would be tough because our game isn’t about weapons the way D20 fantasy was in the 1970s, all Tacticians have an ability that reinforces the “weaponmaster” fantasy.

We had long talked about letting the weaponmaster benefit from two kits, and now we realized ALL tacticians should do that! 

And they do! We’ve already prototyped that and sent it to testers and it seems to be working fine. The basic rule is; you gain the benefits of both kits, unless they grant bonuses to the same stat, in which case you get whichever bonus is greater. And you get both of their signature actions! As a reminder, your hero gains one signature action chosen from their class, and one from their kit. So Tacticians start with three signature actions which is super good! We are well on our way to making Tacticians bad-ass.

Ability Brainstorm

Once we had these three archetypes laid out, we felt really good. We thought these were strong fantasies, which would make successful subclasses, so it was time for the ability brainstorm part of the meeting.

This is the fun part, maybe the most fun part of working on the game, where all the designers sit around literally just coming up with every cool ability we can think of that might be appropriate for this class. We don’t censor ourselves, we just dump all the ideas in a giant bucket. Usually we know, before we do this, who in the meeting will be implementing the prototype. So the goal is to load up the list until we run out of ideas, and then turn to that designer, in this case Djordi, and say “do you feel good about this?”

In other words, have we armed you with so many cool ideas, you feel like getting the prototype done will be fun? Are you excited to get started? 

Here’s a sample of that brainstorm list.

Among my favorites are “I don’t get Tier One Results” and “I don’t get Tier Two Results either.” Meaning, when you make a power roll? The worst you can get is an 11. Then, later, you never roll. You just always get the Tier Three (i.e. the best) result. These would not be powers you get until later in your career, probably not in the first three levels. But it definitely furthers the fantasy of the professional warrior. Randomness is something that happens to people who are insufficiently prepared. 😀

These abilities were part of the original idea for the Tactician back in 2022 when I thought it was going to be our next 5E class. The idea that “I cannot miss” and then later “I don’t even roll, I always crit” seemed to me a very powerful way to help the melee class keep pace with the casters. And I was pretty sure we could math it out to keep it balanced. 

But it’s better for our game, I think. People would freak out at an ability like that in D20 Fantasy, but in this game I think it’s not only cool, people will read it and think “Of course!”

The Prototype

That’s it folks! That’s how we design a class from the bottom up. At this point, nothing in this process should surprise you. We start by focusing on the fantasy. What is the fantasy of the tactician? Then we try to imagine at least three archetypes that would make good subclasses.

We think about what the Tactician is good and bad at compared to other classes, then we brainstorm a ton of cool abilities.

Finally, a designer takes all this and builds a prototype! Then…we test!

For our own internal tests, Lars made pre-made heroes for everyone just to save us time. I thought about posting the actual Tactician rules (levels 1-3) but it was EIGHT pages long and this post is already long enough. Besides, you’ll get to make characters on your own pretty soon. 😀

But here’s a copy of the most recent pregen we’ve been using! Hopefully you can see how the process turned into something real.

There’s a third page but it’s all your skills and ancestry and background stuff so I will spare you more reading.

That’s it folks! That’s how we make a class. We can do this now because we know how our game works. The rules become like a language. We figure out what we want to say (“what is the Tactician about? What kinds of things can it do?”) and now that the rules are far enough along, we know how to “say” those things in our game.

Maybe this will help you make your own custom classes once the game is out!