Flying Fists & Funhouse Dungeons

Sometimes, we get hung up on a certain paradigm or method, and it can be hard to break out of that way of thinking. For me, it's having D&D with classes and then subclasses or kits (2E style) for customization. Why have a Fighter, a Barbarian, Paladin and a Ranger all be pretty much the same class, but separate classes, when you could just have a Fighter with subclasses? 

Flying Swordsmen is this way, because I was cloning Dragon Fist. Dragon Fist was based on 2E, so went this route. If Chris Pramas were designing the game today, he might still go this route, since that's also what 5E does. 

When I made Chanbara, I did the same thing again. 

Working on Treasures, Serpents & Ruins, I've gone back and forth in my design. Completely separate classes. Core classes with subclasses. 

When I created my new Martial Artist class earlier this year, I made it with four subclasses, one that corresponds to each of the four basic D&D classes: the cleric-martial artist, the fighter-martial artist, the magic user-martial artist, and the thief-martial artist. This was to allow emulation of the basic classes of Flying Swordsmen within TSR. 

Two days ago, I started reworking that. Instead of one class with four subclasses, I rewrote it as two classes with martial arts. One, the Martial Artist, has more mundane powers, the other, the Xia, has more mystical powers and spellcasting. (Xia had been a spellcasting martial artist class in a previous version). This seems a bit better to balance, I think, because the Xia class should obviously take more XP to level up. It's a monk/magic-user hybrid (or monk/cleric hybrid?). I think I like this better than the previous four subclasses version. Also better than a previous version where I had martial arts subclasses for each of the four core classes, with very dissimilar powers/abilities to the core classes but very similar ones to each other.

Now I've got to decide if the Xia should use standard spell lists, or use a custom one from my previous version of the game. The custom list was small, and focused on spells that would more closely simulate powers you might find in a wuxia movie. 

Anyway, with this class setup, I can have weird martial artists wandering around in megadungeons and the wilderness looking for loot. 

As it stands right now, TSR-East Marches will have the following classes:

Cleric (Exorcist/Onmyoji, Shaman/Mudang, Warrior-Monk/Sohei)

Fighter (Knight/Hwarang, Vagabond/Ronin, Weapon Master/Kensei)

Magic-User (Geomancer/Shugenja, Scholar/Wushi, Soothsayer/SuanMin)

Thief (Gangster/Yakuza, Infiltrator/Ninja, Outlaw/Pantu)

Martial Artist

Xia

Dokkaebi (demi-human)

Koropokuru (demi-human)

Shenseng (demi-human, 4 varieties/subclasses)

Vanara (demi-human)

I think this setup will work OK. 10 classes (21 types of characters with subclasses). But now that I've broken out of the need to have subclasses for each base class, I've got a desire to simplify even more. 

For example, the Knight and Vagabond have fairly cosmetic differences. Maybe I just need a Fighter and a Kensei as 2 separate classes. The same could be said about the Onmyoji and Mudang, or the Geomancer and Wushi. For the Thief subclasses, they all have some distinctions, but the Ninja and Outlaw are more similar. Maybe I should get rid of those distinctions and let players just make the distinction by role play, as players have been doing for decades? 

And maybe I'm just way to fixated on creating cool classes for my games to tailor-make certain archetypes of the source material with game mechanics. I could go way overboard on individual classes, but I don't want to turn my house rules into something that looks like it was made by Siembieda (seriously, how does anyone choose a class in Ninjas & Superspies? So many of them have such small, fiddly differences!)

Well, enough navel gazing for this Christmas Eve. I'll likely move to simplify things even more over the next month or two. And then sometime next year, start tinkering to expand again. Maybe I should change the name of my houserules to Sisyphus. I keep rolling this rock up the hill over and over, and it probably doesn't matter in the end.

PS - My son and I saw the new Matrix movie yesterday. Expect a review of it soon.