Hello, and welcome to a new weekly post series of mine. This series will mostly be talking about game design, but a lot of what I plan to talk about will also be applicable to mother forms of media, like world building. I’ll be making game design posts on all types of game design, but you will likely see me talk most about tabletop RPGs most, since those are the games I find most interesting. But enough of that, onto the post!

We all know how the saying goes, “A jack of a trades, but a master of none”. However, I feel that many game designers took that a little too literally. Many classes in RPGs that characters who have many different features should be weaker than those who specialize. For example, the Red Mage class from the “Final Fantasy” series usually is a very fancy looking man with a rapier, white magic, and black magic. Unfortunately for him, he cannot cast any of the higher level spells that white mages and black mages can, and is not nearly as competent in melee as the Fighter or Blackbelt. Another example would be the Mystic Theurge prestige class from Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, who can cast both divine and arcane spells, but does not reach 9th level casting in either.

“Seems fair enough, right? They’re giving up some power for variety.” you might say, but that is the problem. They give up power from later in the game for power in the early game, or in some cases are always behind in power because they get their abilities later than other classes. Many games will let you give up numbers (the amount of damage, healing, ect) for options(having the ability to do damage, healing, ect.) or options for numbers, and I think this poses a huge problem. When you give up options for numbers, you’ll have more damage, or healing, or something else than what the game was balanced around for that level(usually), but you’ll also become bored with the game a lot faster because you’ve specialized into only doing one thing. When you give up numbers for options, you will be doing less damage, or healing, or something else than what was designed for the game, or the variety you receive from having the mixture is so high that it makes you too powerful. It’s a very trick balancing act.

To get it to the point where the variety have from those options is equal in power to the amount direct numbers that you have without is nearly impossible and will also usually result in “Slow but interesting” versus “Fast but boring” gameplay. So I am going to show two options that I think are a better way of balancing the Jack of All Trades class. The first way is with utility. By having a mix of features, the class gains a whole lot of utility, whether it be unlocking chests or buffing allies. An example of this kind of Jack of All Trades would be the Bard class from Dungeons and Dragons 3.5. The other option, would be to have options from multiple fields, but have less options than someone specialized in a field. An example of that would be my Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 homebrew Spellblade class, which is limited by the amount of schools of spells thy can know, but are also competent at fighting in melee. Finally, adding unique abilities to the class rather than just splicing two classes together will also help to keep the class balanced. Examples of this would be the Bard’s “Inspire” abilities, and the Spellsword’s “Touch of Steel” ability.

This concludes this issue of “Knowledge (Design) Check”. I hope you have enjoyed. Feel free to comment if you have any questions, suggestions, or if you would like to continue discussion of this week’s topic. If you want to comment but don’t know what to say, I put a weekly comment prompt right here for inspiration.

This week’s comment prompt:

I said in this week’s issue that it was incredibly hard to balance numbers and options. Can you think of one game that does this successfully? How did they do it? Did it fall into the “Slow but interesting” versus “Fast but boring” trap?