The Broken Hourglass Interview
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Q: For those who prefer classes you promise class-templates. The usual questions: what are those, why, how many, how diverse?
A: I'll start with the "why" first. Free point buy, which our ruleset is originally based on, can be a wonderful thing for many people. But it is not appealing for people who do not enjoy or might feel intimidated by learning rule systems. So for those people, we offer advancement templates so that if they know that they would like to focus on "being an archer" or "being a fire mage who can also fight with a sword" they can simply set that button and know that their stats will be boosted appropriately, rather than obsessing over how to spend each and every point. Particularly because health is a point-buy stat and not automatically granted by experience progression as is common in many other popular RPG and CRPG systems, the templates will enable us to suggest "appropriate" health advancement for people who otherwise might forget or obsess over the decision.
Free point buy is also not appropriate for joinable NPCs. These people have their own careers and their own opinions about the best use of their talents and how they would like to advance those talents, and I believe that handing over completely free point buy to the player/player character isn't an appropriate storytelling move where NPCs are concerned. Yes, we do concede some control to the player at the screen and the player character already, but I don't think advancement is an area where the NPCs should give up carte blanche. Instead, each NPC will have a list of paths they "approve of" and it will be up to the player to select which path they will go down. An NPC will never offer just one choice. More importantly, some NPCs will let you "unlock" paths as your words and/or actions convince them that they should consider broadening their horizons, which we believe offers extra roleplaying incentive and reward.
It's important to note that level paths will still leave some minority percentage of the points available for free spending, which allows and encourages some degree of customization for both the PC and NPCs (lest the game become a "teleological sandbox"), but it still preserves the majority of the ease-of-use for people who are not "rules fans", as well as preserving credibility for the NPCs' own personal preferences. As players become more comfortable with these decisions they may decide to switch their PC to straight point-buy in the middle of the game.
As for how many and how diverse, the complete list of paths hasn't been finalized yet. We will have to do some soul-searching and considering usability before locking that down since throwing 30 paths up on the screen could just shift the intimidation we hope to avoid to another screen.
