@MusicVideoGuy @icedquinn the way classes work is fucking awesome. it is meant for darker campaigns, but the people behind it have been working on "shadow of the weird wizard" for a while as well that will be more light hearted. insanity plays a large part in SotDL.

the creator i believe worked on d&d 5e but left because of creative differences, and just made his own thing instead.

one of their main problems was that there was that you don't roll for initiative, it's just the players that go and then the enemies, and they can even change what order they go in each round. i think they were worried i would exploit it in favor of the enemies, but nothing is stopping them from exploiting it in their favor either. i was going to try warming them up to the concept in our 5e campaign by giving one of the guys a magic item that would let him do that once per long rest, just rearrange the combat order as they saw fit, but the campaign/group fell apart right before that happened unfortunately.

@beardalaxy @MusicVideoGuy i prefer classless

whitehack is class based (sadly) although this amounts more to what ruleset you want for your toon. the only real hard one is you need to be a Wise to cast freeform magic (where you write a power domain, and announce an intention, and the GM tells you how much HP that will cost)

@beardalaxy @MusicVideoGuy wises are goofy because they also don't heal right (its supposed to stop you from cheesing the HP=Mana rule) and the designer notes they are the cast that gets homebrewed the most (usually adding a separate mana bar, and in 4E he added an option to treat mana costs as 'corruption' where you accumulate badness on a separate track and then have opportunities to expel it; kind of like Peril from WH40K psykers.)

@icedquinn @MusicVideoGuy classless is good too, but SotDL is a damn good compromise.

i actually made my zombie survival ttrpg system classless. you build up your own class. you start with all your skills being 0 and can increase/decrease any of them by 3, but you have to have a total sum of 0 with all your skills. then you can add positive traits and negative traits, but have to have an equal amount of both. each day you survive, you gain another skill point to assign. if your character dies, you lose 1d3 skill points for your next one.

thought that was a pretty good system, i actually really enjoyed making it and running it. only did it once though unfortunately :P

@beardalaxy @icedquinn When I saw that some actions cause corruption, I immediately thought something like that would tie consequences to actions better than D&D’s notorious arbitrarily enforced alignment system(DM preferences/prejudices) even in something claiming to be amoral. Ironic.