In the first part we established that I'm not really behind adding new classes for archetypes that you could already tease out of existing classes. A class is a category, a group of different types of characters, not a character's entire identity. Some people seem to get too specific with it just because they're either looking for something to add or trying to make a particular character special. That's fine - we all like creating things, we all like more. These things don't always fit into the game I'm trying to run, though.
So let's ask the question of each of these classes: what does this bring to the table? I'm not just asking what character options the class provides, but how the class changes the game. How does it change the setting? The focus of gameplay? What is the total effect of adding a new class?
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Barbarian
I'm starting with the one that had the most tenuous appeal to me. It feels like a missing niche, but not by much. I think the best thing this class brings to the game is exactly that: what it brings to the game. Its appeal to me is mostly mechanical in nature. I'm basing this on the Barbarian's stereotypical role in RPGs and the popular DCC homebrews available: big Hit Dice, rage, and a focus on unarmored melee combat.
This makes combat the Barbarian’s obvious specialization, potentially stepping on the Warrior’s toes. This wouldn’t bother me so much if it were a racial class, but as an additional human class it means combat-focused players now have to pick, “Am I a Warrior or Barbarian?”. Every player who wants to play a fighting human will be presented with this dichotomy. This is fine I guess, but it creates a weird dynamic doesn’t it? It makes it seem like the wide world of fighting is half-barbarian, half-every-other-kind-of-fighter. “Are you a Barbarian or not?” isn’t the first question I’d ask when someone tells me they want to play with a combat focus.
It’s commonly given a larger Hit Die than the Warrior (the existence of a d14 and d16 allow this without being too ridiculous) and some kind of bonus when not wearing heavy armor, to encourage unarmored combat. This allows them to take more hits, but also makes them take more hits because they have a lower DC. I haven't actually done any of the math, but ideally I think it should even out with Warriors surviving better against lower attack bonuses and Barbarians surviving better against higher attack bonuses. That’s kind of an interesting dynamic if you have one of each in the party. Alternately, the unarmored combat rules in DCC Lankhmar encourage unarmored combat but using that along with larger Hit Dice might just make Barbarians straight up better than Warriors.
I know it isn’t about balance, but when you are asking someone to choose one or the other, people will choose the better option and suddenly OOPS! All Barbarians!
Rage appears to be a controversial mechanic. I can’t quite place why. The best I can come up with is that many old-school gamers simply don’t like it. That’s fine, we’re all free to pick and choose what sort of game we play. Maybe it just hasn't been executed well in any edition of That Other RPG. However, there is an appeal to the fantasy of a character who loses control to some primal force and becomes unstoppably ferocious. If that fantasy is all a player is looking for, I wouldn’t be opposed to allowing Mighty Deeds which give boosts to support it, maybe offset with some longer-lasting downside if the Deeds are notably stronger than the usual standard. The downside needs to really matter, otherwise raging just becomes better than standard Deeds.
If that isn’t enough, we’re looking at giving them something superhuman. Now we need to justify that within the world. This is my real sticking point with adding a Barbarian class. It makes sense in a world where people regularly do draw power from a primal spirit or from the inner self, but to make that an entire class? For it to simply be one of the available options for what a character can be? It seems to imply that this is an inherent feature of humanity in the world, as much as combat, skill, magic, and divinity are. This only makes sense in some worlds - I'm not sure that the implied setting of DCC is that world. I do think we can make something very similar work in a more DCC-friendly way, though.
Patron Bond. Hear me out.
The Bear Clan are a tribe of wild warriors who believe the strong should rule. The greatest among them are granted their strength by the Great Bear Spirit. Tribesmen and tribeswomen destined to be warriors or leaders undergo a coming-of-age ritual in which the shaman binds them to the Great Bear Spirit. In times of dire need, they call upon the Spirit to grant them strength, heightened senses, or a fearsome roar. Spilling blood for the Spirit can enhance their call.
This sounds like a mostly-typical fantasy Barbarian, but it also sounds a lot like a Warrior who has had a shaman cast Patron Bond on them, granting them Invoke Patron (Great Bear Spirit). The rules aren't clear on what Patron Bond does to a non-Wizard, but they do explicitly say that it can happen. I think it's fair to rule that the bonded individual can now invoke, and that means you can grant a set of primal powers in the form of a spell table.
(EDIT: Reddit user RithKingWill actually made a demipatron for this, here)
If you’re creating a world where Barbarians are everywhere, maybe it makes sense for them to have their own class, separate from Warrior. Hell, maybe even replace Warrior if civilization is largely tribal and it’s a low-tech world. I think it only makes sense to do that if there are lots of Barbarians running around though, or they are distinctly not Warriors somehow. If you have one player who wants to play this archetype, or even want to build a society of Barbarians, DCC actually gives you plenty to work with if you want to bend it to your whims (and you should) rather than give them their own special unique class.
Bard
What even is a Bard, anyway? It’s generally agreed upon that the RPG Bard doesn’t have to be musical in nature, though it’s expected that she can be. There’s usually magic involved, but it’s probably garage magic in the same way this character is probably a garage musician: it’s improvisational and self-taught but that doesn’t mean it isn’t awesome. Finally, and maybe most importantly, the Bard is a support class whose abilities mostly revolve around being able to manipulate other people - whether that be inspiring, goading, placating, or simply distracting. This along with them being modeled after performers means they’re naturally the face of the party, too.
The general support role isn’t really a niche that is covered in DCC, which has opted to make each class specialized rather than have any class be generalized. Arguably, each class can perform supporting roles - most notably the Halfling being a Luck Battery - but none of them are a dedicated support role. Some people really do particularly like playing the support role, though there’s something to be said for only having classes where each individual has moments to shine instead of a single character who only ever gets to shine through others. Someone might end up stuck in that position, especially if the group feels like they "need" someone in that role.
There’s no class intended to be the face either. Most of that stuff can be roleplayed out and even when you do require a roll, you’ll just use whoever has the best Personality anyway. You don’t need a class for that. However, when you do have a class for that, there is a form of degenerate play that can arise when the Bard player is the player who wants to be the star of the show. This is of course more of a problem with the player than the game, but the archetype that plays into this does exist within the stereotypical Bard, so I think it's worth keeping in mind.
Being able to cast musically is not so far outside the milieu of DCC's implied setting. I don't think it's explicitly mentioned anywhere in the core book, but chants, incantations, and casting via reading are. If magic is possible through oration, magic via precisely tuned and expertly played instruments doesn't seem far-fetched at all. Something about the vibrations of the universe, that sort of nonsense. Honestly, the hard part here now becomes explaining how music isn't more magical.
Now we run into a similar yet opposite problem to the Barbarian one. Presumably, Bards actually are everywhere. Entertainers and performers are ubiquitous and can be found in all societies. Are they all magical? Is music dangerous because of this? The easiest way to explain this away is that musical magic is incredibly particular and not just any music will do. There's something exceptional involved, it may require outside influence and maybe even only one individual can do it. Perhaps you need to take on a musical Patron.
Music being dangerous sounds awesome, though it has big implications for the world. I can picture villages who ban music and angry mobs driving off wandering minstrels.
Because magic's individual (read: Mercurial) nature, you don't need to change anything about the setting to have just one caster who can do magic musically. A whole class of them though? That starts to run into the issue I had with the Illusionist, and mirrors the issue with Barbarians: a caster now asks themselves “Am I a Wizard or a Bard?”.
That works fine in something like That Popular RPG where the Wizards do magic as a science and the Bards do magic as an art (plus there's at least 2 other kinds of arcane caster), but here in DCC it seems odd to separate that when all magic is an art rather than a science, and Warlocks and Sorcerers are already in the same category as Wizards. Why wouldn't Bards be, too? They just happened to find their incantations in song, their gestures in dance, and their summoned energies are found in harmonics and rhythms.
It looks to me like another situation where we can create the fantasy we want within the existing framework rather than create an awkward class division, unless we specifically want the support role to have a dedicated class. If that's something you feel your game needs, the Bard might be for you.
Ranger
These classes have been presented in alphabetical order, but incidentally that leaves the best for last. There's plenty of argument to be had about what a Ranger even is, but we won't be doing that today. The only thing we need to know is he does stuff outside good.
This is a niche that doesn't really exist within core DCC - the best you can get is a woodcutter, navigator or similar who are skilled through their occupation, but a simple d20 roll on outdoorsy activities hardly fulfills the Ranger fantasy, unless your idea of a Ranger is a particularly accomplished medieval boy scout.
The Ranger classes available in various zines, forum posts and blogs all seem to be trying to achieve the same few things. Most of them do it almost exactly the same way - I don't think through copying each other, but rather by using the same source materials and inspirations. You probably know exactly which two characters I'm thinking of if you've consumed any fantasy media ever.
That's right, Will and Halt from the Ranger's Apprentice series.
I'm kidding, it's Aragorn and Legolas of course. In that order.
Most of the classes available give the players a choice between archery Deeds and the Halfling two-weapon-fighting ability. Frankly I find this bizarre. I get where it comes from but I don't see why we are hanging on to it so strongly that every homebrew Ranger does it. No other class in DCC gets an explicit choice between two permanent class abilities at level 1 - I'm not saying you can't do that, it just seems weirdly inconsistent as a one-off thing just for Rangers. It's like none of them wanted to commit to one specific vision, instead asking players to pick between the two.
What's weirder is that even if you only gave them a bonus to archery and no choice, a high Agility Ranger can still do both! It's purely an option for a low Agility Ranger to compensate by being almost-as-good at half the things.
But the real meat-and-potatoes of the class is skills. Rangers get a similar treatment to Thieves in the form of a bunch of defined skills and bonuses depending on level. They have favoured terrain(s) and enemy type(s), to which their bonuses are applied. This lets you carve out a specialty for your Ranger. They might not be able to disarm a trap in a dungeon, but shooting a goblin in a forest while hiding in a tree they climbed? They're good at something, and they're really good at it.
Among these skills are usually Navigate and some sort of Forage, Hunt, or Bushcraft to do while traveling. Medicinal healing (as opposed to magical) is often provided. The overarching goal of these seems to be to facilitate and encourage hexcrawling or other overland exploration, and I think that's the archetype I have personally been missing.
To be fair, this likely isn't an oversight. DCC allows any kind of travel or exploration but doesn't do much to support it. We're supposed to figure that out ourselves (or just skip it).
The way I look at it is Thieves are experts at dealing with man-made problems. Traps, locks... thievery. In a dungeon or a city you want a Thief. In the jungles, mountains, or even the rifts between worlds, you want the local Ranger. It's a nice little dichotomy, like the Wizard and Cleric specializing in totally different magicks. And similarly to Cleric’s deities, the Judge needs to do a little work to make sure that the Ranger’s favoured terrains and enemies are fleshed out in the world.
Like the core four classes, it is its own entire domain of specialty. It's one that isn't covered by any of the core classes. It's one that many of us consider a core part of the game. For some, it's as core to the game as combat or magic - both of which have their own classes.
Adding the Ranger doesn't affect the overall milieu as drastically as other class additions might, making it easy to slip in along with the others. Honestly, you'd almost have to assume this character archetype exists in any world with wild environments anyway. Why can't a player be one?
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All three of these classes have their place in a game, but probably not all games. I don’t think I will make the Bard or Barbarian playable in my games any time soon. The Ranger, however, seems like it’ll fit in very well as a fifth class. I have been running a campaign including the Ranger class for a while now and this has been the process I went through to get there.
The Ranger has its own domain of specialty and that domain is something I want to facilitate and encourage in my games. If I were to run a megadungeon campaign, or an adventure path with very little overland exploration or travel involved, I’d probably consider dropping it and limiting the choices back to the core four again. For now, since overland exploration is a strong focus for me, it’s basically going to be a mainstay. As for exactly which version of the Ranger I use, well, that's a topic for another post.
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