On Unearthed Arcana: Waterborne Adventures, Part 3: a Game of Choice

I’ve spent two posts going over Unearthed Arcana: Waterborne Adventures, which gave me a lot of time to shout about what I like and don’t like about it. But I also had time to think about why I feel the way I do about each feature and why those features exist, and I came to a conclusion that a bit disappointing but not surprising,

Let me put it in graph form, because I am a huge nerd and I like pretty colors:

Building a character is about doing just that, building a character. The player is the architect and general contractor for the character they want, the game designers are the subcontractors, the individual features and rules are the workers, and I guess in this analogy the DM is the zoning board or something. The point is that the player is supposed to decide whether his or her minotaur is an arrogant pirate or a lascivious bard or a nebbish cook, not the designers. If I want a game where the designers built my character for me so I can shove him through an adventure, I’ll play Betrayal at House of the Hill.

It’s about having the freedom to create the character you want. It’s why I don’t like racial prerequisites, or hard-coded alignment, or in this case an option that lends itself to one and only one character archetype. We already have a certain level of restriction playing D&D, particularly 5E, at all. We accept that we’ll be using the classes the designers made, in a western European medieval fantasy, with low-to-medium magic, with Saturday morning cartoon alignment, etc. We don’t need any more boundaries, especially on content ostensibly intended to give us further options.

I ranted on this some time ago, specifically on the distinction between naming a specific archetype “defender” versus “knight”. I came to the conclusion that I liked “defender” better because it gave me more freedom to do what I want with it, but “knight” was easier for new players and I was confident in my ability to strip the name away and tweak the mechanics.

That can’t happen here, not to the degree I want. I can’t just use the mechanics for Heart of the Storm because it’s already just mechanics. The only change I can make is extrapolating it to other energy types, in which case it’s still only for sorcerers who want to deal a specific type of elemental damage. I can take the Krynn out of the minotaur, but its mechanics still only work for a strong character with natural weapons who charges and is good with boats and navigation. I can’t even think of a good character in One Piece for whom I could use the minotaur, and that is a series about strong characters, boats, and navigation. These features hurt players by telling them what their characters should do.

On the other hand, the swashbuckler rogues works for nimble rogues, dual-wielding rogues, charming rogues, tanking rogues, and any combination of the above. It does really want high Charisma, but having a bad Charisma isn’t devastating. Storm Guide can work in any class, which I can say about very few abilities. The Mariner fighting style applies to three classes and breathes new life into them by giving them far more build options and at-the-table, round-by-round options than they had before. All of these help players by giving them ways to play a variety of characters.

Really, all classes should be in the green section on the right of the above chart. All races should be at least yellow, green when the culture is stripped away and only the mechanics remain. Feats should be yellow at worst. Skills should be greenish-yellow. Archetypes, as intentionally narrow subclasses, are best green but can be as far as yellow as long as we have wiggle room to allow different kinds of characters. All the core bits of the system should give the players options, not take them away.

What should be red? Prestige classes. Maybe non-PC monsters and races. These sorts of things tell a story. A gray guard doesn’t need to be a general-use class once the serial numbers are filed off, because the serial numbers are the point of the class. The gray guard means something cultural, so when the players hear “the gray guard is looking for you” they know how to react. It’s not the same as “a goblin is looking for you”, or “a cleric is looking for you”, or even “a goblin cleric of Anubis is looking for you”, because that cleric could have any intentions. A gray guard has one intention, and that’s fine because it fits a specific role in the narrative you and the players want to tell.

When I was shorter, I liked playing with Legos because I could take them apart and put them together in new and interesting ways. I had a book with steps for taking blocks from other pieces and making something new and specific out of them, and I liked looking at those steps but I rarely made the pieces they described, in the same way I rarely made the “look what else you can do with these bricks” pieces on the back of the box. Rather, I took ideas from them and used them in my own pieces. I didn’t want somebody to tell me what my Legos should look like and what they should do. I wanted a toy that let me decide that for myself.

The point of a gaming system is not to tell us our story. It should give us the framework to tell our own, whether that’s about overcoming emotional baggage or changing the world or killing all the large things. The more a system facilitates player imagination and choice, the more fun it is and the longer it lasts. The more it restricts what we can do, the easier it is to leave it.

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