How It’s Done…
This is the first in a series of behind the scenes looks into the TTRPG game design and development process, specifically the creation of a brand new character class for an established game.
This summer I had the awesome opportunity to be a mentor for a writer/dm/homebrewer. During our initial meet and greet and based on his interests and experience we decided his summer project would be a new character class for D&D5e 2014.
Where class creation is concerned, while I would typically recommend starting with a subclass of an existing established class (1 to become familiar with the structure of class design, and 2 to make the work more manageable), we also wanted to step up the challenge a little bit, and based on his prior work I felt he was more than ready for the task.
I too wanted the challenge of creating class creation workshop content as a baseline for use in a course I hope to conduct/publish/share in the future. Having developed 3 full classes for Level Up A5E as a freelance designer (Ranger, Psion, and Star Knight), not to mention a slew of archetypes/subclasses for existing classes, I felt confident I could provide valuable feedback and guidance as a mentor.
That said, between real life vacations, work, and other activities and time commitments, I knew developing a publishable character class (his project) and a complete instructional course (my project) from scratch in three months time would be a stretch. In the end, we acknowledged that perhaps a 5-level playtest packet would be a more realistic and manageable goal for him, and that for me, the workshop content would just be an ongoing project of mine for a little while.
Fast forward to our last meetup of summer, and I have a solid course outline with about 50% of the lessons fleshed out, while he has a 5-level draft of the class just a few steps short of being playtest-ready. I’d say a very successful outcome on both counts.
But somewhere along the line the creative bug wormed its way into my brain and now I’m halfway through my own new character class. I figure if I’m going to someday market my course to other students, I better make sure it works.
I figure this will take more than a single blog article to document, and while I’m not gonna just cut and paste the course into my blog, I hope to give enough here that folks are 1) inspired to “do the thing” and homebrew their own class or subclass/archetype, and 2) maybe even take my course one day (when it becomes available ;) ). So consider this a live case study. I’ll imagine I’m documenting my results of taking someone else’s course, and then use what I learn along the way to complete and refine the course for public consumption.
Now, to get into the student mindset, I want to know why I would even be interested in taking a course or participate in workshop for creating a D&D character class. The simple answer is naturally: “I have this great idea for a class!!” The longer answer gets into Lesson 1.1 of the course: Ideation.
But before we dive in, let’s briefly take a look at the course outline:
Lesson 1: INTENTION (1–3 days)
Having a strong sense of idea identity and figuring out desired design outcomes is the beginning of turning ideas into reality. Ideation, inspiration, are important starting points, and knowing your destination ahead of time makes tough decisions simpler in the long run.
1.1 Ideation
1.2 Inspiration
1.3 Design Goals
1.4 Publishing Options
Lesson 2: PREPARATION (1-3 days)
Setting yourself up for success at the beginning and gathering the tools you need to accomplish your can help ensure continuous progress throughout the process and avoid downstream issues.
2.1 Organization
2.2 Tools and Resources
2.3 Design Bible
2.4 Marketing & Publication Strategy
Lesson 3: CREATION (2-3 weeks)
This is the meat of the project and often, though not necessarily, where the most time is spent. Ensuring the class has a clear niche to fill, a substantial power source, and unique subclass/archetype options is the key to this step.
3.1 Find the Gap
3.2 Core of Power
3.3 Features and Variants
3.4 Balancing Act
Lesson 4: MOTIVATION (ongoing)
Staying committed, consistent, and motivated can be hard when writing anything, especially after a few rounds of your work being critiqued. But the right mindset prevents constructive criticism from feeling too much like a negative feedback loop and helps build up a thick skin in case unhelpful or strongly opinionated remarks come your way.
4.1 Remember Your Why
4.2 Forget Your Ex
Lesson 5: ITERATION (1-2 weeks)
No man is an island, and that includes game designers. Peer reviews and playtests, edits and revisions are the hallmarks of a good iterative process.
5.1 Grammar and Spelling
5.2 Peer Review
5.3 Line Development
5.4 More Eyes
5.5 Playtest
Lesson 6: PRODUCTION (1-2 weeks)
Once you’re happy with your class and all the content you’ve written, it’s time to start packaging it all together into a solid layout, leveraging art assets, and thinking about getting the message out via marketing campaigns, word of mouth, social media, etc.
6.1 Production Flow
6.2 Deadlines and Drop Deadlines
6.3 Quality Check
6.4 Marketing Run Up
Lesson 7: PUBLICATION (1 day)
At last it’s time to upload your files and/or send them to the printer! Then sit back and wait nervously for someone to make the first purchase!
7.1 Self-publishing
7.2 A Note on Crowdfunding
7.3 Freelancing
Looking over the outline, it’s clear this isn’t just a how-to guide for homebrewing a character class. The summer mentoring program was intended to support the goal, not just of creating the class, but actually publishing it out into the wild as well. There’s something heady about seeing your name on a book that people can actually purchase…
That said, perhaps there’s an opportunity here to offer two—or even three—versions of the course: one for just homebrewing the content itself, one for publishing a release in the TTRPG space, and one for both. The thing is, I feel I’ve seen all kinds of existing guides out there about class creation and plenty of other things out there about self-publishing in general. But a single course that covers both in an interrelated way? Might be just the niche I need to be in.
One other note, the timelines next to each lesson are pretty much just made up. Estimates that in an ideal world some ideal writer with ideal circumstances could probably follow without issue. Of course we all know the real world is far from ideal. For now we’ll agree to simply compare my actual timelines with the stated timelines and leave it at that for now. Perhaps a future analysis of the lessons and recommended days elapsed for each is in order.
In any case, I’ve gotten distracted.
Back to the actual outline. As I write this, I’ve already tweaked some things and rearranged a few steps which should make following them (and documenting my progress with them) a little easier.
But the first step hasn’t changed. Ideation is the beginning of it all. If I (or someone else if I’m freelancing) didn’t have an idea in the first place there’d be no cause for me to seek guidance about how to make the idea a reality. So that’s where I’ll start. The actual lesson goes into a little bit about the benefits of outlines and word maps and such but I’ll skip to the assignment as I’m already familiar with those things: “Assignment: Carve out a few hours over the next few days to produce one or more ideation documents.”
So here’s the elevator pitch for my idea: A half caster, but for bard.
We already have a half casters for other full casters—Paladin/Herald for Cleric, Ranger (o5e) for Druid, and Artificer for Wizard, so why not Bard? OK, Warlock and Sorcerer too, but for right now I’m talking about Bard. And yeah I get the whole Divine/Nature/Arcane magic triad, and Wiz, Sorc, Lock, and Bard all sort of fall under Arcane, but IMO, there’s an argument that Performance Magic is its own thing.
Coming from prior editions of D&D, when I first saw that Bard was a full caster in 5e it honestly surprised and confused me. In fact, within the lore of my home campaign world, bards canonically come from a line of nomadic magic users who had to hide, suppress, and alter their use of magic under the guise of art so entertaining it was spellbinding.
But truthfully, art and performance is so magical in real life. It can evoke emotions and memories you thought you locked away long ago, it can make you laugh until you find it hard to breathe. It can sustain you when all hope is lost or crush your spirits when you least expect it. It can transport the past to the present, predict the future, and even connect the living with the dead.
But again I digress. We were talking about designing a character class by following the lessons of an instructional course and trying to complete the first assignment: producing an ideation artifact.
At this point I have to pause and make a confession. I’m actually already two days into the class creation process, my brainstorm jot list and outline took a few minutes to churn out, not a few hours, and I’m just now reviewing the coursework and going back to see if I missed anything, identifying whether I did anything out of order, or purposely skipped any steps and why. But I was also starting to get a little bogged down with the project, and thought perhaps if I went back and did things by the book, maybe I’d have a better time of it than just flying by the seat of my pants (which to be fair, isn’t a terrible way to get a lot written in a short amount of time, but which also comes with the downside of “well now what?” once the flurry of words starts slowing down).
So here we are. I have a jot list, and an outline (or what remains of an outline now that I’ve spent a few days fleshing some of it out, but I’m getting ahead of myself again). What I don’t have yet though is a mindmap. Now to be clear, the assignment only really requires me to create one ideation artifact, but as we are where we are, I think I’ll go ahead and take the time to put a mindmap together.
One thing about my writing habits is I do a lot of work and designing on my phone. It’s nearly always with me, doesn’t require me to boot up, sit down at a desk, or be at home. I can jot quick ideas, write thousands of words, find images for inspiration, do research, all on this tiny handheld device, and it’s amazing. Not to say I don’t enjoy every once in a while using my laptop or desktop for more screen real estate, side by side tabs and windows, etc. And I do love to take a pen or pencil to paper every so often to feel the tactile nature of actually writing or sketching things out in an analog rather than digital fashion. But the smartphone is a powerful tool and it only makes sense to use it to my advantage.
Case in point, I can spend a few minutes using a phone app to create my mindmap, take a screenshot, and add it to this article:
Now we can visually see the class concept taking shape, and though the details are vague (and there are still probably more questions than answers), this mindmap can serve as a frame upon which to begin (or in my case continue) building out the class.
Though there’s more to say, we’ve reached a good stopping point, and this article has come to its end. We’ll pick things up next time with the rest of Lesson 1 and work on from there.
