Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Dodgy DM design diary for Oz in Ashes. I am a dodgy DM in many ways, and right now I am working on a tabletop RPG about a post-magical apocalyptic version of Oz, explored by adventurers from our world circa 1900.
Last time we talked about base ability scores. This time, we are tackling a massive question: is this game going to have formal character classes like you would find in Dungeons & Dragons?
For a class-based game, a class creates an immediate sense of what that character’s job is in a party. In a classic four-character adventuring group, everybody has a spot, everybody has a role, and certain players naturally gravitate towards certain roles. That is a beautiful thing.
But it is also a deeply restrictive thing.
The Menu of Limitations
I think a lot of people experience the class chassis as a fallback limitation rather than a platform for their imagination. It creates a menu of options. If you’re a fighter, you fight. If you’re a cleric, you do cleric stuff. If you’re a wizard, you cast spells to solve problems. Everybody does a little bit of everything else along the way, but for the most part, you are boxed into a limited set of options.
A class-based system also invites leveling, which creates a very fixed, structural staircase for your character’s advancement. Every level you get a new power, or a better spell. Your burning hands turns into a fireball, and your fireball turns into, I’m gonna burn your city down, you filthy bastard.
I’m not gonna lie, there have been some very long, very dark periods of my life where I was a freak for character optimization. I would be up at 3:00 in the morning doing elaborate spreadsheets to figure out how I could get a 3.5e monk to actually survive to level 10.
That quest to gain another level sometimes drives decision-making that is completely counter to what a real person would do when confronted with actual danger. It feels inorganic, overly structured, and incredibly gamey. It messes with the verisimilitude of the world. And sometimes, you skew into a system where the different classes don’t line up in power, and you spend six sessions feeling utterly useless compared to the player sitting next to you.
Enter the Profession
Because Oz in Ashes unfolds around 1900, the strictness of traditional fantasy classes just doesn’t fit. I’m not imagining a group of people responding to an ad in a tavern that says “Fighters and Barbarians wanted for Quest A.”
I’m imagining a system where the players are professionals or mercenaries recruited by an organization to go out into this twisted new world. If you were a person of that nature circa 1900, you wouldn’t have a class. You would be recruited for a set of skills. And to me, that indicates a profession.
Now, I do enjoy games like Into the Odd that defy class systems entirely and just send you out into the world as regular people struggling to survive. But I think most of us, when designing a character, want a little bit of flavor to indicate what sort of archetype we are playing.
What I’m trying to design with a profession system is a platform from which you begin your adventure. It is a starting point rather than a tunnel that just keeps taking you higher and higher. You’re not climbing stairs. You’re moving in a smooth arc, getting better at your profession but also getting better at everything else that adventuring requires.
Universal Competence, Specific Expertise
Given the nature of the situation (adventuring in an alien, broken wasteland where the physics of reality don’t always make sense), it is going to be all hands on deck for these Interlopers.
I want everyone to be able to contribute to combat because there will be plenty of it. We are going to separate your ability to fight with a weapon from your ability scores. If you get hired for this gig, you are going to be able to fight at least a little bit with your starting weapon. Nothing will prevent you from spending resources to learn a different one. That also means everyone is going to know some basic first aid. Everyone can apply a bandage or tie a tourniquet.
I often think about the early seasons of The Walking Dead. You have the nerdy tech guy, the stalker guy, and the ironclad, vaguely justified sharpshooter guy. They represent different archetypes, yet their essential job overlaps: killing zombies.
I want the profession to give you a little something special, but not define who a character can become. Call it a specialist edge. If you trained as a combat medic in the armed forces, you are obviously going to be better at field medicine than the rest of the party. The other characters aren’t helpless, you just do it better. A professional big game hunter will have a slight edge shooting at a moving target at a distance. A repair person or quartermaster can fix the party’s broken gear efficiently in the field so you don’t have to limp back to an outpost.
Rider Objectives and Inventory as Identity
I am also imagining that these professions will come with a secondary set of objectives determined by the nature of the job you were hired to do. There is a reason each character was recruited, and that should be a factor in play.
Maybe the geographer gets character advancement from completing cartography tasks. The geologist needs to bring back unique mineral samples. The botanist is out there doing science, and the anthropologist is trying to make contact with whatever weird inhabitants are surviving in fallen Oz. In D&D, everybody’s job is exactly the same: survive, get treasure, get more powerful. I would rather create a game where professions are motivated by the task they were actually trained to do, in addition to the objectives presented by their current adventure.
Finally, I have developed a deep appreciation for the way a lot of OSR games handle the relationship between character identity and inventory.
There is a lot of OSR gesturing toward the idea that your inventory is your class. The rest of that cluttered character sheet is distilled into a small collection of things you can hold in your hands. The things that you carry are very much the things that you do.
This is true in 5e when you have a Bag of Holding with 25 different situational options in it, and it’s true in Shadowdark when you only have 10 slots and have to say “fuck you” to an item you need to drop.
Restricting inventory in a rational way means you are choosing your gear based on what your role is going to be. Your profession might give you a preexisting kit or a special object that makes sense thematically. Somebody is funding your access to these limited portals into Oz, and they are outfitting you with the expectation that you will fulfill a task for them on the other side.
It is a big hazy cloud right now, but I am working on it. Next time, we’ll talk about what these specific 1900s professions should be, or why exactly these characters are risking their lives in the first place.