Thread by @MichaelJSayre1

1/ I've had enough people reach out and tell me that this is their preferred venue for design information that, at least for the time being, I'm going to continue posting here. So for today's #Pathfinder2e design ramblings...

2/ I'm going to talk a bit about concepting classes and how we currently do that on my Rules & Lore team here at Paizo.

To start, here's a little hiring anecdote- there are two questions I regularly ask when interviewing candidates for designer positions.

3/ The first goes something like "Here's a pitch for a character concept we want to put in the game. Tell me a bit about how you would bring this concept to life using the PF2 rule system." This shows me a bit about how the candidate works with a mandated project.

4/ The second is pretty open-ended but sometimes leads to a lot of follow-up depending on the answer. It's "If you had the opportunity to make any class for the game, what class would you make and how would it work?" I learn a lot about the interviewee based on this question.

5/ Now, for me, I'm hoping to see someone answer me with a really exciting idea. A story I haven't heard before that you can't tell with the rules we currently have available. What I'm less excited to hear is a list of existing mechanics assembled in a predictable fashion.

6/ For example, "A Wisdom-based wave caster with magus weapon proficiencies" isn't going to excite or encourage me. Anyone can come up with that idea because it's not a new idea, it's just a flavor of an old idea, and not a particularly inspired one.

7/ A new and exciting idea might be something like "The class is the serendipity, and they're a luck-based character who uses occult power to make sure things always go their way. They could maybe use spells, but I think it would be even cooler if they worked like a-

8/ kineticist and instead had unique actions that inherently interacted with fortune and misfortune in cool ways, like causing enemies to become unbalanced and have misfortune on all their Acrobatics checks to get their footing."

That description still talks about the-

9/ mechanics of the idea in a way that lets me know the person is familiar with our system, but it puts the story first, sets the stage for the character, and only once you know what the character is does it start to build a mechanical framework around them.

10/ Personally, I greatly prefer this kind of design process. We only get one book with new classes in it in a given year (typically) and only one or two new classes for each such book (usually). An edition cycle is usually about 10 years long (plus or minus), so-

11/ On average I've got 20 chances per decade to do something truly new and exciting that will convince people to play our game over somebody else's. I don't want to spend those opportunities making classes that could easily be an archetype or a feat chain, I want to spend them-

12/ on cool ideas that people aren't getting elsewhere in the market. So when people come to me with those kinds of ideas, that's what gets me excited about working with them.

That's far from the only thing that makes a good designer, of course, and not everyone on my team-

13/ thinks the same way I do; in fact, another thing I look for when hiring new designers is people whose ideas and cultural touchpoints are different than those of the folks already on my team! You want as large and diverse a group of talented people as you can assemble-

14/ to get the best ideas. But the one thing I'm always looking for is those exciting stories. At the end of the day, a TTRPG is a game that you tell stories with, and each element should enhance and broaden the stories you're able to tell. I think one of the big strengths of-

15/ PF2 over other systems is that the breadth and depth of possible characters opens up a lot more potential for interesting stories, even within groups where players are repeating the same class multiple times. The more stories a concept can tell, the more pages it's-

16/ going to earn for itself in a book, and a class has to be able to tell *a lot* of stories to justify 16ish pages. Something that only tells a different flavor of an existing story is going to struggle to justify more than one or two pages in a given book.

17/ So that's the thing we ask with every new class: "What's the story that's not being told and what's the best way to tell it?" If it doesn't have a story and is a collection of mechanical tweaks, it's not a class. But when the story is real good, it's going to claim a spot.