Roles in a Setting

Dungeons and Dragons (in it's various editions) has classes. These define the skills a character might possess and the abilities they receive as they continue their journey of knowledge along that archetypal path. 

White Wolf's Storyteller system (in it's various incarnations) has a freeform approach to developing characters by giving a general description and archetype, then choosing a range of skills and abilities that justify that core identity choice. Overlaid on that might be a specific type of supernatural creature, which provides possible paths of power and growth beyond mortal constraints.

Most games follow one of these two general patterns... either classes that define the character, or skills and abilities that define the character.

I'm sure I've mentioned it previously, but the intention with the Walkabout game was always to follow something closer to the Warhammer Fantasy career system. Careers provide benefits (attribute increases, new skills, quirky advantages), and possessing the right combination of attributes/skills/advantages/story-goals allows acess to new careers that further the progression of the character. The progression of the character is more like the real world, it tells its own story, and it creates characters that feel (for want of a better term) "authentic".

One of the ideas I never got around to implementing in "The Law" was the concept that the Agents of the Law weren't a monolithic entity, they didn't follow the same progression path from "rookie beat cop" to "senior sector overseer". They had the option to specialise along their way, perhaps gaining expertise as a "Sniper", "Riot Control Specialist", "Forensic Investigator", "Psychic Detective", "Cyber-Security", or one of many other roles. There were going to be a dozen of these options opened up in a "Player's Guide" for the game, then later books in the series would open up another couple of options to help round out the world, depending on the types of paths the players took with their intended stories. In the case of the "Sniper", a character might have needed a minimum Mental attribute (because shooting relies on mental acuity and precision), and the "firearms" ability... and once a character had opened up the "Sniper" career path, they'd gain access to an upgraded "firearms" ability called "sniping" (along with a few other skills relating to care of firearms and gaining strategic advantage), a range of new potential equipment associated with that class, and a one off special ability once they'd mastered the class.

This idea became the foundation for the "Shattered City" game that I developed for my high school gaming club. Every character started with a basic career with minimum attribute scores required to get into it, and those careers provided three basic skills, and an advanced benefit once the skills were mastered. Once a character completed their basic class, they could move on to a new basic class, or move up to a veteran class if they met the higher level attribute and skill pre-requisites. In that game the basic classes had access to a basic range of skills, but the veteran classes now had access to a range of more powerful skills and abilities that were more beneficial, but more focused in their application. It worked pretty well, and the students helped provide ideas for new career classes as the game unfolded over a playtesting period of 6 months.

"Shattered City" evolved into "Shattered Heroes", and those classes evolved into power paths. On the whole, characters could develop a range of basic skills but as they developed powers, they could augment their natural skills and develop inhuman abilities beyond mortal understanding. As an example, a mind control power might have started with the skills "etiquette", "intimidation", and "persuasion" to reflect the characters ability to subtly influence the minds of those around them, and then once they'd mastered these three skills they'd gain access to a bonus power that gave them a heightened ability to control the thoughts of other characters. We had a listing of 60 or more power trees in the game, each of which had three basic skills associated with them, then a master power that was unlocked once all the basic skills were known. This also worked pretty well, and a number of my students are incredibly disappointed that we haven't been able to continue development on that system.

One of the other games I've been toying with in recent years is "Familiar", which was basically an attempt to make a freeform magic system like "Mage: the Ascension", but with the idea that the players are portraying the familiars of the mages, the mages they link to have their own goals and stories, but there is a mental bond between them. The mages are basically expendable, and may die or meet their goals and no longer need magic in their lives, so the familiar moves on and finds a new mage to help. The classes (of "Shattered City") and the power paths (or "Shattered Heroes") became magical textbooks to find. Characters could only unlock the knowledge within the magical textbook of they had a certain range of prerequisite attributes and abilities, and once they unlocked these, they'd gain access to magical words that were either verbs or nouns (magic was done by combining a noun word and a verb word into a complete effect... eg. "understand" + "code"). Learning mundane skills and abilities was pretty freeform in this system, but the important thing about this game was the magic, so here's where the challenges in the story were to be found. Familiar bought a lot of the ideas back into the framework of the SNAFU system (which drives The Law), and brought a lot of ideas full circle with an added degree of refinement. (Actually, recent traffic to the blog has prompted me to go back and look at a few of the unexpectedly popular posts... and it looks like I've been tinkering with this kind of idea for a lot longer than I'd remembered... with credit to Levi Kornelsen for early suggestions)

Now I'm pushing those ideas forward into Walkabout, but with this newly determined ability system there will need to be some tweaks.

If I'm running with 60+ ability aspects, then limiting each of the career paths to three associated aspects is probably a bit too narrow. I'd need a minimum of 20 careers to cover all the aspects, and more realistically I'd probably be dividing the list into common aspects (maybe 40) and uncommon ones (maybe another 40 once I include genre specific ability aspects into the mix). I'd probably run with 20 basic careers which only consist of basic aspects...then another 20, each of which has two common and an uncommon. Which would then lead to the issue of the type of benefits that might manifest through mastery of these careers. Mastery of a career in previous games systems I've been developing has given different types of benefit, mastery of a "bartender" career might open up access to buying your own bar or tavern. Mastery as a "duelist" might open up access to increased damage with swords. Each of these benefits was quite different and started veering into that "design by exception" problem which tends to rapidly overcomplicate things. I want to try to avoid that, while making things more consistent and streamlined in the game.

Expanding each career to at least five associated aspects might allow an interesting correlation to occur.  We've already established that an ability die is built up by combining the aspects a character knows. What if we have a career advantage die which applies to a specific type of task that the career is focused on. In this case the more mastered aspects associated with the career, the higher this advantage die gets. It's basically a "two for the price of one" benefit when the character is doing something specifically associated with the career, but they also get a general advantage in other actions because they can combine those aspects in a variety of mix-n-match patterns to accomplish all sorts of other tasks. 

Engineer

• Ability Aspects: Academics, Engineering, Intelligence, Mathematics, Science, Technology
• Career Advantage: Calculations. You gain an advantage die when you are preparing a plan for a team to work on. This plan may build, destroy or modify an item or location in the story. Any successes gained on the plan will be used in the follow up action where you (or other characters) execute the plan. 

Outland Survivor

• Ability Aspects: Alertness, Gathering, Herbalism, Hunting, Stamina, Survival
• Career Advantage: Foraging. You gain an advantage die when spending time to prepare food and supplies to keep you alive far from civilization. Any successes gained on this type of roll provide a single meal for yourself or your companions, or eliminate an existing hungry trait.

Raggedy Man

• Ability Aspects: Alertness, Brawl, Instincts, Intimidation, Reflexes, Survival
• Career Advantage: Hard to kill. You gain an advantage die in close combat when the odds are stacked against you in a combat, this may occur when you are outnumbered, outgunned, or simply when the opposition has a situational advantage against you.  

In these examples, both the "Outland Survivor" and the "Raggedy Man" provide access to the "Alertness" and "Survival", so it doesn't matter which of these careers have provided the aspect, it ends up beneficial to them both. There will naturally be a range of careers that have some overlap among them, and which will have a natural tendency to link certain types of careers together... but in all the systems where I've been exploring this idea, I consider it to be more of a feature than a bug. The important thing is to make sure that the careers are different enough that players can generally only gain one career advantage die at a time. The other thing that I now need to consider for these careers is any entry requirements for them. Career advantages that seem more powerful than others should be associated with careers that are more restrictive to get into. In the examples above "Calculations" seems to be a less powerful advantage than "Hard to Kill", but I guess we won't really know that until playtesting occurs. 

P.S. In both of the "Shattered" games, I also had a nature and a nurture cluster of skills...so the same sort of thing could easily apply here. These might considered "Race" and "Background" from a D&D perspective, but I tended to call them "Heritage" and "Upbringing". They basically provide a starting prompt for a character, a set of initial skills and abilities that inform a characters life during the early years before they started forging a path of their own. In both those games, these preliminary skill groups didn't have major advantages associated with them, they improved character attributes instead (which is quite a bonus in its own right).  

P.P.S. As I've started working on these various career roles, I've actually expanded the number of ability aspects associated with them up to 7.I'm also starting to work on the idea that a career advantage won't activate until a character has three or more aspects from a career (the first two are teaching them a range of things about the role, and after that point they pick up the nuances enough to acquire the new benefit). This kind of feels like the occupationally specific skills in Cyberpunk 2020, but perhaps with better grounding into other elements of the game...and that's not a bad thing.