Fantasy Heartbreaker: No Classes, Just Skills

As stated in the last Fantasy Heartbreaker post, I don't particularly like classes. After reading a lot of skills for the GLOG game I've changed my mind a bit. It seems that creating the classes has been a big part of the GLOG community. I like how everyone multi classes really easily and how classes have been used for Curses (which could easily be extended to poison or disease in interesting ways).

But I still don't like classes that much. All those wonderful GLOG classes fill the game with mini-sub-systems I prefer to avoid. However, I don't mind previous history the way they did in RuneQuest 2 or Harnmaster. Previous history is a nice way to differentiate characters at the start, by providing a pre-set grouping of skills and perhaps a bit of backstory. Then once the character has started they advance as they please.

I did need one class though. I didn't like the OpenQuest system of everyone starting with magic and felt I needed to limit that. By having previous history set up the characters I could ensure that if you didn't have Wizard as your previous history you weren't going to cast spells. So its a class, but not really. Then by dividing magic into different Domains I could create variety among wizards.