New Class: the "Vessel"

When thinking about character classes, I really try to focus on the class's "role" in the party. This forces me to make decisions about what the characters do in the game, what kinds of expertise they need to do it, and how I need to split up these expertise so that you don't have characters stepping on each others' toes. This line of thinking has led me to completely replace one of my classes, the Mechanist, and replace it with another, the Vessel.

Because of Hostargo's cybertech/fantasy setting, I picture the world full of high tech vehicles, airships, drones, robots, and other crazy machines. So, I thought a party might require the skills of someone more mechanically inclined; someone specialized in dealing with machines. Enter the Mechanist. His "role" was supposed to be both a vehicle driver and someone who dealt with fixing/modifying/destroying machines. But, more and more these seemed like specializations that actually just limited the class's overall usefulness.

In practice, the Mechanist seemed to be the least interesting class. I was having trouble coming up with interesting story hooks without always throwing in a giant robot or some malfunctioning machine. Worse, I was having terrible trouble coming up with how some of the callings in the game could be applied to the Mechanist role. Specifically the Biomancer and Animancer magic callings, which deal with basically everything but machines.

The inspiration for the Mechanist is clear: it's based off of both the "Rigger" class in Shadowrun and "The Driver" class in Apocalypse world. The problem with the Rigger class is that to make it interesting, Shadowrun bogs its books down with a crazy amount of detail about controlling your own drones and owning customized vehicles. Then the coolest part of The Driver class is that you get a vehicle to start... but that's about all you've got. Neither of these is really helping me push the Mechanist to be an integral part of the game.

So I took a step back and asked the important questions again. What am I really trying to accomplish with this class? After some backtrack thinking, I realized that the real purpose of a class like this, in a general sens, was helping the party get from point A to point B, no matter how that was achieved. Once I realized this, I was able to cut out the focus on machines, and instead focus on a less explored area of RPGness: party movement.

While on one hand this is actually cutting out part of the class's specialty, but on the other it opened up a whole new realm of thinking. And that's exactly what I was looking for. Now, instead of being too narrow minded about interactions with machines, I can have Leaders call in extraction requests, Biomancers whistle for a small hoard of ride-able beasts, and Animancers open dimensions portals for the party to teleport through.

This new line of thinking has renamed the class Vessel, hopefully appropriately. I'm still potentially searching for a cooler name, but for now it hits the mark. I am once again excited about this class being a part of Hostargo!