The start of a new year is always a good time for asking the important questions in life, so I have one for you:

How would you build MacGyver in Dungeons and Dragons?

My first character in Dungeons and Dragons was a cleric.  I wanted someone like Cadfael—observant, thoughtful, and shaped more by his faith than his ability to fight–but I ended up with something closer to Sir Galahad, a soldier who happened to be religious and could work miracles.

My second character was a bard.  I wanted Shakespeare, Scheherazade, or the poet who composed Beowulf.  Instead, I got Mack the Knife: a criminal with flair, living in an opera world.

In both cases, I tried to do what the game seemed to ask.  I wanted a cleric, so I played a cleric.  I wanted a bard, so I played a bard.  The game just had very specific ideas about what those things meant, and my ideas didn’t match. 

Things took an even sharper turn when I wanted my third character to be someone like MacGyver.  What class was MacGyver?

He wasn’t one of the priest classes, warrior classes, or wizard classes, and he didn’t play an instrument, so he wasn’t a bard.  That left thief, a poor fit at best!  If I’d waited a few years, I might have tried an artificer, but that would have pushed him toward magic and magic items rather than ingenuity, adaptability, and practical problem-solving.  There just wasn’t a class for him.

Even setting that aside though, my problem wasn’t solved.  What should MacGyver’s ability scores be?

Thieves are stereotypically dexterous, but while MacGyver was nimble, he wasn’t particularly fast or graceful.  Aside from Intelligence, every ability felt like a compromise.  He had endurance but wasn’t especially strong; he was resilient but still fragile; perceptive but not reflective; charming but not smooth.

The frustration I had started to feel about classes wasn’t limited to them.  Abilities were another part of the game that seemed to undermine my character ideas rather than facilitate them.

Sherlock Holmes, for example, could adopt countless personas and dominate a room when he wished, but he was abrasive and sometimes socially oblivious.  Would his Charisma be high or low?  Watson noticed details and often had insight into human behavior that even Holmes lacked, but he didn’t have Holmes’ ingenuity for deduction or rapier wit.  Would his Wisdom be high or low?  (And he was a doctor!  Healing is quintessentially Wisdom-based.)

This is actually two different parts of game design—classes and abilities—but they produced the same experience at the table.  I kept imagining interesting, nuanced, versatile characters and the system kept telling me that I had to be something else.  I wasn’t even trying to be overpowered; I wasn’t pushing against balance.  I was pushing against assumptions.

Bundle Now and Save

It took a while to put my finger on what was bothering me.  I didn’t have a problem with the idea of classes or abilities themselves; I was frustrated by how they were implemented.

The problem was bundling. 

D&D’s abilities aren’t traits — they’re packages of traits, combining aptitudes that don’t need to be related. Its classes aren’t just roles — they’re bundles of narrative identity, mechanical function, and implied personality. If you want one part of the package, you’re forced to take the rest.

That model of personhood didn’t match the characters I wanted to play.

Of course in the decades since I started playing second edition as a teenager, Dungeons and Dragons has changed. New editions smoothed rough edges, expanded class options, introduced subclasses, feats, backgrounds, and whole sourcebooks of customization. Many of the specific problems I ran into as a teenager have better workarounds now than they did then.

But the underlying issue remains. Abilities still bundle together unrelated aptitudes, and classes still carry strong narrative assumptions about who a character is supposed to be.  A lot of times, the best that the system can do is approximate a character idea rather than realize it.  Sometimes it doesn’t quite feel close enough to be satisfying.

I Still Wanted to Play MacGyver Though

One of the core inspirations for Bardworthy was the attempt to answer these frustrations directly: to make a system broad, flexible, and deep enough to accommodate all sorts of characters, without losing the clarity of numeric abilities or the fun of choosing a class and perusing its features.  I wanted a system that let players create their own bundles of traits and choices, so that they didn’t have to accept mismatches and constraints.

That meant addressing the two problems separately: disentangling aptitudes that had been forced together, and loosening the narrative rails imposed by class progression. The result is a different model of personhood, one that better captures the diversity we see in both real people and fictional characters—quick but clumsy, perceptive but foolish, inspiring but abrasive.

In the next entry, I’ll focus on the first of those problems and the solution Bardworthy uses to address it: the Attribute Matrix. After that, I’ll turn to modular classes and what it means to keep the joy of character identity without forcing it.

Until next time,

Daniel

Just to be clear, Dungeons and Dragons is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast and MacGyver is a trademark of CBS.