I’ve always struggled to create characters.  Conventional wisdom would point out that I’m the common feature of all my failures, and there’s truth to that.  I appreciated heroes like Aragorn, Conan, Merlin and Robin Hood, but I didn’t want to play as them.  My tastes ran idiosyncratic: I wanted Cadfael, the Beowulf poet, or MacGyver.  Those ideas don’t rest neatly inside the broad paradigms of most games.

Too Many Eggs in One Basket

MacGyver makes the point simply enough.  (Also he’s recognizable, having become something of a cultural treasure, whereas I suspect most people don’t know as much about the other two.)  Aragorn is essentially the Ranger. Conan is the Barbarian, Merlin the Wizard, Robin Hood the Rogue.  A lot of classic heroes map cleanly onto famous archetypes. What does MacGyver map to?

Tabletop games model real people, who have a lot of dynamic parts: broad qualities, specific aptitudes, passive traits, activated abilities.  Designers make that complexity manageable by packaging those parts into baskets players choose from: inherited traits (species/race), trained traits (class/origin), and small add-ons (backgrounds, feats, boons).

In a lot of games, the largest and most influential basket is the class. It supplies most of a character’s distinctive features and often determines which smaller choices—skills, feats, proficiencies—are even available.  That’s efficient, but it distils too much into a single decision. Narrative identity, mechanical function, and implied personality are often bundled together.  If a player wants one element from the bundle, they inherit the rest.

So what happens when someone wants skills without thievery, ingenuity with enchantment, or fieldcraft without wilderness mysticism or guerilla theming?  They have to pick whichever basket is “close enough” and live with the mismatch.

The Ranger grants survival skills but imports wilderness combat and hunting accessories.  The Artificer emphasizes crafting, but through overt magic.  The Bard offers versatility, but centers performance and social manipulation.  The default catchall becomes Rogue: numerous skills, true, but also an implied underhandedness and a talent for sudden murder.

Maybe the mismatch isn’t overwhelming.  Most of us have ignored features that didn’t quite fit.  The tension remains though, and it has consequences.  When a character diverges from how their class is balanced to function, the strain can appear unexpectedly.  A combat encounter tuned for a lethal Rogue or aggressive Ranger may overwhelm a character who chose that class primarily for skills.

Too Many Baskets of Eggs Is Its Own Problem

The usual workaround is multiclassing. If one class doesn’t capture a concept, perhaps two will. Maybe more.

Too often multiclassing behaves less like selective curation and more like gluing two overfilled baskets together. The character may finally collect the features that a player wants but also accumulates awkward or unused ones.  Making MacGyver an Artificer/Rogue might add skills and cunning to the Artificers crafting toolkit, but it would also carry skulduggerous traits and magical tokenism.

Multiclassing can produce results that feel like a failed chimera: parts assembled from multiple archetypes, but rather than being as awesome as the player hoped, it’s weaker and less coherent than any source individually.

This is a problem Bardworthy set out to solve.

The Right Number of Eggs in the Right Variety of Baskets

(Yes, the metaphor has gotten away from me.)

If awkward bundling was the problem, the solution had to be precision.  Targeted choices could build more robust characters without collateral tension, narrative or mechanical.

Consider MacGyver again.  Each class we examined offered a way to play an adaptable, skilled character, but each bundled that core idea with additional assumptions.  Bardworthy focuses the choice on the desired element and eliminates the spillover.  Each character selects a Specialty: what they’ve practiced, what they do well, the role they’ve chosen.  Specialties resemble classes but are intentionally narrower.  They bundle fewer assumptions.  The Specialty for an adaptable, skilled character is called the Jack.

Narrowing the bundle does more than reduce mismatch though: it reveals meaningful differences that broad archetypes can flatten. There are lots of ways to be adaptable and skilled for example. A decathlete adapts across physical trials. A conman adapts socially with bravado and luck. A hedge witch adapts using mystical toolkit. MacGyver adapts through clear thinking and puzzle-solving ingenuity.

In Bardworthy, each character also chooses a Resource. If Specialties answer what the character does, Resources answer how they do it.  What does it look like?  What powers them?  What do they draw from?

• The decathlete use Might.
• The conman uses Daring.
• The hedge witch uses Aether.
• MacGyver uses Cunning.

They’re all Jacks, but they’re each different.

Resources extract another element from the amalgam that traditional classes keep fused. A classic Fighter can be understood as a Mighty Soldier, combining the Resource Might with the Specialty Soldier.  (Soldiers represent training and discipline; Might emphasizes straightforward physicality.)  When choosing the Fighter class, a person chooses both incorporated qualities.

In Bardworthy, because those elements are no longer inseparable, there’s room for a Cunning Soldier, a Daring Soldier, or an Ethereal Soldier without straining the system or forcing a player to settle for mismatch and wasted features.  The concept determines the build, not the other way around.

This dramatically expands meaningful options for the player.  In traditional class-based systems, the range of easily supported character concepts is limited by the number of classes available: often little more than a dozen.  In Bardworthy, even a small selection of Specialties and Resources multiplies into diverse but coherent, mechanically supported combinations.

And the above multiplicity is only two decisions into character creation, neither of which is cumbersome or confusing.  Because each choice is precise—stripped of broad presumptions and unnecessary bundling—the system increases expressive freedom without requiring complexity.  The rest of character creation follows the same principle: clarity first, then combination.

And There Are So Many Combinations

We were serious when we said that we wanted players to create any character that they could imagine, and we wanted to facilitate that without sacrificing the mechanical integrity that keeps play fair and character building rewarding.  That commitment doesn’t stop at character creation.

In traditional class systems, progression runs along rails.  One Fighter at level five looks much like every other Fighter at level five.  Even subclasses follow predetermined tracks: features arrive in fixed packages in a fixed order, whether or not they reflect the player’s evolving vision.

Bardworthy extends the same precision and modularity that shapes character creation into character growth.  As characters gain power, players choose where that growth lands. They may deepen their Specialty, refining what they’ve practiced or unlocking new techniques.  They may invest further in their Resource, strengthening the engine that powers their abilities or learning new ways to apply it. They may broaden their foundation: improving skills, honing attributes, or cultivating distinctive traits. They may branch outward, incorporating a second Specialty or learning to draw from an additional Resource.  Or they may blend any of those paths as their story develops.

Growth is directional but not predetermined.  Even two character who begin as identical combinations—the same Specialty, the same Resource, even the same Species, Origen, and Accomplishments (about which more another time)—don’t have to resemble each other for long.  One Cunning Jack may lean into preparation and clever tactics.  Another may train their Attributes to broaden their capabilities.  A third may dabble with Daring, eventually adding the Swashbuckler Specialty. Their foundation is shared, but their trajectories can be unique.

The result is a system that embraces the sorts of variation we see all around us, and lets it compound over time rather than narrow into conformity with only superficial differences.  A character’s story determines who they become, from creation to retirement. 

The More Stories the Better

At the beginning of this project, the goal was simple: let characters be as complex as the people who imagine them. The Attribute Matrix provided a richer model to describe each person’s qualities. Specialties and Resources provided a more precise way to express what people do and how they do it. Modular growth ensured that character futures are shaped by their story rather than confined by their starting archetype.

Bardworthy doesn’t reject archetypes, it simply refuses to trap players inside them. When mechanics acknowledge complexity instead of smoothing it away, they stop fighting imagination and start supporting it. That’s the mechanical verisimilitude we love so much.  The result is not just more variety, but more interesting characters and with them richer stories.

Until next time,

Daniel

As it ever was, Dungeons and Dragons is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast.  Similarly MacGyver is a trademark of CBS.  Cadfael was created by Ellis Peters.  No one knows who wrote Beowulf, but whoever was brilliant.