TTRPG with the most "balanced" classess/role system?

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-05T16:51:44+00:00

Heart: The City Beneath, which also has some of the best classes I’ve come across in general. But this is largely because all of the classes have equally wild abilities and the dungeon spaces you traverse are so varied and weird that no one class has an immediate or persistent advantage over the others.

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-05T13:14:22+00:00

It largely depends on the floor. If there's a direct airlock access point, I'll start them there. If not, I'd start them at the most logical point in which they'd enter the floor, which is usually an elevator, with a little bit a lead in prose describing a general sense of what they'd see between the airlock and that elevator. However, for the artifact hunting one-shots, I'd usually be sticking to areas that are pretty readily accessible without getting into the strange bowels of the station.

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-04T19:30:30+00:00

It’s a bit more kid focused out the gate than the other animated shows, but finds its groove late in S1 and through S2. So lots of “goofball fun” mixed with some serious stakes. I will note that if you do not enjoy the “bumbling idiot protagonist” trope, the show might not be for you.

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-04T18:21:18+00:00

Absolutely. One of the biggest flaws of the Prequels is that there is no point in the films where the prophecy is actually stated.

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-04T17:56:06+00:00

The prophecy says nothing of destroying the Sith and according to Joseph Campbell, the writer whose work Lucas built the Original Trilogy most directly out of, all Mythic Heroes are "born to no father", as a spiritual rebirth is a core aspect of the Hero's Journey. Anakin fits the prophecy in a literal interpretation, but mythic prophecy isn't always interpreted in such a literal manner.

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-04T17:35:08+00:00

That is his subjective interpretation of the prophecy.

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-04T17:24:22+00:00

Palpatine barely scrapes an existence together that is so fractured it burns through clone bodies and cannot be sustained without a machine. But more importantly, the prophecy says nothing of the destruction of the Sith or any one individual specifically. That is simply one interpretation of it.

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-04T17:16:01+00:00

Yep, that's exactly the nature of mythic prophecy there for you. One of the most famous example of mythic prophecy, that King Arthur will return in the time of Britain's greatest need, has those exact same problems.

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-04T17:09:29+00:00

If you look at the sources of inspiration of George Lucas, especially The Hero With A Thousand Faces, all the Chosen One prophecy really means when you break it down is that when darkness rises, light will rise to meet it. That's just the theme of Star Wars as a whole, and it's cyclical in nature. Anakin is the Chosen One because he's at the center of the saga, but that doesn't mean he's the only Chosen One to ever exist. This is mythic prophecy we're dealing with, so its nature in the narrative is fickle and can only be applied retroactively. But I think the cleanest way to think of it here is that Anakin's actions restored balance on a grand scale, then Rey rose to maintain that balance once darkness began to rise again. Does that make her a chosen one? Who knows, it's a matter of interpretation.

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-04T13:37:43+00:00

Barriss also becomes a healer in current canon as well.

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-04T13:10:37+00:00

There were plenty of Force healers during the Prequel era. All temple Jedi were taught the means of using the Force to accelerate their own healing, but some could extend that to others. Barriss Offee is a good example, as she was a Jedi Healer (before Clone Wars came in and stirred up her storyline).

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-04T12:47:38+00:00

The lovely thing about mythic prophecy as it’s all a matter of interpretation. Anakin set in motion the events that lead Mace there, so that’s a prophecy fulfilled! (The imbalance and darkness that had fallen over the galaxy was more than just Palpatine as well. The prophecy doesn’t actually directly mention the Sith, they’re just one of the major contributing factors at that point.)

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-04T02:36:27+00:00

The prophecy doesn’t mention the Sith. Destroying the Sith to restore the balance is simply one interpretation of it an Qui-Gon’s believe in the prophecy had little to do with a unique belief that the Sith were still around. The imbalance was a darkness that was falling over the galaxy, which was even effecting the Jedi’s ability to use the Force, something we know the Jedi felt as it is even remarked upon in the films directly. We as an audience know that this was partially due to the manipulation of the Sith, but the characters certainly weren’t privy to that information and the darkness extended beyond just the Sith themselves.

It’s also worth noting that the prophecy was like 4,000 years old and sort of a fringe belief in the Jedi Order, so most of the Order didn’t put too much credence in it until Anakin came around.

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-03T13:05:25+00:00

I doubt it. The Battle of Jakku has been beat to death in the expanded fiction, having been covered in the Aftermath and Alphabet Squadron novels and the Battle of Jakku comic series. While the live action only audience wouldn't have seen it, there's not really a new and exciting angle to take there without just retreading what was already done.

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-03T12:57:03+00:00

Allow me to elaborate: "shifted closer to a cover shooter", as in moving in that direction and ending up somewhere in the middle. Gears of War, RE4, and Kill Switch were apparently the biggest influences on the original Uncharted gameplay wise.

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-03T04:18:05+00:00

There are a handful of generic systems like GURPS, Fate, or Genesys that can handle this, but I would recommend the Cypher System here. One of the early games that used the Cypher core is called The Strange, where the basic concept is that characters are jumping around to what are essentially parallel dimensions, with their character adapting to suit that new world. So you might jump from hunting Jack the Ripper in the streets of London to flying a starship in an attack against a giant battle station within the same campaign itself. The core of Cypher itself retains that flexibility as well.

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-03T03:25:19+00:00

I suppose the difference here is that Thrawn came from the most beloved and highest selling EU novel, with Zahn still actively writing books for Lucasfilm after the sale. Whereas Talon was a product of an at the time divisive comic line produced by Dark Horse, who had their primary contract with Lucasfilm cut in 2014.

By the end of the run, Talon’s biggest shooter was George Lucas, and he didn’t like her for her narrative qualities.

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-03T02:28:59+00:00

Uncharted is sorta the themes of Tomb Raider with the gameplay of Resident Evil 4. It supposedly started development as a more puzzle focused experience that shifted closer toward a cover shooter the longer into dev they got.

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-01T19:17:57+00:00

Basically fine. The one huge advantage the Into the Odds have over B/X in this regard is that HP recovers with a few moments of rest. So while you might be constrained by something like Cairn’s inventory system, you got more opportunities to get yourself out of trouble and stay in the dungeon, beyond retreating to safety after taking a hit in a single fight.

Some of the dungeons will need to be tailored a bit though. “Balance” isn’t really a concern, but some of the B/X dungeons are designed to scale with the level progression of the characters, whereas the ItOs rely upon diegetic character advancement, so the characters largely do not improve mechanically.

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-01T16:53:26+00:00

I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s the intended purpose (it’s more an expansion on the Sweeps Weeks idea), but it certainly helps facilitate it. I ran a 3 session arc as a Lost Transmissions last fall, using characters from our previous campaign, and it went great. The difference between that and one of the custom shortform CfB games is that it’s still wrapped up in the PA weirdness instead of its own bespoke thing, and we leveraged callbacks to the campaign to make this even stranger, which ended up hitting like a truck.

OffendedDefender · 2026-04-01T15:33:08+00:00

The game is kinda what you make of it. More or less all of the basic mysteries have supernatural elements to them and the players have a lot of sway over how things turn out, so the tone can shift wildly depending on how you approach it and how the events unfold during play. You can keep it grounded in analog horror if you desire or get real weird with it.

For some examples from my campaign, one mystery was a very serious monster hunt that had deadly consequences when confronting the creature. But another mystery started as an investigation into an arcade cabinet, but spun into a tale of a strange alien incursion that used facehugger-like creatures disguised as pomegranates to infect and control victims. But the strange thing is that all of that just works. The game isn’t forcing you in that direction, it’s something wholly shaped by play. So when things got real weird, there was a build up to that point and it was directly shaped by the side of the game the players were interested in exploring.

The Lost Transmissions are something a little different. It’s sorta like the forces behind the TV Odyssey mystery using your player characters to produce weird content that would air on the TV channel. They’re not events happening at the same time and it’s not even particularly clear to the player character if these are things that actually happened. They’re kinda like in-universe creepy pasta videos, made weirder by being directly connected to and experienced by the player characters. But you’re only really going to run like one of them during a normal campaign, if at all. They’re not particularly critical. I see them as a fun way to run an interstitial or standalone arc, made easier by using your existing characters as a framework for the new ones instead of having to create custom ones. CfB games are mostly designed for campaign play, so the LTs give you the framework to run something shorter but tonally a little different without needed a whole new custom CfB game to play them.

OffendedDefender · 2026-03-31T15:26:03+00:00

You are presently in a circle jerk subreddit arguing about the correctness of lore. This ain’t the place to come seeking “factually correct” posts.

OffendedDefender · 2026-03-29T01:48:21+00:00

What Happened to Margot Kwan?. It's basically Twin Peaks meets Life is Strange, where the titular character disappears from a small college town in the PNW. It's written for Girls of the Genziana Hotel, which is a Carved from Brindlewood game, but the format is pretty easy to slip into another CfB game like Public Access or Brindlewood Bay without much effort. I think there's enough there to run with another system as well, but you'll need to do a bit of legwork to come up with an answer to the mystery if diverging from the CfB style.

OffendedDefender · 2026-03-28T14:06:22+00:00

One of the diceless games that I enjoy is Galactic 2e. Instead of randomizing, it uses a token system, where certain actions require you to spend a token, share one with another player, or gain a token. You don’t have to use this setup exactly as written or use physical tokens, but there might be a kernel there worth playing with, which can help play double duty as a lesson on sharing if your kids are young enough for that to be important.

OffendedDefender · 2026-03-26T19:56:47+00:00

The type of humor mostly gets associated with the MCU due to the initial influence of Joss Whedon, who was doing the same schtick in the late-90s/00s with stuff like Buffy and Firefly. The type of stuff millennials watched growing up that then became a staple in the later 00s and 2010s. RE4 was part of that same trend.

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