Building the Perfect Class

Creating new and balanced classes for any campaign

Play D&D long enough, and it's inevitable that you'll want (or need) to tweak an existing character class or create one of your own. There are many approaches to doing so, but if you're like me (i.e., you have OCD and believe that everything can be represented by numbers), you want a process that's consistent, that meshes with the existing rules, and that doesn't take a lot of time (because maybe you want to add many classes to your campaign).

Luckily (and largely because I have OCD), this article provides just that process, which allows you to create or customise any class you want, using any race and a variety of abiltiies, all without unbalancing your campaign.

Getting Started

For brevity, the class creation instructions are located in the PDF attached to this article, Building the Perfect Class. I suggest you download the article, read it thoroughly, and follow the instructions given.

But since no one actually reads manuals, here's the short version:

How it Works

Building the Perfect Class assumes that each class is, in dry terms, a collection of abilities and that every ability can be represented by an XP value. If you total the XP for each ability, you can figure out how many experience points are needed for each level.

The trick to achieving game balance is making sure XP values are consistent. To do this, I reverse-engineered each of the "official" classes by breaking them down into component abilities and tweaking the XP values until my results matched the level advancement tables. While this probably isn't how the classes were built, the results (with one notable exception) were sufficiently precise to form a solid foundation.

With consistent XP values known, one could mix and match abilities to create new classes, or simply customize classes that already existed. The article explains how to do this, but it's a very simple process: because I bothered to "show my work," it actually takes more time to read the material than to simply crank out a few classes.

Quick and Dirty

To speed things along, you can use the attached Excel spreadsheet (class_xp.xls), which contains all the abilities, XP values, and experience point tables from the article.

The spreadsheet is quick and dirty—simply open the file and start creating your own classes in the section titled, "Enter Your Classes Below."

Final Note

I'm always interested in the classes people create, mostly because we all have different interpretations of what a "ranger" is, or what weapons a halfling thief is allowed to use. There are certainly no wrong answers, and the system here is infinitely scalable.

So when you're done building your perfect class, follow our posting guidelines to share it on this site. I'd love to see what you come up with!