Rebuilding classes to have (approximately) equal XP charts?

So, I love ACKS. But I’m not too into the “balance by differing xp charts” style of class building. Just me personally. I also usually abandon xp altogether in most games and just wing it. I know for ACKS this isn’t generally gonna work considering how domains etc. work, so I was thinking that it’d be possible to rework the classes so they have approximately the same XP progression as the fighter, and just let it go from there.

The magic user gets arcane3, thievery1, trading the thief stuff for Command of Voice, Familiar, and Loremastery. That’s 2075xp, which is close enough I’d be comfortable rounding it off.

Spellsword: HD1/Fighting2/Arcane1 for 2275xp, trade armor down a step for Spell Storing. That’s as close as it gets I think, if you wanna have a class like this.

The thief itself is a sticky one though, because there’s no way to just give them stuff to increase their XP per level. The only solution that works is to give them dwarf3, which makes sense thematically if you just reskin the abilities, and mostly makes them just better at being skilled and thiefy. The only problem there is that it comes with a level 10 cap, which sucks, but I’m not sure if it really matters that much? I think it means they can only control a fairly small domain, but that sorta makes sense for a thief anyway. I’m not sure.

What do people think? I’m trying to do this “by the book,” just as an exercise if nothing else. Of course I can always just house rule stuff in the end.

Other option would be to figure out the highest xp cost race/class combo your PC’s are using and tweak the others up. I imagine it might be easier to add a build point or rogue power than stripping out depending on how much you need to move.

you could also try dividing some of the bigger ones. The obvious example is elven spellsword: if you’re going to just declare “Hey, everybody leveled up this session” then on the even times you declare it, the spellsword gains a “level” of fighter (attack throw progression, damage bonus, HD) and on odd declarations they gain a “level” of mage (just the spellcasting).

Other hybrid elf classes might be tougher, the nightblade would probably involve 1-3 “levels” of thief for every 1 “level” of mage.

I’ve attempted to baseline all the classes in my game on the Fighter’s 2000XP. I agree, bean-counting XP is not my idea of fun, it’s something I’d rather dispense with altogether.

Ha, I was actually going to say “I thought I saw the guy with the historical Greek game did something like this…” when I first posted. You came up with mostly new classes, right?

Thanks for your suggestions, everybody.

I augmented a lot of the existing ones (or cut them) and borrowed some house ruled ones from here. But yes, nothing survived unscathed, and I’m still working on them.

Isn’t there an XP cost for each special ability/power? I.e. allowing you to purchase powers a-la-cart? This would solve things. I vaguely recall Alex posting something along these lines some time ago.

It depends on where they come from. Reducing weapon and armor proficiency costs 150xp per special power obtained, but only if you have 2 build points in fighting aspect. But this does not apply if you reduce selections available under the thief or cleric progressions.

Alternatively you are paying xp per build point put into thief skills, which can be traded for custom powers, however it doesn’t add up perfectly to a price/power.

Value Thievery XP Cost
4 (15 Skills) 1,100
3 10 Skills 700
2 5 Skills 400
1 3 Skills 200
0 none 0

There was a post here that, like, calculated everything according to the number of custom powers they’d be worth. And there was a thread where someone asked about buying stuff a-la-carte for XP increases and the consensus was that it doesn’t work that way RAW. I’m not sure if Alex posted something along those lines but I couldn’t find it.

Scale it with wizard, give bonus stuff to round out selection.
Fighters get d10 hd or fight as monsters.
Thieves get d6 hd, thief 4 (5 extra profs),+
Clerics get d8 hd and divine 3…(or something).

I like this - could be very cool. Somewhat like a “3E ACKS”…