Let’s talk about balance.
My understanding is that with regular TTRPGs a balanced party looks something like this:
- Someone to stab things up close and absorb damage.
- Someone to cure people (generally the one who’s absorbing the damage)
- Someone to sneak around
- Someone to find and disarm traps
- Someone to do damage from distance
Basically: Fighter, Cleric, Thief, Wizard.
In W&W, Fighters are fighters. These seem kind of bog standard. They wear armor and swing things that are either heavy, sharp, or both. As a fighter, you also can pick the “way of the weasel”, which I understand to be roughly analogous to a barbarian but with more rodent powers.
Healers are Holy Ones. As a class, in general they’re absolutely necessary and completely boring to play, which apparently tracks with clerics in other systems. The game designers seemed so bored in fact that they didn’t fold any weasel jokes into the class description.
Thieves, as the party has discovered, are only really good at stabbing and running. And while, as in life, there are certainly times where that is appropriate, it’s mostly useless. Everything else they’re good at like sneaking or finding traps becomes quickly redundant when the magic users can cast invisibility, silence, etc, so if you play one you’d better get a kick out of skirmishing. There’s a ‘Weasel Scout’ variant that drops any pretense of sneaking or trap finding, but somehow leaning into the flaws of the class doesn’t make it more appealing.
As far as damage from a distance, there’s basically the ranger and wizard. Rangers in W&W have arrows, and also a fair number of spells, all of which they can deliver through their arrows. Which sounds kind of cool, but since at least some of their spells are healing or other boons, I have a feeling that my party is going to end finding a lot of humor in shooting each other.
Wizards are wizards, but they have to pick a school of magic (yes, since you asked, there is a weasel school) which are incredibly restrictive. The school of Fire basically gets fireballs, the school or Zapping (really) gets lightning bolts and lightning themed spells, the school of illusion gets illusions, and the school of weasels basically gets a dozen ways to summon weasels (ranging from single, to giant, to swarms).
And that’s about it. According to Bob in accounting, who knows more about this than I do, in other systems there are a hell of a lot more options, including some classes (like Bards) which aren’t necessary but people insist on playing anyway primarily to embarrass, annoy, or bore the other people at the table (or maybe all three things at once).
Wizards and Weasels doesn’t have a bard class. In fact, attaining proficiency in a musical instrument causes the player to lose other skills or even (in the case of the lute) a level. In general, this is considered one of the great innovations of the W&W system, and one of the reasons why people (all 38 of them*) continue to play it.
Seems like enough background on the system for one week. Next week, the dingbats pick classes, and we take another run at the Dungeon of Descent.
* The last W&W convention was small enough to take place at a local Mountain Mikes and ended in a fistfight.
