D&D 5E Do Classes Have Concrete Meaning In Your Game?

[AbdulAlhazred]

Something else of note with the whole, which class cast the fireball, is that due to the way spell preparation works, you may never see a wizard read from a spellbook. For all we know he leaves the spellbook at home when he travels after prepping his list of spells. He might still carry a ritual book which records of the ritual spells he has, but then literally any class can have a ritual book with the right feat. I find that really speaking, the lines are blurred. We have a total of 7* separate classes/subclasses that can cast fireball and it would be impossible to judge how they gained the ability to cast it. They could all look the same since even a wizard can wear platemail and still cast spells if he has spent the feats or is multi-classed (both feats and multiclassing blurs the lines between classes even more).

In my current game, I'm letting my players create the fiction of their class. If that means that they follow what's suggested in the book then I'm cool with that. Really speaking though, not everything needs to be laid bare about how it looks in the game world, I don't need to know if people can tell if that guy in robes who threw a fireball was a wizard, a sorcerer, or an eldritch knight. In the end, all that matters is that the enemy is nice and crispy.


*bard, eldritch knight, wizard, warlock, sorcerer, arcane trickster, light cleric. I may have missed some.

Heh, yeah, in our 5e campaign my wizard is a Mtn Dwarf Transmuter. He's clad in Chain armor, and carries around a battleaxe, which he's credibly good at wielding too (more for show than anything, but appearances matter to him). Not that anyone would mistake him for a non-caster, but they might easily call him an 'Eldritch Knight' or whatever. A level or two of MCing or even one or two feats would probably make that axe a better option for toe-to-toe than his Fire Bolt.

 

[Arial Black]

In my current game, I'm letting my players create the fiction of their class. If that means that they follow what's suggested in the book then I'm cool with that.

Perfect!

This is the reality of 'fluff' in the game: as long as you don't break the rules (crunch), then you (the player) can fluff it any way that makes sense. It doesn't matter if someone else would or wouldn't make the same fluff choice for those crunch choices; it's not their business. Even the DM! He makes everyone else in the world, the players create their own PCs within the rules.

The idea that my monk (rogue 1/monk2; fluffed as 'special forces unarmed combat') isn't really a monk because she never went to a monastery, therefore I'm not allowed to play this character, is not consistent with D&D. It always was true that we could choose our own fluff, and it was never an actual rule to restrict our imaginations to the fluff suggestions in the book.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Perfect!

This is the reality of 'fluff' in the game: as long as you don't break the rules (crunch), then you (the player) can fluff it any way that makes sense. It doesn't matter if someone else would or wouldn't make the same fluff choice for those crunch choices; it's not their business. Even the DM! He makes everyone else in the world, the players create their own PCs within the rules.

The idea that my monk (rogue 1/monk2; fluffed as 'special forces unarmed combat') isn't really a monk because she never went to a monastery, therefore I'm not allowed to play this character, is not consistent with D&D. It always was true that we could choose our own fluff, and it was never an actual rule to restrict our imaginations to the fluff suggestions in the book.

I totally agree! However, you will probably find pretty quickly (no doubt you have already) that there is a segment of the D&D Community that firmly believes that reflavoring mechanics like this is anathema; that a single mechanic can only and forever correspond to exactly one in-game cause. So to say that your short sword is really a wakazashi is somehow antithetical to basic logic or something. To say that your wizard studies the patterns in the stars and that his spell book is simply a reference work, which comes in the form of a set of instruments, is a deep offense against the spirit of the game. Not that I wouldn't be happy to see some elaboration of mechanics for the 'astrologer' character, but in terms of what is reasonable for most players to come up with its a perfectly reasonable reflavoring.