Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
To clarify, do class names have a concrete meaning in your game world? Do they exist as understood professions with associated abilities? If someone introduces themselves as a "Fighter" is it automatically understood and assumed that they would have the class abilities of the Fighter class, as opposed to a rogue or barbarian?
In my games, they don't. Classes are meta-game concepts, essentially just bags of mechanics that players use to model a character. A PC in my game can introduce themselves as a barbarian, for instance, but that just means that they hail from one of the barbarian tribes, not that they have the barbarian class. In fact, no one in my game world even understands what a barbarian class would be.
I ask this question because a recent addition to my game group asked, in character, what another character's class was, and confusion ensued as the other player roleplayed confusion as to what was meant by the question. It turns out that the player thought that classes were real things in the game world; that everyone in the game world understood that a class was a real thing and had meaning and defintion. His example was 'if someone says they're a Wizard, everyone knows what that means." My counter was that wizard was a title in my game, earned by graduating from a wizard school, and that people of that class that did not graduate from such a school were not know as wizards, instead being called hedge mages or similar. This seemed to be very disturbing to my new addition, who told me that he knew of no one else that played that way. He's a bit bombastic, and prone to such outbursts, it's a minor issue, but it made me actually stop and consider if I did do things in a less common way here.
So, are classes a concrete thing in your games?
In my games, they don't. Classes are meta-game concepts, essentially just bags of mechanics that players use to model a character. A PC in my game can introduce themselves as a barbarian, for instance, but that just means that they hail from one of the barbarian tribes, not that they have the barbarian class. In fact, no one in my game world even understands what a barbarian class would be.
I ask this question because a recent addition to my game group asked, in character, what another character's class was, and confusion ensued as the other player roleplayed confusion as to what was meant by the question. It turns out that the player thought that classes were real things in the game world; that everyone in the game world understood that a class was a real thing and had meaning and defintion. His example was 'if someone says they're a Wizard, everyone knows what that means." My counter was that wizard was a title in my game, earned by graduating from a wizard school, and that people of that class that did not graduate from such a school were not know as wizards, instead being called hedge mages or similar. This seemed to be very disturbing to my new addition, who told me that he knew of no one else that played that way. He's a bit bombastic, and prone to such outbursts, it's a minor issue, but it made me actually stop and consider if I did do things in a less common way here.
So, are classes a concrete thing in your games?