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

[Elderbrain]

In the group I play(ed) with, yes, classes were a thing mentioned in-character... not that every Fighter was called a "fighter" per se (another term like "warrior" might be substituted), but in-game the PCs and NPCs did recognize that members of different classes had different powers (not that the term "class" was used). Of course, your average Commoner NPC might not recognize the difference between a Sorcerer, Warlock, or Wizard, but he/she would know that that person was not, say, a Cleric. In the real world, we call people with different skills and abilities Technicians, Plumbers, Electricians, Mechanics, etc... why would the PCs and NPCs in the game-world not have such terms for their specialists? In the case of the "Barbarian" class, it's true that the term "barbarian" includes people who would not have the specific abilities of that class. However in the real world, warriors with different abilities definitely DID receive different names, for instance the berserker of the Viking world, who was noted for his battle-rage. Nobody would confuse such a warrior with, say, a European knight.

 

[Xeviat]

TLR: Classes have concrete meaning in my games.

In my games, Classes have concrete meaning. This is because 10.66 of the classes have spells or supernatural abilities that are tied to a class. Someone could lie, a Cleric could say they're a Wizard, but "Cleric" has meaning in the world. Some of the basic class names may not be universally used: Fighter, Rogue, and Cleric especially. Paladin is a thing. Rangers are a thing. Bards are a thing. Monks are a thing. Barbarians are a thing, separate from barbarian tribes (I like "berserker" better myself, always have, for this very reason). Warlocks are different from Sorcerers, who are different from Wizards; these three can get confused for each other by the common folk, but there is a difference. A nature cleric and a druid could be misunderstood for each other, but they are distinctly separate things.

A Fighter is a warrior who uses raw combat skill, while a Rogue is a character (not necessarily a warrior) who uses opportunity (however created) to fight. That fighting style, the difference between sneak attack and not, could distinguish a Fighter from a Rogue from a Fighter/Rogue to those with a keen eye (like a Mastermind Rogue or a Battlemaster Fighter). Maybe someone proficient with martial weapons, akin to a tool proficiency, could tell whether someone was proficient with the weapon they are wielding (Int+Proficiency check?), which could distinguish a fighter from a rogue.

So, the word "class" isn't used the same. Not everyone will answer "What are you" with "I'm a fighter", but some may answer "I'm a Ranger" or "I'm a Paladin". Those names could differ in different areas, but they are traditions and archetypes present within the world.

 

[Chaosmancer]

So, when I started reading this thread all the way at the beginning I had a completely different idea what this thread was about.

When I first read "Do classes have concrete meanings" the answer was obviously yes, because classes have concrete effects on the world. Level even plays into this btw but that is for the other thread I suppose.

For example, over 43 pages a lot of people have said there is no way an NPC could tell anything about a characters class by observing them. This is patently untrue, because the class is tied to specific abilities that have specific effects. A Wizard can only cast Fireball a certain number of times before running out of fireballs to cast. An evoker can create pockets of safety in that fireball, and whether they do it by sucking some of the flames into their mouth and rage screaming to the heavens or they do it by dancing to harp music they both are doing the same thing with the same concrete observable effect. And, as an added bonus, they will each be able to overchannel later on, barring multiclass and assuming pure class progression, and that will have the same concrete end results.

If you asked a Barbarian, A fighter and a Paladin to swing at a practice dummy you could observe at higher levels the fighter is hitting more often, but let's assume level 5 and everyone is the same speed. Then ask them to "give it everything they got" the barbarian would rage and deal more damage, the fighter would hit twice as fast as everyone else via action surge and the paladin would deal radiant holy damage via divine smite. Each of these is a concrete effect, observable in the game world that is shared between all people of that class.

It turns out though that we are not asking if they have concrete meaning within the game world. We are asking if the names have concrete meaning in the game world. Which is an entirely different problem.

Let's do some real-life comparison really fast.

Let's say I ask you to bring before me a "gamer". Who would you bring? Would they play table-top pen and pencil games? Video Games? PC Gaming? Board Games like Catan or phone app games like Farmville? Hard-core 70 hr a week players or more casual 3 hr a week players?

All of them are "gamers", all of them are completely different, even if they overlap in places.

That's the starting problem that I think isn't being addressed very effectively by either side. Just because your character would never walk up and say "I'm a Fighter" doesn't mean the local baron who served in the army isn't able to say "That guy is a Fighter". Even if you two have entirely different ideas of what it means to be a fighter. The baron probably isn't going to call the guy able to summon holy power a fighter, because normal men and women not blessed by the gods can't do that, you have to be something different.

However, I enjoy re-fluffing certain things, like the Barbarian. I haven't had a chance to build or play one yet, but if I ever did play a barbarian they wouldn't use "rage" as in "bloodthirsty anger" instead they would do more of a "battle trance" where they let go of the idea of protecting themselves and instead just flew at the enemy with no regard for personal safety. It even still works with the resistance from being able to ignore pain from the trance state, the concept that because the opponent expects you to flinch and you don't meaning their strikes don't land as intended and your increased awareness of the immediate combat allowing you to avoid blows more effectively by "quarter dodging" so your wounds are merely flesh wounds and not organ wounds. I think it fits fine, but it is a very different type of barbarian than anything in the books. More inspired by Japanese anime characters who "rage" in that manner than the berserkers of the Norse.

So, concrete meaning within the world. Yes. The name having a concrete meaning? As much as any names ever do in a complex world.

 

[Ovinomancer]

So, when I started reading this thread all the way at the beginning I had a completely different idea what this thread was about.

When I first read "Do classes have concrete meanings" the answer was obviously yes, because classes have concrete effects on the world. Level even plays into this btw but that is for the other thread I suppose.

For example, over 43 pages a lot of people have said there is no way an NPC could tell anything about a characters class by observing them. This is patently untrue, because the class is tied to specific abilities that have specific effects. A Wizard can only cast Fireball a certain number of times before running out of fireballs to cast. An evoker can create pockets of safety in that fireball, and whether they do it by sucking some of the flames into their mouth and rage screaming to the heavens or they do it by dancing to harp music they both are doing the same thing with the same concrete observable effect. And, as an added bonus, they will each be able to overchannel later on, barring multiclass and assuming pure class progression, and that will have the same concrete end results.

If you asked a Barbarian, A fighter and a Paladin to swing at a practice dummy you could observe at higher levels the fighter is hitting more often, but let's assume level 5 and everyone is the same speed. Then ask them to "give it everything they got" the barbarian would rage and deal more damage, the fighter would hit twice as fast as everyone else via action surge and the paladin would deal radiant holy damage via divine smite. Each of these is a concrete effect, observable in the game world that is shared between all people of that class.

It turns out though that we are not asking if they have concrete meaning within the game world. We are asking if the names have concrete meaning in the game world. Which is an entirely different problem.

Let's do some real-life comparison really fast.

Let's say I ask you to bring before me a "gamer". Who would you bring? Would they play table-top pen and pencil games? Video Games? PC Gaming? Board Games like Catan or phone app games like Farmville? Hard-core 70 hr a week players or more casual 3 hr a week players?

All of them are "gamers", all of them are completely different, even if they overlap in places.

That's the starting problem that I think isn't being addressed very effectively by either side. Just because your character would never walk up and say "I'm a Fighter" doesn't mean the local baron who served in the army isn't able to say "That guy is a Fighter". Even if you two have entirely different ideas of what it means to be a fighter. The baron probably isn't going to call the guy able to summon holy power a fighter, because normal men and women not blessed by the gods can't do that, you have to be something different.

However, I enjoy re-fluffing certain things, like the Barbarian. I haven't had a chance to build or play one yet, but if I ever did play a barbarian they wouldn't use "rage" as in "bloodthirsty anger" instead they would do more of a "battle trance" where they let go of the idea of protecting themselves and instead just flew at the enemy with no regard for personal safety. It even still works with the resistance from being able to ignore pain from the trance state, the concept that because the opponent expects you to flinch and you don't meaning their strikes don't land as intended and your increased awareness of the immediate combat allowing you to avoid blows more effectively by "quarter dodging" so your wounds are merely flesh wounds and not organ wounds. I think it fits fine, but it is a very different type of barbarian than anything in the books. More inspired by Japanese anime characters who "rage" in that manner than the berserkers of the Norse.

So, concrete meaning within the world. Yes. The name having a concrete meaning? As much as any names ever do in a complex world.

Your framing, while perhaps true in for others, doesn't work for me. Everyone who casts fireball by memorizing the formula isn't a wizard class in my game. NPCs do not follow PC rules for the most part. Most NPCs don't have a class at all. They do similar things, but they aren't wizards or clerics or rogues or fighters. To me, class is an entirely mechanical device that exists between the player and the game world, but isn't in the game world. It's an interface only, designed to offer modelling to a themed array of abilities using mechanics that try to balance the experience across the players. The NPCs, though, existing in the game world only, don't need that interface and can adopt any mechanics necessary to properly model the challenge they represent.

So, yeah, my player may be playing a wizard class, but there aren't a bunch of other NPCs around with the same set of mechanics governing their abilities. This severely limits the usefulness of 'well, I know he's a fighter even if he calls himself a boogabooga.' There's no way to know that he's a fighter class, because he may be the only one in the area, while there are a bunch of NPCs calling themselves boogaboogas, because boogaboogas are known as fearsome warriors of the plains and they live on the plains and are fearsome warriors without a single level of any class whatsoever.

 

[Arial Black]

a lot of people have said there is no way an NPC could tell anything about a characters class by observing them. This is patently untrue, because the class is tied to specific abilities that have specific effects. A Wizard can only cast Fireball a certain number of times before running out of fireballs to cast. An evoker can create pockets of safety in that fireball, and whether they do it by sucking some of the flames into their mouth and rage screaming to the heavens or they do it by dancing to harp music they both are doing the same thing with the same concrete observable effect. And, as an added bonus, they will each be able to overchannel later on, barring multiclass and assuming pure class progression, and that will have the same concrete end results.

If you asked a Barbarian, A fighter and a Paladin to swing at a practice dummy you could observe at higher levels the fighter is hitting more often, but let's assume level 5 and everyone is the same speed. Then ask them to "give it everything they got" the barbarian would rage and deal more damage, the fighter would hit twice as fast as everyone else via action surge and the paladin would deal radiant holy damage via divine smite. Each of these is a concrete effect, observable in the game world that is shared between all people of that class.

There is a serious flaw with your analysis here.

Sure, a creature in game could experiment scientifically, and observe results, and (within acceptable margins of error) conclude that Person A matches the PHB's description of the fighter class, while B must be a paladin from the PHB while C is obviously a barbarian because what we can observe in game matches the PHB's description of the class almost perfectly.

But the point is that creatures in the game do not have the PHB to refer to!

The things they can observe may or may not be tied to class features. When a 2nd level spell is cast, it is knowable in game by observation. Spell levels are a thing. But different classes can cast the same spells, so seeing a fireball doesn't give away an identity that precisely matches one class while denying another.

Using Spell Points to get more spell slots...how 'observable' is that?

What about increasing crit range to 19-20? Surely, that denotes a Champion Fighter, yeah? Er...no. Some Moonblade wielders would disagree. Plus, how 'observable' is that? How can an observer know that an attack was a crit? Some non-crit attacks do more damage than some crits, whether or not a hit takes the target down is more a function of their remaining hit points. Plus, the mere chance of getting twice as many crits because you crit on 19 and 20 doesn't mean that you will crit twice as often, because observers cannot tell whether a crit was generated by a 19 or a 20 (let alone being certain that a hit was a crit).

A barbarian's damage resistance? How can an observer tell the difference between that and simply having twice as many hit points?

All this is assuming that creatures let you perform experiments on them. And even this is assuming that there is any creature in game who could be motivated to discover how well the people he knows conform to the 5E rules set that he can know nothing about!

So, when meeting someone, no you don't know what class they are. 'Class' is a game construct, not an actual in game 'thing'.

 

[steeldragons]

So, when meeting someone, in my game's setting, no you don't know what class they are. 'Class' is a game construct, not an actual in game 'thing' at my table,.

<bold additions mine>

Fixed that for ya. You're welcome.

 

[Mephista]

But the point is that creatures in the game do not have the PHB to refer to!

They have other people, however. Using the novels and shared lore of Forgotten Realms as a standard, wizards, sorcerers, and warlocks are distinct things in the world, as are druids, rangers, clerics, paladins, and bards. You can take 480 adventurers, and group them according to their similarities. On average, forty of them will have the ability to cast spells from memorizing spellbooks. Forty will learn magic as an innate talent. Forty will need a matron/patron from distant planes. Forty will have the ability to heal by laying on hands, and so on. Well, the numbers will vary, but the point is that an NPC could study people and classify them according to the 12+ classes by similarities they all share.

The only exception to this process will be in Ovinomancer's situation, where everyone does things differently than the PCs, even other adventurers. However, by default, the world will have all wizards able to study the burning hands spell, write it in their spell book, and cast it the next morning. Repeat with all other 1st level spells on the wizard list. No one else can do that.

As long as there are measurable traits, you can categorize people. If you have an in-game rivalry between wizards, sorcerers, and warlocks, as suggested by many sources, there are observable differences between them.

 

[Ovinomancer]

They have other people, however. Using the novels and shared lore of Forgotten Realms as a standard, wizards, sorcerers, and warlocks are distinct things in the world, as are druids, rangers, clerics, paladins, and bards. You can take 480 adventurers, and group them according to their similarities. On average, forty of them will have the ability to cast spells from memorizing spellbooks. Forty will learn magic as an innate talent. Forty will need a matron/patron from distant planes. Forty will have the ability to heal by laying on hands, and so on. Well, the numbers will vary, but the point is that an NPC could study people and classify them according to the 12+ classes by similarities they all share.

The only exception to this process will be in Ovinomancer's situation, where everyone does things differently than the PCs, even other adventurers. However, by default, the world will have all wizards able to study the burning hands spell, write it in their spell book, and cast it the next morning. Repeat with all other 1st level spells on the wizard list. No one else can do that.

As long as there are measurable traits, you can categorize people. If you have an in-game rivalry between wizards, sorcerers, and warlocks, as suggested by many sources, there are observable differences between them.

But that's the point -- it's not the rules that determine that classes are part of the game fiction, it's the setting.

 

[empireofchaos]

For example, over 43 pages a lot of people have said there is no way an NPC could tell anything about a characters class by observing them. This is patently untrue, because the class is tied to specific abilities that have specific effects. A Wizard can only cast Fireball a certain number of times before running out of fireballs to cast. An evoker can create pockets of safety in that fireball, and whether they do it by sucking some of the flames into their mouth and rage screaming to the heavens or they do it by dancing to harp music they both are doing the same thing with the same concrete observable effect. And, as an added bonus, they will each be able to overchannel later on, barring multiclass and assuming pure class progression, and that will have the same concrete end results.

If you asked a Barbarian, A fighter and a Paladin to swing at a practice dummy you could observe at higher levels the fighter is hitting more often, but let's assume level 5 and everyone is the same speed. Then ask them to "give it everything they got" the barbarian would rage and deal more damage, the fighter would hit twice as fast as everyone else via action surge and the paladin would deal radiant holy damage via divine smite. Each of these is a concrete effect, observable in the game world that is shared between all people of that class.

In this one regard, my position (as a proponent of classes) is actually closer to that of the other side. It's very difficult to know, in a quantifiable way, how often a character "hits". There was a great paragraph in the 1e PHB (or maybe DMG, I can't exactly recall) describing what happens when you beat down a high level fighter who has 90 HP. By the time he's been reduced to about half that number, he is covered with lots of bumps and bruises. That means that a lot of the "hits" are not actually hits that penetrate armor and cause bleeding. You are just wearing the guy down, and setting him up for the coup de grace, which may be the only thing that looks like an actual "hit".

Obviously, a high-level combatant is going to have more of these hits (and will be more successful in general), but it's highly unlikely (to put it mildly) that there is someone in the game-world with a sophisticated enough knowledge of statistics to be able to glean, from long-term observation and recording of data, what level and class someone is on the basis of "hitting".

On the other hand, there are certainly styles, and if classes have reality, it wouldn't be terribly complicated for the initiated to be able to quickly glean one's class, archetype and level from watching you fight (rather than "hit"). Per day or per rest powers (like spells) would be somewhat easier to observe - but again, for the initiated. Wizards likely take great care in obscuring their abilities with a veil of mystery, and only those who belong to their school would likely be able to penetrate this veil (and live).

It turns out though that we are not asking if they have concrete meaning within the game world. We are asking if the names have concrete meaning in the game world. Which is an entirely different problem. Let's say I ask you to bring before me a "gamer". Who would you bring? Would they play table-top pen and pencil games? Video Games? PC Gaming? Board Games like Catan or phone app games like Farmville? Hard-core 70 hr a week players or more casual 3 hr a week players?

All of them are "gamers", all of them are completely different, even if they overlap in places.

That's the starting problem that I think isn't being addressed very effectively by either side. Just because your character would never walk up and say "I'm a Fighter" doesn't mean the local baron who served in the army isn't able to say "That guy is a Fighter". Even if you two have entirely different ideas of what it means to be a fighter. The baron probably isn't going to call the guy able to summon holy power a fighter, because normal men and women not blessed by the gods can't do that, you have to be something different.

Yeah, the semantic aspects kept being brought up (as a red herring), but they didn't make a terribly useful contribution to the discussion. I used an example similar to that of your proverbial gamer involving physicists and chemists. Just because most people (including, occasionally, those who bear those titles) can't always tell the difference, doesn't mean the distinctions don't really exist.

However, I enjoy re-fluffing certain things, like the Barbarian. I haven't had a chance to build or play one yet, but if I ever did play a barbarian they wouldn't use "rage" as in "bloodthirsty anger" instead they would do more of a "battle trance" where they let go of the idea of protecting themselves and instead just flew at the enemy with no regard for personal safety. It even still works with the resistance from being able to ignore pain from the trance state, the concept that because the opponent expects you to flinch and you don't meaning their strikes don't land as intended and your increased awareness of the immediate combat allowing you to avoid blows more effectively by "quarter dodging" so your wounds are merely flesh wounds and not organ wounds. I think it fits fine, but it is a very different type of barbarian than anything in the books. More inspired by Japanese anime characters who "rage" in that manner than the berserkers of the Norse.

So, concrete meaning within the world. Yes. The name having a concrete meaning? As much as any names ever do in a complex world.

If you want to have Sailor Moon holy-roller barbarians in your world, more power to you. To me, different fluff would be be better fit with a different archetype (since "berserker" literally mean "bear shirter" - and refers to an animal-like rage which does not really resemble your "battle trance" that closely). To me, the fighting styles of these two characters would be completely different, and it would hardly enter anyone's mind to compare them. I doubt the aesthetics of this type of character would accord with my vision so that I would allow it and build an archetype around it, but I might if it were described in a way I could anchor to some group or another (and that's what would make the character identifiable with a particular class).

 

[Mephista]

But that's the point -- it's not the rules that determine that classes are part of the game fiction, it's the setting.

Irregardless, I was commenting directly to Ariel Black's assertion that without a PHB, in game NPCs can't divide the classes into, well, classes. That's a false statement. I couldn't care less what everyone else does in their individual tables. I care about provablely false statements.

In the default D&D setting (Forgotten Realms for 5e, but this applies to 4e and 3e as well), the classes are distinct roles that are known about in character. The D&D writers, novelists, and video game designers make a point to talk about classes in character, such as a rivalry between wizards, warlocks, and sorcerers, about paladin and monk orders, about the roles of rangers, and so on. This is the standard supported by the various D&D media. This is the style setting that Chaosmancer started his argument from, this is the same setting that Ariel Black had to use to try and refute Chaosmancer.

Ovinomancer, individual table has a way that its doesn't make sense to divide things up by class. And that's fine. But its not what I was talking about. There are demonstrative abilities that each class has that differentiate them from other classes. These abilities have a direct impact on the story.