D&D General Character Classes should Mean Something in the Setting

[doctorbadwolf]

This is because D&D was never designed for a specific setting.

D&D was always a hodge-podge of different Fantasy S&S, and Weird Fantasy sources. If you were to take a step back and create the next edition of D&D for a specific setting from the ground up, a lot things would need to be mechanically re-thought out.




If it doesn't have a purpose; it should be cut out.

Because Limits are important.

They're not just how we keep things in check, but they're the best way to give things a unique flavor. When you have a world that includes every D&D class, and assumes the existence of every D&D monster somewhere, it's going to end up looking a bit like the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk, no matter what you do.

The best way to create a new world isn't to come up with a new spin on existing classes or monsters; but to exclude things.

IMHO, you should stick to your first instinct and cut Sorcerers out.

Rather than trying to come up with yet another reason to include more of "Core D&D" , your setting will be more unique without having to justify why sorcerers are in your world. Because the more you include the more your setting will trend towards a Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk pastiche.





Them's the naughty words right there...

I have seen it on this very board that when GM's start talking about restricting this or that element from the core PHB for their home brew campaign they start to get very politelyish pushback for not being "creative" enough to accommodate what a player may want to play regardless of the settings conceits.

When IMHO it is restriction that tends to breed creativity.

I firmly believe that every class can fit in nearly any setting that isn’t built to tell a single story, but I agree you don’t have to find a place for them all. If sorcerers have no particular place, then it just means that they are so rare that they don’t impact the world, or so disparate that there is no link between them within the game world. Doesn’t mean a player can’t have their mage be a sorcerer because they learned/understand magic in a more malleable way that is more limited in other ways because they work a small number of spells into their muscle memory and focus their creativity on twisting and bending the magic as they release it.

 

[Sithlord]

Who's looking in detail and conducting this census to check that all wizards operate the same way? Even if we have a wizarding school and exams then the odds are the warlock can pass most of the wizarding exams - after all they can cast spells and most of the wizard's ritual.

I'd have said this census and ensuring that everyone was cookie cutter clones so wizards who swap spell books are almost functionally identical to each other with only a little study was just weird and creepy myself. (And yes I'm aware this was improved by the way 4e/5e handles specialisations).

I'm not even sure that a Partisan and a Ranseur are different weapons but they've had different rules. Clearly D&D has historically had different rules where the distinctions were trivial. And the difference between two people is not.

Well, yes. But two named bugbears can also have different rules.

And Elminster and Tasha are different sorts of casters therefore they get different rules. The idea that just because they prepare spells from books two people must do so using the exact same mechanics irrespective of e.g. individual study patterns is something I find weird. This is a non-trivial difference, especially when you are supposed to be all about studying and casting.

I see few warlocks with skill in arcana. I look at them as really know very very little about magic. They just made a deal with an other world entity for magic and use the abilities granted them. That just my take on them. They may deal for their power. No clue on the nuts and bolts of magic. Plus i have never even seen a warlock with an intelligence above 10 (almost always 8) or even skill in arcana.

 

[Delazar]

There are atheist clerics in Eberron, in the Blood of Vol. They believe that the “gods” are just psychological archetypes given folk stories and that divine power comes from faith and will, not from anything external. They aren’t the whole faith, bc others view the gods as antagonistic toward mortals, while still others have different beliefs from either of those.

A homebrew setting could easily just not have gods but still have clerics.

Also in Planescape there are the Athar. They don't deny the existence of powerful creatures calling themselves "gods" but they just don't consider them "divine" (whatever that means), and they do not deserve worship. For the Athar, "gods" are just super powerful individuals, like saying that an archmage is a "god" to an ant. Gods are the archmages, we are the ants.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

“D&D in space” doesn’t mean anything more than “a space game using the D&D system“. The D&D system does not require any particular setting, theme, tone, genre, or even gameplay style.

"System doesn't matter" huh? Ok. If that's your position then well, welcome to 1991 and there's not much to discuss.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

That doesn't mean it doesn't support a broad range of fantasy. It simply means that the medium informs the experience, and this is essentially true (to a greater or lesser degree) for every medium.

"to a greater or lesser degree" is doing a huge amount of work there, mate!

The issue with D&D is that the medium is extremely peculiar and distinctive and has serious limitations. The same is true for ED of course.

As for your "you couldn't do X with Earthdawn", you can't do Dark Sun with 5E either. You can't even come close. It's totally unsupported. You'd have a to build a setting that was like DS but wasn't - same as ED. And you're talking about D&D settings in particular which doesn't at all support your "broad range" of fantasy point. Eberron doesn't work great with 5E - it works far worse than with 3.XE (or even 4E, arguably). You'd have far less trouble running the FR or Eberron with ED than you would DS with 5E, I'd say (though ED also couldn't handle DS). And those are settings specifically designed for a different game.

Could 5E do Barsaive convincingly? No, not without a huge amount of extra rules (as ED could benefit from to do Eberron say).

Horror points aren't particularly peculiar in the context of fantasy as a genre. I totally disagree that anything at all in ED has "more implications than Vancian magic" though ("as many" maybe, but that's my point). I just outright reject that. Vancian magic is hard-incompatible with the vast majority of fantasy fiction. The lack of a "flowing" magic system at all is an absolutely gigantic issue. Fundamentally you can't even represent most fantasy settings because of that.

Hit Points have endless and huge implications which seriously limit the range of fantasy D&D can actually do, too. I know people like to put different hats on D&D, but that's what's happening in most cases, and claiming D&D is "generic fantasy" is just laughable.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Can't -really- do Athiest Clerics in D&D Settings 'cause most of the time the fact that there are gods is common knowledge. Not "Maybe there's a God" but "I saw him, last Tuesday, down at pub. He owes me 6 silver!"

But Ur-Priest, for sure. Stealing magic from the gods. Or a Cleric devoted not to a deity but to a specific ideal/domain? I could see that being a thing.

The gods don't manifest physically in the Ravenloft or Eberron settings, and don't exist in Dark Sun or Mystara (they are immortals instead). I mean, outside the original three settings of TSR (Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms) they tended to downplay "physical gods".

My own campaign has plenty of religions and clerics, but no gods manifest or talk directly to their followers. They might exist, they might not. (The powers clerics get could be from their patrons, or merely magic that comes to the faithful not much different to wizards). I also do away with the entire Great Wheel and all the planes that D&D usually has.

But it's still D&D.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

"to a greater or lesser degree" is doing a huge amount of work there, mate!

The issue with D&D is that the medium is extremely peculiar and distinctive and has serious limitations. The same is true for ED of course.

As for your "you couldn't do X with Earthdawn", you can't do Dark Sun with 5E either. You can't even come close. It's totally unsupported. You'd have a to build a setting that was like DS but wasn't - same as ED. And you're talking about D&D settings in particular which doesn't at all support your "broad range" of fantasy point. Eberron doesn't work great with 5E - it works far worse than with 3.XE (or even 4E, arguably). You'd have far less trouble running the FR or Eberron with ED than you would DS with 5E, I'd say (though ED also couldn't handle DS). And those are settings specifically designed for a different game.

Could 5E do Barsaive convincingly? No, not without a huge amount of extra rules (as ED could benefit from to do Eberron say).

Horror points aren't particularly peculiar in the context of fantasy as a genre. I totally disagree that anything at all in ED has "more implications than Vancian magic" though ("as many" maybe, but that's my point). I just outright reject that. Vancian magic is hard-incompatible with the vast majority of fantasy fiction. The lack of a "flowing" magic system at all is an absolutely gigantic issue. Fundamentally you can't even represent most fantasy settings because of that.

Hit Points have endless and huge implications which seriously limit the range of fantasy D&D can actually do, too. I know people like to put different hats on D&D, but that's what's happening in most cases, and claiming D&D is "generic fantasy" is just laughable.

Pure hyperbole. People are already playing Dark Sun with 5th Edition rules. You're saying they ''can't even come close". Come off it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Pure hyperbole. People are already playing Dark Sun with 5th Edition rules. You're saying they ''can't even come close". Come off it.

Not using the actual rules from the 5E rulebooks they're not.

They might be playing a thing they're calling Dark Sun, but the total lack of a full Psionic class (or much in the way of Psionics rules), the lack of support for Defiling mechanics, the absence of several classes (some could be archetypes in 5E), the absence of most of the races, the lack of rules for weapon materials, the lack of rules for Dragons/Avangions, the lack of the appropriate monsters, the lack of a definition of arcane magic and so on. I mean that's practically the tip of the iceberg. I repeat - you cannot even come close to Dark Sun with the extant 5E rules.

Maybe what you mean is, by homebrewing a gigantic amount of material, including entire classes and fundamental mechanics not present in 5E, people can run a homebrew version of Dark Sun using some 5E rules and a ton of additional material? If so sure. But that's the point I'm making. Even to run a D&D setting - a setting specifically designed for an earlier edition of the same game - you'd need vast amounts of extra material - and if you generated vast amounts of extra material for ED, it could likely do the same. They're both highly specific settings with huge numbers of extremely weird and specific assumptions, and both of which lack rules for pretty common stuff from fantasy settings.

 

[Fanaelialae]

"to a greater or lesser degree" is doing a huge amount of work there, mate!

The issue with D&D is that the medium is extremely peculiar and distinctive and has serious limitations. The same is true for ED of course.

As for your "you couldn't do X with Earthdawn", you can't do Dark Sun with 5E either. You can't even come close. It's totally unsupported. You'd have a to build a setting that was like DS but wasn't - same as ED. And you're talking about D&D settings in particular which doesn't at all support your "broad range" of fantasy point. Eberron doesn't work great with 5E - it works far worse than with 3.XE (or even 4E, arguably). You'd have far less trouble running the FR or Eberron with ED than you would DS with 5E, I'd say (though ED also couldn't handle DS). And those are settings specifically designed for a different game.

Could 5E do Barsaive convincingly? No, not without a huge amount of extra rules (as ED could benefit from to do Eberron say).

Horror points aren't particularly peculiar in the context of fantasy as a genre. I totally disagree that anything at all in ED has "more implications than Vancian magic" though ("as many" maybe, but that's my point). I just outright reject that. Vancian magic is hard-incompatible with the vast majority of fantasy fiction. The lack of a "flowing" magic system at all is an absolutely gigantic issue. Fundamentally you can't even represent most fantasy settings because of that.

Hit Points have endless and huge implications which seriously limit the range of fantasy D&D can actually do, too. I know people like to put different hats on D&D, but that's what's happening in most cases, and claiming D&D is "generic fantasy" is just laughable.

Hit points don't have huge implications unless you impose those implications upon them. IIRC from our previous conversations, you view hit points as "meat". Meaning that a 100 hp fighter can survive more physical punishment than a 10 hp fighter. Under this interpretation, using rigorous application of the scientific method, one could arguably determine exactly how many hp that fighter has (from within the game world itself).

However, if you recall, I view hit points as nothing more than a (convenient) gamist abstraction. Within my interpretation, there are no implications of hp on the game world, because they don't exist in the game world. No application of the scientific method (in the setting) could ever reveal the existence of hp, because they don't exist there to begin with.

Regarding "Vancian" magic, it's only Vancian in the loosest sense in 5e, and sorcerers in particular are quite similar to mages in much of fantasy. They know certain spells. They have a finite amount of magic they can generally use before they exhaust their supply. Wizards are the closest you'll find to Vancian magic, and even they are further than they've ever been from the writings of Jack Vance.

Of course, there are usually specifics to a given magic system that it doesn't duplicate, but that's literally impossible for a "generic" magic system. If you want to duplicate a specific magic system, you would need to design a system specifically for that. Worlds Without Number, GURPS, and Savage World (as well as every other big net game out there) have essentially the same "issue" with their magic system.

I don't expect to convince you, but I assure you that my group and I have played a vast variety of fantasy games using D&D over the years. You might think that we are "fish who don't know what water is" but we do understand both its strengths and limitations. We've played plenty of non-D&D games over the years. It's just the opinion of my group and myself, but the limitations of D&D are in no way as limiting as you seem to believe they are. As far as I can tell, the limitations that you see in D&D are largely self-imposed or simply the result of what seems to me to be unrealistic expectations.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

IIRC from our previous conversations, you view hit points as "meat". Meaning that a 100 hp fighter can survive more physical punishment than a 10 hp fighter. Under this interpretation, using rigorous application of the scientific method, one could arguably determine exactly how many hp that fighter has (from within the game world itself).

However, if you recall, I view hit points as nothing more than a (convenient) gamist abstraction. Within my interpretation, there are no implications of hp on the game world, because they don't exist in the game world. No application of the scientific method (in the setting) could ever reveal the existence of hp, because they don't exist there to begin with.

You misremember.

I want to regard HP as the latter, but they are prevented from being that, because the game rules hard-block it, even if you don't regard them as "physics" that apply off-screen, they do apply on on-screen, and they prevent stuff that's a really, really basic component of really common fantasy settings, like uncontrolled falls killing or seriously injuring people, or people being knocked out or killed in a single blow. The fact that in D&D, all on-screen combat is weardown combat, and that there's basically a trinary state of being "basically fine", "dying" and "dead", with no injuries, and immediate returns to full effectiveness on the slightest healing, and where one night's sleep will fix literally anything does limit what D&D can do fantasy-wise, even just applying on-screen (and assuming off-screen things are very different).

Regarding "Vancian" magic, it's only Vancian in the loosest sense in 5e, and sorcerers in particular are quite similar to mages in much of fantasy. They know certain spells. They have a finite amount of magic they can generally use before they exhaust their supply. Wizards are the closest you'll find to Vancian magic, and even they are further than they've ever been from the writings of Jack Vance.

Of course, there are usually specifics to a given magic system that it doesn't duplicate, but that's literally impossible for a "generic" magic system. If you want to duplicate a specific magic system, you would need to design a system specifically for that. Worlds Without Number, GURPS, and Savage World (as well as every other big net game out there) have essentially the same "issue" with their magic system.

This is disingenuous, though it may not be intentional on your part.

D&D was never close to Jack Vance's take in any edition (as has been much discussed), so it's a weird and pointless semantic argument to point that out. The term Vancian applies regardless.

I agree that it's not possible to have a truly universal magic system (god knows people have tried), but I don't think it's remotely true that you can't design magic systems that are broadly generic and whilst they might not be a 1:1 match, are say a 0.8:1 match, whereas D&D's bizarre magic system isn't even going to be a 0.1:1 match with most games. Either using an exhaustion-based or spell-point based system with casting checks and broader spells would get you a hell of lot closer to about 80% of fantasy media.

(As an aside, you could probably have a decent discussion about exactly how to fix this in another thread, because I don't think it would be impossible, esp. as most magic systems in fantasy media fall into about three categories none of which is even slightly similar to D&D's approach.)

Even WWN with it's intentionally-peculiar system at least has a properly worked-in spell-point based caster (and you can bring in Psionics from SWN). You'd have a hell of an easier time running DS with WWN than 5E D&D (indeed I've seen some people discussing how they're doing just that). And WWN isn't a "generic" system, it's a specific one.

GURPS is of course generic, but I will admit, I am drawing a blank of its magic system entirely so can't comment. SWADE's magic system is going to work better for a lot more fantasy than D&D (IIRC, it's been a while).

It's certainly not true to suggest most/all fantasy RPGs have the same issue to remotely the same degree. It's a risible claim that relies on us ignoring obvious differences. D&D's system is hugely incompatible with fantasy in general because it's so odd.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Narratively, perhaps. But mechanically, only one of the two classes can actually add new spells that they find and add them to their repertoire. The Warlock can do that to a smaller extent if they pick Pact of the Tome and a specific Invocation. And only Rituals, of which there are very few.

To me, this is cutting the distinction very fine.

The Wizard added 8 spells they found to their spellbook. The Warlock added 3 cantrips and 5 rituals to their Book of Shadows. I don’t see any basis to conclude that the Wizard has any basis to claim that he is more academically-oriented than that Warlock.

And second, many of the wizards I’ve seen don’t conform to the stereotype of seeking out knowledge to add to their spellbooks. So a warlock whose background is to actively seek knowledge, and who take a subclass and an invocation to do that specifically is likely to be more academically-oriented than the average wizard.

 

[Delazar]

Not using the actual rules from the 5E rulebooks they're not.

They might be playing a thing they're calling Dark Sun, but the total lack of a full Psionic class (or much in the way of Psionics rules), the lack of support for Defiling mechanics, the absence of several classes (some could be archetypes in 5E), the absence of most of the races, the lack of rules for weapon materials, the lack of rules for Dragons/Avangions, the lack of the appropriate monsters, the lack of a definition of arcane magic and so on. I mean that's practically the tip of the iceberg. I repeat - you cannot even come close to Dark Sun with the extant 5E rules.

Maybe what you mean is, by homebrewing a gigantic amount of material, including entire classes and fundamental mechanics not present in 5E, people can run a homebrew version of Dark Sun using some 5E rules and a ton of additional material? If so sure. But that's the point I'm making. Even to run a D&D setting - a setting specifically designed for an earlier edition of the same game - you'd need vast amounts of extra material - and if you generated vast amounts of extra material for ED, it could likely do the same. They're both highly specific settings with huge numbers of extremely weird and specific assumptions, and both of which lack rules for pretty common stuff from fantasy settings.

not trying to disprove your point, but I run a 2-year long campaign in Dark Sun using 5e, and all I had was a 6 pages conversion document

Fury of Freedom

A D&D 5e Campaign - Started October 2017 - Ended October 2019

darksun01.blogspot.com

 

[Ruin Explorer]

not trying to disprove your point, but I run a 2-year long campaign in Dark Sun using 5e, and all I had was a 6 pages conversion document

Fury of Freedom

A D&D 5e Campaign - Started October 2017 - Ended October 2019

darksun01.blogspot.com

Sure, and with respect, much of that would never appear in any official 5E book, and it doesn't deal with most of the issues I mentioned (it too is missing most of the stuff). It's a crude homebrew which calls itself Dark Sun. I'm sure it was fun - most crude homebrews are (metaphorical or literal)! And that's an official D&D setting which has appeared in two editions!

 

[Krachek]

It is almost a quantic question,
Do npc have a stat bloc only when they interact with PC or all the time?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It is almost a quantic question,
Do npc have a stat bloc only when they interact with PC or all the time?

Yeah I think that's an amusing question!

In earlier editions (OD&D, 1E), particularly those with a sandbox approach, it's pretty clear it was intended to be "all the time" to at least some extent - certainly much of it was diegetic, i.e. applied "off-screen". But by 4E, it was pretty much definitely "only when they interact with PCs". 5E is closer to 4E on this I think.

HP themselves have always been a bit weird but it seems like they are non-diegetic and don't apply off-screen, broadly speaking, and EGG seems to have regarded them this way. Still, them applying on-screen limits what D&D can do, and pushes it away from being particularly "generic". No system is universal, but D&D is one of the ones further from the typical events of fantasy media. Back in 2E this caused a lot of issue and hilarity when characters from D&D novels were given official stats, and often had to break pretty basic D&D rules. It got particularly bad when a character habitually or definingly did something which was completely impossible under AD&D 2E rules, like snap a neck with their bare hands. IIRC in the books listing FR heroes this ended up with people having bizarre magic items or special rules to allow them to do stuff that characters normally couldn't, and it was very irritating as a player to see the issues highlighted like that whilst the main rules did nothing to address them (even though as WWN shows, in a lot of cases they could have).

 

[Umbran]

"System doesn't matter" huh? Ok. If that's your position then well, welcome to 1991 and there's not much to discuss.

Mod Note:
Dude, if you are going to engage, you have a responsibility to be respectful. Please continue with 75% less snarky dismissiveness, if you continue at all. Thanks.

 

[TwoSix]

Even WWN with it's intentionally-peculiar system at least has a properly worked-in spell-point based caster (and you can bring in Psionics from SWN). You'd have a hell of an easier time running DS with WWN than 5E D&D (indeed I've seen some people discussing how they're doing just that). And WWN isn't a "generic" system, it's a specific one.

I'm just treating most of the non-spell using classes as Psionic classes; Healers, Vowed, Duelists, etc. Easier, and I don't need more books.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Also in Planescape there are the Athar. They don't deny the existence of powerful creatures calling themselves "gods" but they just don't consider them "divine" (whatever that means), and they do not deserve worship. For the Athar, "gods" are just super powerful individuals, like saying that an archmage is a "god" to an ant. Gods are the archmages, we are the ants.

Yep. Atheism is pretty easy in D&D.

"System doesn't matter" huh? Ok. If that's your position then well, welcome to 1991 and there's not much to discuss.

Ah yes, the condescension and assumption of ignorance rather than engage with the concept that people legitimately disagree with you.

Eberron doesn't work great with 5E - it works far worse than with 3.XE (or even 4E, arguably).

It works excellently in 5e. In fact, the game is friendlier to the assumptions of Eberron now than it was in the much less generic 3.5.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Also, just a note, making monsters/NPCs isn’t homebrew. It is literally part of the game. Part of most TTRPGSs, in fact, but especially those with an intention toward being a versatile toolkit, like D&D, or the even more generic GURPS.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Anyway, perhaps a discussion of whether D&D is generic could be its own thread?