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

[empireofchaos]

Yeah, people can group themselves any way they want, but they cannot group themselves based on their D&D class because they cannot know their D&D class!

"Hey Kabeiroi! Are you hill dwarves or mountain dwarves?"

"What? We help our father Hephaestus tend to his forge. We don't understand what you mean."

"Aha! Gotcha! You can't group yourselves as a D&D race! Race is metagame!"


"Hey Daedalus? Are you a guild artisan?"

"What's a 'guild'?"

"Aha! Gotcha! You can't group yourself into a D&D background! Background is metagame!"

 

[empireofchaos]

Nobody said it is impossible for heroes to be kings or that NO kings are heroes.

No, but someone did say this:

Its just WEIRD to think that the world would be made up of people who can only acquire certain specific combinations of abilities in certain patterns, and that entire organizations and social structures would be made up of people with such a narrow templatized skill set and behavior. It wouldn't IMHO be even vaguely similar to the real world, it would be WEIRD AS HELL.

I'm showing how it can actually be, not only possible, but normal, or common, for kings to actually have a fairly narrow skill set as a qualification for kingship, in the real world.

Class is moderately useful, it is VERY useful as a way to help PLAYERS choose what sort of character they play and what exactly benefits they are entitled to in the game based on that. That doesn't make class REAL in the game world. Nothing, even in 1e, indicates that a character can literally name off the classes or tell which one he belongs to, or (as an NPC) even state that he does belong to one.

It doesn't make class real in your game world. There are lots of indications, in the rules, in the way a significant proportion of people (at least a third, but arguably a majority, judging by this poll), and based on the examples I gave, that lead to that conclusion, and no amount of repetition by you is going to change that.

Other things like 'what level do I have to be to cast spell X' aren't even necessarily germane either. As an NPC there aren't rules for when or if you can cast certain spells. Its perfectly possible that its within the realm of what happens in a world for a child to cast a 9th level spell, and without knowing any other magic. Presumably there's a narrative reason for that which elucidates some sort of principle that operates in the game world in question, but its not 'against the rules' for this to happen, the game isn't a set of rules for what CAN happen. Thus 'class' isn't a set of rules for how everyone advances or what they do, only for PCs.

That's your reading. But there are too many examples of classed NPCs in published and homebrewed materials to convince me that non-classed NPCs should predominate. Especially in my settings.

 

[empireofchaos]

You point out all these logical inconsistencies with dungeons and monsters, as presented in the AD&D-esque paradigm that includes, in your estimation, class as a fact of the game world, yet nothing I've seen has ever resolved any of those inconsistencies, EXCEPT a deeper and less gamist-centered world design that is HIGHLY unlikely to be built around classes.

As for the rest, I don't know what it is that you are arguing. Nobody ever said "no empires ever exist" nor that monsters don't have their own societies and perhaps even coinage and empires of their own in some instances. That is all rather irrelevant to question at hand. Nothing in any of that says that humanity must be larded full of classed individuals at a 1% rate because otherwise the monsters would eat them all, which was your argument (slightly paraphrased).

I think that reasoning conclusions about how the world works from AD&D's treasure tables and monster descriptions and such is a fool's errand. No consistent world can ever come of it. Gygax didn't have a consistent world in mind, he had a fun game scenario in mind. Where things conflicted he simply assumed a suspension of disbelief as far as I can tell. He certainly made NO attempt to explain where treasure comes from, and only the most cursory of statements about how it would interrelate with things like the economics of the game world. To extract conclusions from that is simply to see something that isn't there.

You're insisting on modeling some sort of historical realism, but the examples you give (e.g. Borgias, non-martial kings) either illustrate the opposite of what your are trying to argue, or are too idiosyncratic to make your point. Or your contentions show a lack of understanding of those real societies you invoke (empires are common - and their modes of organizing people into hierarchies would likely be, too, in many game worlds).

On the other hand, you fail to realize that the "real world" differs fundamentally from the in-game world because it lacks very powerful magic and other powers that are present in the game worlds people use. So your "realism" is kind of beside the point as a model of a campaign world.

Given the contradictory premises, it's not particularly surprising that you think trying to reason out a class structure is a fool's errand. It's your business whether you want to do this or not in your games. But your insistence that such modeling just can't be done - by anyone - is annoying.

 

[bmcdaniel]

Suppose the following scenario occurs while playing a game of D&D3.5.

The PCs meet a local baron who impresses them as being very competent: He can kill 4 kobolds with 4 different greatsword strokes in 6 seconds; he can regularly make a long jump of 30 feet; he can swim underwater for 1.5 minutes (or hold his breath motionless for 3 minutes); etc.

The DM tells the players that, while out riding one day, the baron fell off his horse and hit his head on a rock, which instantly killed the baron.

The players reason as follows: According to the player's handbook, for a human to make 4 attacks per round with a greatsword, he must be a fighter of at least 16th level. This is supported by his ability to regularly make DC 30 jump checks (i.e. ~ +4 Str plus 16 ranks in jump gives him a +20 modifier). If he can swim underwater for 90 seconds, the baron must have at least a 15 Con. Minimum hit points for a 16th level fighter with 15 Con is 48 hit points (with the unlikely assumption he rolled 1 every time).

Falling 10 feet off a horse does 1d6 damage. Perhaps the DM added another 1d6 for the rock. Maybe even assume that the fall did "critical damage" and doubled. That still means the fall did at most 24 hit points of damage, and could not have killed the baron.

Therefore, the players reason that that something else must have gone, and they go off in search of the baron's murderer.

As a DM, is your reaction:

A. The players are very clever. By knowing the way the game world works, they have discovered something important.

B. The world doesn't work that way. Hit points, character classes, etc. are constructs only to describe how the PCs interact with the world.

IMHO, for D&D3.5, the correct answer is A. The world really does operate according to a set of rules, even if those rules aren't always visible to the PCs. (Absent some bizzarre prestige class or something similar)

However, for D&D5e (and 4e), I would say the correct answer is B. It is entirely consistent for a baron to have all kinds of ad hoc special abilities (multi-attack, hold breath) that don't come packaged with high hit points.

 

[Shasarak]

Suppose the following scenario occurs while playing a game of D&D3.5.

The PCs meet a local baron who impresses them as being very competent: He can kill 4 kobolds with 4 different greatsword strokes in 6 seconds; he can regularly make a long jump of 30 feet; he can swim underwater for 1.5 minutes (or hold his breath motionless for 3 minutes); etc.

The DM tells the players that, while out riding one day, the baron fell off his horse and hit his head on a rock, which instantly killed the baron.

The players reason as follows: According to the player's handbook, for a human to make 4 attacks per round with a greatsword, he must be a fighter of at least 16th level. This is supported by his ability to regularly make DC 30 jump checks (i.e. ~ +4 Str plus 16 ranks in jump gives him a +20 modifier). If he can swim underwater for 90 seconds, the baron must have at least a 15 Con. Minimum hit points for a 16th level fighter with 15 Con is 48 hit points (with the unlikely assumption he rolled 1 every time).

Point of order: the Baron may have abilities such as the "Cleave" feat which would allow him to kill 4 Kobolds with less then 4 "attacks" making him less then 16th level.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The trouble with all this is that what you know is not what they are, but what they do; their field of expertise as we choose to define 'field'. Are physicists, chemists and biologists different paths of their 'class', chosen at 3rd level? Are they different classes? Are they all commoners with different skill and feat choices? We cannot know, and in a game which included rules to create scientists those guys could not know their own class in rules terms, even though they could and would divide themselves into factions in game which may or may not match the game rules governing them.

All of those things you have suggested are possible ways a game could choose to do it. That there are multiple possibilities does not mean that you can say that absolutely every world can't do it.

But their D&D class is unknowable. They can certainly describe themselves in similar ways (fighter, wizard) and the names of the classes are supposed to resemble the role they play, but anyone in game describing themselves as a fighter may or may not have fighter class levels.

You seem to be arguing two different things here. On the one hand, your first sentence suggests you are arguing that class is unknowable, even in principle, to characters--it is never, ever something they could be aware of under any circumstances. But the other sentences, and some of your other stuff (like the "I may be over-emphasizing" bit), seem to indicate that you are merely arguing that it isn't knowable in some universes. These two are fundamentally distinct things, yet you appear to be fluidly moving between them as though support for one indicates support for the other. That's not a thing you can do, because they're logically different claims. The first is "class-awareness is never possible," while the second is "class-awareness is not guaranteed." I fully agree with the second claim, but completely disagree with the first.

What exam could the creatures in game give the 12 classes to prove that they must have levels in that class? How would you test, say, a paladin? Earlier in this thread it was asserted that a pit fiend would absolutely know that the party contained a paladin if most of the party made their saves, because paladins have an aura that adds to saves. What? It couldn't be that they have Rings of Protection? Or simply rolled well? The pit fiend could not know about the aura; he's much more likely to blame bad luck than blame a game rule he could not possibly know about. "I knew I should've worm my lucky pants today!"

What if I told you that, in my campaign world,* every Paladin has a particular feel to their spiritual aura, the "scent" their essence exudes? What if I told you every class had such a particular "scent," and having training in different classes merely blended their scents together? A normal human might be inured to such scents--hell, all mortals might be unable to sense such things. But angels and infernals, oh, they're quite different. Their fundamental nature is spiritual. Just as a Paladin's blessed blade "knows" (in the sense that, on average, it deals more damage to) whether a being is a fiend or undead as opposed to a natural creature, fiends and angels can "know" the natures of the beings they meet. The feral, red-and-green must of Druidry; the salted-steel of Fighters; the flavored-cream subtleties of Cleric; etc.

There's nothing logically preventing this from occurring. The choices you make mark your soul--in the same way that a spiritual being might be able to simply know if a person has raped or killed or stolen, purely from the spiritual-sense data they can detect.

So that would be the "exam" you'd ask for. Summon an angel, or a devil, or...I dunno, some being of perfect law or whatever. Whether by persuasion or contract, have it examine and share the information it can see imprinted on the subject's soul. Another possible exam could be that, in a certain world, training in a certain class causes a physical brand on the person's body--because Heroes (people with class levels and HD) tap into the powers of Fate, empowering them in ways mortals cannot be, and that power leaves marks--sometimes many marks, for those who tempt Fate by dipping into its coffers a second, or third, or fourth, or more-th P) time.

*I don't actually have a campaign world. But this is a cool setting conceit, so I might actually use it if I ever did make a campaign world.

As interesting as your personal example is, it doesn't prove that the rules mandate that creatures are aware of their D&D class. What you've done is carefully create a world in which they somehow do, and then hold that up as evidence. But it is only evidence of what you have done, not what the PHB made you do!

And here you are again with the arguing that I have to prove it's universal. You have, repeatedly, claimed that it is universally IMPOSSIBLE for a character to know their class. That claim IS invalidated by my example: to prove that something is not impossible, I only need to prove that it has happened at least once. That leaves you only with the much weaker claim, that it is not guaranteed--a claim I have already long granted you.

Would it be fair to create a setting where a group of PCs were the ONLY Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, and Wizard in the whole world? Why or why not?

Yes, because that's a potentially interesting story. DW even recommends it, after a fashion, and I'd call it a pretty fair game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Would it be fair to create a setting where a group of PCs were the ONLY Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, and Wizard in the whole world? Why or why not?

Sure! In fact that's how I have interpreted my own campaign world. In days of yore, going all the way back to Holmes Basic when it first was born, I never liked the idea of hierarchies of levels of NPCs that was sometimes implied. Honestly, I didn't say to myself back then "nothing but the PCs uses a class", but I always considered it shorthand for what existed, not laws of nature that generated every individual that was more than a 'commoner' like cookies.

So, when I revisited it after 4e came out, it had been a number of years, I simply generated a stat block for each NPC that it was relevant for, and concluded that really only PCs were strictly speaking members of a class. Now, there are in that campaign world MANY NPCs that are "like a ranger" or "like a paladin" or whatever, and may even be called by the kinds of names and titles that a PC of those classes might command. At the same time, its a world with a lot of detail, you're not typically going to find an NPC that is JUST a "Ranger of Otillis", he's probably also a member of the Welda family, has an estate, was once the Constable of The Hill, and is married to the Duke's Cousin. Whatever his abilities are is going to be a logical outgrowth of these details. If its a minor NPC, then obviously things will be sketchier, but I try to invent 2 very simple elements for an NPC that fit with where it is encountered in some way and give it its signature ability. Clearly there are also plenty of 'mooks' out there, but those are covered by standard monster stat blocks and usually come in multiples, like monsters in any edition.

The upshot being, the PC rogue is the only character that is exactly a 'member of the rogue class'. Its a very flexible system in any case, so even if there are several PCs with the same class (at once or over time) they're not likely to be visibly close copies of each other, which might be more of a problem in say 1e, where every thief is pretty close to the same and there's no real way to diversify them except gear or exceptional non-rules-based stuff.

Truthfully I think the breaking out of the 'everyone has a class' mould is MORE important in AD&D than in 4e in terms of its impact on the world, but 4e gives us many other reasons to use statblocks and good tools for it, so it makes sense to do it there. IF I was to run 2e again, which I won't, I'd make NPCs ala 4e there too nowadays.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

And I would also rule it that way if I was working from your original premise.

Right. Again, I have nothing against the idea of a 'high level king' and I'm sure that some ways of gaining a kingdom could net you a lot of XP too. I just think its not necessary to posit that every king is a super heroic level warrior that can take on 10 ordinary men and not really break a sweat.

And what kind of "shallow world" does Conan exist in? Because obviously he does not have any loyalty to a King or nation etc and has no problem murder hoboing his way through the land crushing zero-leveled kings under his jeweled sandals.

Well, first of all, Cimmeria et al isn't really all that fleshed out. We get a lot of atmospherics, but we never learn much about the actual society or anything like that. Contrast with other fantasy series, Middle Earth has a deep history and cultures, etc. What is there for Conan to be attached to? Even so Howard feels it necessary to construct a background for his character that deliberately isolates him from all positive social influences. His whole tribe is murdered, he's enslaved and chained to a wheel for 10 years, etc. Of course he's a homicidal maniac with no attachments! And obviously you can simply play a game of D&D like that too. I'm not even putting down such a game, but its not like the D&D system can ONLY do that. The argument that "NPCs must be high level to keep order against homicidal PCs" may be a technique for such games, but it isn't some kind of law of D&D that has to be followed. It is part and parcel of a 'shallow' kind of campaign environment where there isn't much of a society and the PCs are basically outsiders with no constraints.

Even in 5e I would put a 10th level Fighter up against the Kings 40 level 2 guards and it would be even worse for the Guards if the Fighter had the rest of his adventuring buddies along for the ride.

It would be, but the point is that even high level PCs in 5e can meet their match, and meet it in the City of Podunk if they aren't careful. It militates towards a more subtle approach to the populace. You may actually care about what they think, how the laws and traditions work, etc. You might be able to slay Good King Fruit Salad with trivial ease, but that doesn't mean you won't be run out of town by 100 knights that were loyal to him a week later.

Clearly high level 5e characters have a lot of personal power, but its a lot more like the real world where even the most bad assed special forces dude doesn't just ride into town and declare himself to be King of Dallas or whatever. If you want to run things you have to play by the rules. Maybe you can bend them and rewrite them to some extent, and maybe being a bad ass might come in handy sometimes, but MOST of having power is politics. I imagine it would be that way in 5e too.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

And you could very well be correct that it was never intended to be that way.

Unfortunately I can only go by what was actually written rather then what Gary and Dave thought was the case.

Edit: Actually if I think about my first experience with DnD, it had nothing to do with what Gary or Dave thought, but rather what Frank Mentzer thought. And what he thought was that your character (a Fighter) teamed up with Aleena (a Cleric) to fight Bargel (a Wizard). After that it only made sense to think that everyone else was some kind of class (unless you were a race instead of class).

And I think that people often went that way. I think they didn't really think about it that much. I doubt Gary and Dave really thought too much about it. Gary has all the kings in Greyhawk being 'level X/Y/Z' this or that (some I note are not legal as PCs). I think he just assumed that class was a useful tool, but there are many places where he flat out says that NPCs aren't exactly governed by PC rules. NPCs can belong to classes and have levels that PCs cannot, they can make magic items that PCs cannot, they often seem to do things that PCs have no rules for, like making pacts with demons, or turning into a mummy, etc. Obviously the DM can allow PCs to do these things too, but the point is class is only one little tool to use.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

No, but someone did say this:

I'm showing how it can actually be, not only possible, but normal, or common, for kings to actually have a fairly narrow skill set as a qualification for kingship, in the real world.

What, by mining through 1000's of years of myth to come up with a few examples? ALL of which are of course totally fantastic and never existed in the real world. I don't see how that makes any sort of normality at all. Obviously you can make up a world filled with nothing but hero-kings if you want. I stand by my assertion that it would be a bizarre world, not even resembling Bronze Age Greek myth all that much.

It doesn't make class real in your game world. There are lots of indications, in the rules, in the way a significant proportion of people (at least a third, but arguably a majority, judging by this poll), and based on the examples I gave, that lead to that conclusion, and no amount of repetition by you is going to change that.

Or 2/3 agree with me, etc. You can really conclude nothing from that.

That's your reading. But there are too many examples of classed NPCs in published and homebrewed materials to convince me that non-classed NPCs should predominate. Especially in my settings.

And yet they don't conform well to PC rules even when they're granted a 'class'. As I've said before, my question is more about the MEANING part of the topic. IMHO class is simply a tool, it isn't any more real even for PCs than hit points, armor class, etc. These things reflect some aspects of the world or the character, no doubt, but they're only very general things, tools to use to get what you want out of the game.