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

[Emerikol]

The real question and the only important one is "Are the rules of the game the physics of the world?"

If the answer is yes, then someone in that world can determine what class a character belongs to and if the answer is no then they cannot.

In my campaigns, the concept of class especially with the casters has been very strong. Class though is not a profession. I might have any number of different Rangering groups in different parts of the world that do not interact with each other. They are all rangers but they'd likely not describe themselves that way. They'd say "I'm a ranger of the Vilhon forest"

I do think though that the exact formulae of wizardry is a known thing in my world. People know wizards prepare spells and so forth. I've always played that way. The reason is that I want my players being their characters. If spell prep is metagame then that ruins it for me. I don't want the player outside of the character choosing spells. I want the player AS the character choosing the spells.

As for the fighter class, I'd probably be more lenient as fighting is the skill. So a pirate could be a fighter. He probably won't tell people he is a fighter. He's a pirate. Same for rogues. They are far broader concepts. They are because they do not have as many very specific mechanics like the casters do.

 

[Ovinomancer]

The real question and the only important one is "Are the rules of the game the physics of the world?"

If the answer is yes, then someone in that world can determine what class a character belongs to and if the answer is no then they cannot.

In my campaigns, the concept of class especially with the casters has been very strong. Class though is not a profession. I might have any number of different Rangering groups in different parts of the world that do not interact with each other. They are all rangers but they'd likely not describe themselves that way. They'd say "I'm a ranger of the Vilhon forest"

I do think though that the exact formulae of wizardry is a known thing in my world. People know wizards prepare spells and so forth. I've always played that way. The reason is that I want my players being their characters. If spell prep is metagame then that ruins it for me. I don't want the player outside of the character choosing spells. I want the player AS the character choosing the spells.

As for the fighter class, I'd probably be more lenient as fighting is the skill. So a pirate could be a fighter. He probably won't tell people he is a fighter. He's a pirate. Same for rogues. They are far broader concepts. They are because they do not have as many very specific mechanics like the casters do.

Disagree. It's only if class restrictions apply to everyone or even most people that it becomes visible. The game rules don't decree classes exist. Again, look at NPCs in the MM. They clearly follow the rules of the game, but have no classes. Or monsters, either, who also follow the rules but have no classes. The rules can be fixed AND you still might not be able to identify classes.

This changes, of course, if your setting has a restriction to class, or if you decide that people just know what class they have. That's perfectly fine, in a world with dragons and pantheons of gods and kobolds, for people to be born with an understanding of their higher calling. But the rules don't decree this; it's a choice.

 

[Emerikol]

Disagree. It's only if class restrictions apply to everyone or even most people that it becomes visible. The game rules don't decree classes exist. Again, look at NPCs in the MM. They clearly follow the rules of the game, but have no classes. Or monsters, either, who also follow the rules but have no classes. The rules can be fixed AND you still might not be able to identify classes.

This changes, of course, if your setting has a restriction to class, or if you decide that people just know what class they have. That's perfectly fine, in a world with dragons and pantheons of gods and kobolds, for people to be born with an understanding of their higher calling. But the rules don't decree this; it's a choice.

I didn't say that class was a hard rule for everyone. In fact, I stated right at the beginning of my post that the deciding question was whether the rules of the game are the physics of your world. That will determine your interpretation.

In my games, from the very beginning (red box D&D) the rules have been the physics of the world. Until probably 2008, I was never given any reason to question that assumption. No articles I read questioned it. Now I'm not saying some people weren't thinking the other way and just viewing everything from their perspective and assuming all agreed with them. Might have happened. Never met those people.

I think it comes down to playstyle. Most major conflicts in roleplaying today are over style. One group wants their players to BE their characters. That means always acting the way they believe their characters would act. The other group wants to create a story and use their characters as pawns in that story to create an interesting outcome. The first is more gamist and the latter is more narrativist.

There is no right or wrong way to play a game if all are having fun. It's just a matter of discussing preferences and insights on the styles we like. This is why this thread will never really resolve to a conclusion. It can't. People want different things out of their roleplaying.

If the world were not hopelessly entangled on terms and I could reset everything, I'd call my style roleplaying because it's focus is on playing a role specifically, and I'd call the other style a story teller style. Now I'm not trying to offend or claim you aren't roleplaying. I'm just saying that playing in character seems the most like the term roleplaying. Whereas the story creation approach seems to fit the term story teller better.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I didn't say that class was a hard rule for everyone. In fact, I stated right at the beginning of my post that the deciding question was whether the rules of the game are the physics of your world. That will determine your interpretation.

In my games, from the very beginning (red box D&D) the rules have been the physics of the world. Until probably 2008, I was never given any reason to question that assumption. No articles I read questioned it. Now I'm not saying some people weren't thinking the other way and just viewing everything from their perspective and assuming all agreed with them. Might have happened. Never met those people.

I think it comes down to playstyle. Most major conflicts in roleplaying today are over style. One group wants their players to BE their characters. That means always acting the way they believe their characters would act. The other group wants to create a story and use their characters as pawns in that story to create an interesting outcome. The first is more gamist and the latter is more narrativist.

There is no right or wrong way to play a game if all are having fun. It's just a matter of discussing preferences and insights on the styles we like. This is why this thread will never really resolve to a conclusion. It can't. People want different things out of their roleplaying.

If the world were not hopelessly entangled on terms and I could reset everything, I'd call my style roleplaying because it's focus is on playing a role specifically, and I'd call the other style a story teller style. Now I'm not trying to offend or claim you aren't roleplaying. I'm just saying that playing in character seems the most like the term roleplaying. Whereas the story creation approach seems to fit the term story teller better.

No, I understood you fine, perhaps you mistook my response. I'm saying that I play with the rules as the physics of the world, and that STILL doesn't make classes detectable. I pointed out that NPCs use the rules as real, and don't have classes, nor do monsters. So it's entirely possible to accept your premise of the rules as physics (and only the rules) and still not have classes be detectable. It gets doubly so if you allow for cosmetic changes, such as screaming skulls for magic missiles, or green glowing arrows for magic missiles.

 

[Emerikol]

No, I understood you fine, perhaps you mistook my response. I'm saying that I play with the rules as the physics of the world, and that STILL doesn't make classes detectable. I pointed out that NPCs use the rules as real, and don't have classes, nor do monsters. So it's entirely possible to accept your premise of the rules as physics (and only the rules) and still not have classes be detectable. It gets doubly so if you allow for cosmetic changes, such as screaming skulls for magic missiles, or green glowing arrows for magic missiles.

Okay I didn't understand your response. I had knee surgery recently and maybe it's the meds .

I've never been a big fan of the NPCs following different rules than the PCs when they are class based. When 3e introduced the NPC classes I generally ignored them. I don't play 5e nor 4e so forgive me if I can't comment on those systems.

I considered monsters as their own unique entities though I did add classes to monsters where appropriate in 3e.

Now. When I say that the classes can be known, I'm not saying that every single person in the fantasy world can identify someone's class easily. Of course there are many in a world who wouldn't know a class and that was true for me throughout the history of my gaming. I'm just saying that there exists a theoretical person who could figure the classes out because they are knowable in the context of the world. There has been many occasions when a bad guy whipped out something unexpectedly and my PC's suddenly realized they were dealing with a potential different class than they originally thought.

I do though think that a wizard pc is going to recognize a fellow wizard fairly quickly *most* of the time. Of course if the other wizard is taking great efforts to disguise that he is a wizard then that won't be true.

 

[Remathilis]

Whatever combination of 1 and 3 meets needs. Also, do you think the NPCs presented in the back of the MM are cheating? None of them have class levels, even if a number of them have at least a passing resemblance to a class. Take the Archmage, for instance. How do they prepare spells?

Good question. What are the archmage stats supposed to represent? A high level member of a PC spellcaster class with fiddily bits filled off? Another unique tradition of spellcasting that PCs cannot take? A unique individual who alone uses this method? None of the above?

 

[Emerikol]

Good question. What are the archmage stats supposed to represent? A high level member of a PC spellcaster class with fiddily bits filled off? Another unique tradition of spellcasting that PCs cannot take? A unique individual who alone uses this method? None of the above?

I agree that even as early as 3e we had NPC classes. I never used them and never felt a need for them. I believe the designers would have said they were quicker to create and simple drop in replacements. I think a decent computer program or even a book of NPCs would have served better. I acknowledge their existence and by no means do I claim to know the minds of the developers or even their intents. They promised a lot of things in 5e that they didn't deliver but I'm sure they think they delivered those things.

For me, while I recognize all the classes as in world constructs, I also acknowledge that monsters can be designed in any way due to their uniqueness. I also acknowledge that adding class levels from a known class is okay too. In the past when a new class got introduced, I just treated it like a very rare version that the PCs had not heard of before. I've always been a big three or four type guy anyway. Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, Cleric.

 

[Shasarak]

No, because its perfectly feasible for the DM to introduce any new material he wants to at any time. You can't conclude anything about what classes there are. I mean yes, PLAYERS can do that, to the extent that the DM has decreed that there are only characters complying to some specific set of classes in the whole world, but that's a META-GAME consideration, entirely, as such a decision has no basis WITHIN the fiction of the game world.

Obviously you can simply arrange a metaphysics of your game world that literally embodies the world with rules making every single inhabitant a member of some highly restricted set of classes and decree that nothing else exists. Of course its going to be a VERY absurd world when you start to think about it in any detail. It literally means that the inhabitants of this world are physically incapable of learning or achieving ANYTHING except some very specific set of things that are spelled out in class abilities. Even if you grant there are many 'unregulated things' (IE say you assume the use of 'secondary skills' as outlined in the 1e AD&D rules) the result is still HIGHLY unnatural.

Unless your DM is freestyling then every class he adds to his world will be able to be identified. That is just the way that the rules work.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Good question. What are the archmage stats supposed to represent? A high level member of a PC spellcaster class with fiddily bits filled off? Another unique tradition of spellcasting that PCs cannot take? A unique individual who alone uses this method? None of the above?

My assumption was always that there were "a lot of ways to do it" or many possible traditions. The various PC non-divine caster classes each representing some variation of the potentially infinite paths to magical power. 'classic' D&D didn't diversify much, the original OD&D rules simply had a 'book mage' type of interpretation of a Vancian mechanic. Even then there were notes as to how this was not the ONLY possible way to interpret just this one set of class mechanics. Indeed 1e DMG included shamans and witch doctors, as discussed earlier, who follow MOSTLY similar rules to a magic user and cast the same spells, but don't have "book learning", at least not to the same degree. It was also mentioned somewhere in AD&D that "spell books" were a fairly abstract concept and might take alternate forms. I think there are some, uncommon, examples of things like casting foci and such that replace books per-se. The Al Qadim setting also has casters that use wizard spells, but cast using an entirely different system. This is presented as a parallel to the 'book learning' of magic users.

I think that all 'magic user' was intended to absolutely represent was 'wizardry' in all its forms, with the possibility of many variations, albeit only 2 were spelled out in the initial rules (and another if you count rangers). I'd note that witches, etc were presented several times in places like Dragon, though there was never an official version in an actual rule book for 1e that I can recall.

It seems to me that the intent thus is that class is a general tool to easily give some rules structure to utilize when the time comes to ask the question "what can this guy do"? but the 'how' is considerably more open, and especially so for NPCs. I think if you look through all the mass of NPCs and villains in 1e that cast spells the impression I get is that they do so by a lot of different paths, but the mechanics are USUALLY based on the magic user (IE if they have a spell progression it generally conforms to magic users, though not always). Some have other abilities that PCs lack, others gain spells by means other than studying a book, etc. Some simply have one or more spells they can use without really explaining how or why in any mechanical fashion.

So, I always played it that there was a magical tradition of book learning, and that 'book wizards' were a major, perhaps predominant, strain of casters amongst demi-humans. But that didn't preclude other possibilities, and potentially there could be entirely separate additional traditions, like warlocks, shaiir, wild mages/sorcerers, etc. These are just not, usually at least, PCs, a warlock is subservient to a master, not really PC material, etc. 2e, and things like OA/Al Qadim, definitely expanded the playable options, but it was 3e before they REALLY picked up a wide range of them with warlocks and sorcerers, which 4e carried on with and adds to. The point being, any given NPC might belong to the classic wizardly tradition, or some other tradition, or be unique. Even if they belong to the 'wizardly tradition' that doesn't mean they necessarily EXACTLY follow the magic user class, maybe they have fewer or more spells, or whatever, based on how they were trained, etc.

PCs are a specific product of their environment, so they're just one example of a continuum, and the DM may well invent new classes to represent different points on that continuum that are going to be interesting to players, at least potentially.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Unless your DM is freestyling then every class he adds to his world will be able to be identified. That is just the way that the rules work.

How would you even distinguish between a 5e warlock and a 5e wizard? They can both cast virtually all of the same spells, and doing so is 90% of their functionality. Moreover a lot of the class ability stuff is very similar to spells or items, or is simply specialist knowledge that a different type of caster might reasonable master via the skill system.