Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercule" data-source="post: 6761046" data-attributes="member: 5100">All the way back to when I first learned the game, in the early 1980s, the "Are you a fighter?" question vexed me. No thief in their right mind would say "No, I'm a thief." Conan the Barbarian, on the other hand, called himself a thief. Were magic-users prohibited from joining the Thieves' Guild? If not, then were they prohibited from calling themselves thieves? How does a triple-class elf answer?On the other hand, there was clearly always some intent to map classes to in-game roles. Alignment restrictions, if nothing else, show that. I chalk that up more as a legacy tie to Chainmail than as something intentional in making D&D into a role-playing game. Having fewer classes, also made it a lot easier to apply broad labels. Are you a fighting man? Well, I belong on the battlefield, I'm not a holy man, and I'm not a magic-user, so I guess that makes me a fighting man.As classes have changed over the years, some have lent themselves to in-game concepts better than others. In AD&D, Magic-User was a catch-all for college wizards, hedge mages, and even warlock-eque pact makers -- unless you used Cleric to model that. In 3E, you could use either Sorcerer or Wizard for any of those concepts, with your choice depending on how you wanted to interact with the game mechanics. In 5E, they tweaked the standard casting mechanics such that Wizard is back to being a fairly broad catch-all, but Sorcerer now has no reason to exist other than as an in-game map (and tradition). But, you could play an Eldritch Knight as a warrior who later joins a college of magic just as easily as you could a Fighter/Wizard multi-class.I have no qualms with certain classes being better for building certain concepts (you could build a heavy-armored, greatsword wielding man-at-arms with a Wizard; it would just suck). I just don't like classes that are inseparable from in-game roles. That's one reason why I hate the addition of the Far Realms fluff directly into the UA mystic/psion. It's also why I don't like the 5E Sorcerer and see no reason to have both Sorcerer and Warlock classes.Nope. I remember having the conversation all the way back in 1E. In fact, I made a point of establishing organizations that were named "Rangers" and "Paladins", but had a mix of classes, just to make my point clear and make it pretty much impossible to map the classes to in-game things. Nothing will break someone of asking what class someone is faster than getting back-stabbed by a Paladin or having a Ranger throw down a power word: kill.Fair point, which is why I was glad to see those dropped from the game and sad to see them return. Really, though, I'd let anyone else learn cant, if they cared, just like any other language. That turns it into a class perk rather than it being so incongruous.</blockquote>

Verification