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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6762978" data-attributes="member: 4937">For the most part, classes are entirely metagame constructs.  They are implementations of a common related set of skills that a person might have in the same world.  You can't cast 'detect class'.   People in the game world do not know what class they are and do not usually describe themselves as being a member of a class.  But people in the game universe do describe themselves according to the profession that they have, and those professions tend to or often have very close associations with a class.Fighters never call themselves fighters.  They call themselves soldiers, mercenaries, knights, gladiators, duelists, bodyguards, bouncers, hunters, and so forth.  They don't really think of people in the same profession as having a different class than they do, although they might.  That bouncer might just be a Brute.  That hunter might be a Hunter.  The newly recruited soldier might be a Warrior or a Fanatic.  That fellow mercenary or pirate might be an Explorer.  That duelist might be a Rogue.  They don't know.  All they know is the skills that they have, which overlap quite a bit with the skills of other people.  We the persons running that game fit those skills to the class or classes that best fits the character's skills.  In an overwhelmingly large number of cases, the best abstraction of a professional soldier in my game world is someone with one or more levels in fighter.Virtually all priests in the game world are of the cleric class or at the least have some levels in cleric.  A person could describe themselves as a cleric of Showna, and people would know pretty much exactly what was meant by that.  Now, if you had a sufficient broad group of priests and priestesses of Showna, you'd have a group with very diverse abilities.  Some  - those most in the favor of Showna - would probably be straight clerics.  Some would be multi-classed cleric-experts or cleric-scholars.  A few might be multi-classed cleric-champions. Others may have entered the priesthood after careers of other sorts, and have a few levels of virtually any class before they came to their current calling.  Many - less militant in their calling than the questing clerics - might have the Civilized trait or Noncombatant disadvantage, or the Limited Background disadvantage.  So they'd all look a bit different and have some diversity of skill and abilities, but because they were all ordained Priests of Showna, everyone in the game world viewing the group would think that they share something in common.  And from a metagame perspective, they'd all be right - they all have levels in cleric.The same might generally be said to be true of Wizard.  It's a specialized profession studying arcane magic.  The same general things about some of the wizards not being devoted to combat arts, and some of the wizards perhaps being multi-classed would be true, but generally speaking a person in the game world's guess concerning whether they all have something in common would be true.  And even to the extent that an outside observer might get this wrong, the gathering of 'wizards' themselves being experts in the subject could quickly sort out amongst them which of them had real practical knowledge (and thus were best classed in the metagame as a wizard) and which of them were mere dabblers and dilettantes whose knowledge was largely theoretical and whose focus of study was not so much on magic (and thus were best classed as scholars and experts).    But the same would not be said of a class like rogue.  People in the game world seeing a group of rogues together would generally never guess that they were all of the same class.  For one thing, they wouldn't be of the same profession.  Many would be nobles.  A few might be merchants.  Some would be criminals of various sorts.  And the reverse would also be true.  Not every criminal is a rogue.  Not every noble or merchant is a rogue.A good way to show this, is that if you went into a monastery in my game world, everyone there would be monks.  But no one in the monetary would be monk classed - because the monk class doesn't exist in my game even though the profession - 'lay servant of a cult' does.   Instead, in terms of class you'd find a collection of commoners, experts, scholars, and fanatics.  Depending on the deity, you might also find fighters, wizards, or rogues.  And heading it all you might find a few clerics.  The observer wouldn't know any of these things.  All they'd know is that there was a fairly diverse range of skills and abilities on display.  They be even less able to guess the class than the players are, because at least the players have knowledge of the class in their version of the world.</blockquote>

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