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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arial Black" data-source="post: 6763125" data-attributes="member: 6799649">The fluff in each class write-up are not game rules. They are mere examples intended to help you launch your imagination. They have absolutely no limiting effect on my fluff. What does affect my fluff is the class's crunch. I have to be able to explain, in game, the stuff I do in game. She was trained by various skilled individuals over a period of about 50 years, to do the stuff on her character sheet (and to develop the stuff that will be on her sheet as she levels up). For her people (a mixed wood/high elf population of the High Forest), 'magic' is interwoven in the very fabric of the world and of life itself. Whether you call that magic 'arcane' or 'divine' or 'ki', individuals can learn to tap it for various effects using varying methods.From her perspective, there is no artificial divide between the stuff she does that come from the mechanics of the Rogue class and those that come from the Monk class. She doesn't consider herself 'multiclassed'; that's a game mechanic. She doesn't consider herself a 'monk' because she has no association with a monastery. She doesn't consider herself a 'rogue' because she fulfils her missions as ordered, and there is no 'disobeying an order' during a mission, just 'making a judgement call on the ground'.What's more, no other creature could credibly meet her and come to the conclusion that she is 'monk', 'rogue', or both. She is an individual, just like everyone else. (I'm not!)(Shut up!)In game, she is a member of The Elves of the High Forest, which is a minor faction, akin to The Harpers or The Emerald Enclave. As PotA writes, they are dedicated to the long term goal of uniting the disparate tribes of elves in the High Forest into a single kingdom based on the old elven kingdom of Earlann that included the High Forest thousands of years ago.She is also a member of a secret group within the Elves of the High Forest, called The Tears of Shevarash, The Lachrymae Shevarash. These are hardcore field agent types, special forces, that kind of thing.Now, it would be entirely possible for a DM to introduce a Prestige Class called Lachrymae Shevarash, and design game mechanics. But this is only coincidentally the same name in game as it is in game mechanics. The DM could have called the PrC 'Elven Special Agent', but they would still be 'Lachrymae Shevarash' in game.But I don't want that; it would be too limiting. Not every Lachryma Shevarash has the same identical cookie-cutter abilities. They are made up of individual elves who have a useful combination of abilities that would be valuable to a secret organisation which uses stealth and information-gathering as much as it uses violence. There could be a place for members of any class, but not any type of behaviour. If you are the type of paladin that cries, "Aha! Prepare to meet your doom at the hands of the Lachrymae Shevarash!", then this organisation is not for you. But if you are the type of paladin that quietly does what needs to be done and then slips away, that could work.   Again, the fluff in any class description does not define the only allowable fluff with which this class can be played.  I might be phrasing this harshly, but it sounds like you only allow 12 character concepts in you game, or 36 if each class write-up has 3 example fluff paragraphs. And if a player wants to play using the exact mechanics in the book but explain those abilities sensibly using his own fluff, you tell him to play another system.But the intent of the written fluff for each class is not to limit the fluff of a PC. The classes are intended to cope with a huge variety of fluff between them.To test this, take any character from (non-D&D related) fantasy fiction, and have 10 different people separately stat him up. You would not expect 10 identical character sheets. If Conan was your choice, how many sheets would include levels of rogue? They should, yet Conan is the archetype that the barbarian character class was built upon.If I wanted to stat up Gavin Deathstalker from R. Green's novels, I know that Gavin is a civilised noble whose family line has artificial organs implanted in their bodies that can inject large amounts of adrenaline and combat drugs into their bloodstream at will. This gives them abilities that closely resemble Rage in game mechanics. Even the limited uses per day is explained that the body only has so much of the stuff and it takes those organs time to replace it. Yet some DMs would impose their fluff on me, claiming that all barbarians 'must' come from the wilderness.The game isn't made that way. It's made so that you can have any fluff at all, so long as that fluff somehow explains the abilities you have, and Gavin Deathstalker's implanted organs explain his Rage game mechanic at least as well as "I live outdoors" or "I like chewing the edge of my shield""But how does civilised, aristocratic Gavin explain his Nature skill?" Well, he needn't have that skill! Or, if he has, he can describe Gavin as a keen huntsman, or anything else that makes sense.What is unreasonable is to claim that you cannot possibly be an expert in unarmed combat unless you were raised in a place where religious lay-persons go to contemplate philosophy.You have a point here. For me, the DM controls everything in the world....except the PCs. The PCs are the only thing the player controls (within the rules, of course. Fluff is not rules). The biggest crime a DM can perpetrate on his players is to take that agency away.If a DM said, "No, your character wouldn't do that!" then he's talking out of his arse. Players aren't playing a part written by someone else, they are playing a part that they themselves are creating, even if they should do so in a believable way bearing in mind the world around them.A DM has the fluff of his campaign world, and this is impossible to do without. But if a DM says that 'Hit Points are known about in game, and the creatures in the world can sensibly ask, in character, "How many hit points are you down to?"', then my reaction isn't so much to criticise the sentence which ends in a preposition, and much more to enquire, 'Are you out of your mind?''Class' is a game mechanic. Creatures in the game can have no conception of the game mechanics.The names of the classes are just words in game, not tied to game mechanics. You can call anybody a 'fighter' but that won't give away any class abilities. There may very well be organisations that use the same name as a game mechanic class, but since the class names are intended to be somewhat descriptive (you've got to call them something, and it's going to be something with an association with the stuff they can do), but the name of an in game organisation is not and cannot be exactly the same definition of the game mechanics that describe a class.And once more, fluff is not rules.</blockquote>

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