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Message: <blockquote data-quote="empireofchaos" data-source="post: 6764826" data-attributes="member: 6800918">Everything in my quotes, which was my 'description of the question', was the verbatim quote from the initial question. The rest of what constituted my "description" of the question followed what someone who agreed with the notion of no class in-game (can't remember who) said - that what you have in-game is not class, but character concept. What you say in your post below: "If my players have a concept that works well with the mechanics of the class" - seems to be stating the same thing. How, then, am I departing from your question?And I understand what your player was saying. He wants to know if a character can recognize whether someone belongs to a certain class or not. You seem to be saying two different things. On the one hand, you're saying that classes have fictions, but they're not necessarily the fictions described in the class writeups. But on the other hand, you're saying that the fiction (any fiction, any set of fictions) cannot be recognized as encompassing classes which use particular mechanics. I'm not sure why "people training to harness ki in monasteries" is necessarily distinct from "monk class". Maybe monk class is broader than that. Maybe not. Maybe some of the people (most of the people, even) in the monasteries are 0-level lay brothers that aspire to monkhood for brief periods, but lack the talent or perseverance to make it. Maybe members of other classes stop by from time to time (and mechanically, they receive something like a feat if their experience was successful). But whatever the fine distinctions, they don't necessarily mean that the class can't be recognized by anyone. In 1870, very few people could tell the difference between a physicist and a chemist (probably, if you conduct on-the-street interviews today, after a century and a half of mass education, the numbers wouldn't be that much better. Possibly some chemists and physicists lie about what field they're in, or are themselves confused about the disciplinary distinctions on the margins. But that doesn't mean that physicists and chemists don't exist.  Well, we mostly agree then, we just come at it from different sides. Your "negative theology approach" (fighters are not this, druids are not this and this and this) is, for me, a more positive approach "(fighters are vaguely this, druids are approximately this, paladins are almost certainly this", etc.) I'm not sure it's lines inside which you draw as much as it's a scatter-plot that comes closer to being a distinct shape in some cases. But again, if a player has an amazing concept of how to restat a barbarian (not play a fighter who calls himself a barbarian, but come up with a new set of mechanics to describe the barbarian fluff in the PHB), how is that different. And I'm completely agnostic as to whether I would let the player go ahead with their idea in either case - it depends on what the specific proposal is, whether it jibes with my reading of the class fluff for this particular world, and whether our negotiation with the player about whether her fluff "fits" or whether her new crunch is workable, is successful. But that doesn't mean there aren't conceptual boundaries in principle. And in either case, both player and DM will have to do work to fit the character into the world (through writing up a new class, figuring out how the fluff variant is related to the established variant, who trained the PC, are they alone in the world, or still a type, etc.)</blockquote>

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