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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6780510" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think the discussion got a bit muddied by people pulling out examples from various editions of D&D. The thread, ostensibly, was about 5e. 5e, AFAIK, doesn't have any rules that mandate anything about classes in the vein of AD&D or OD&D/Basic/whatever. There's no training rule that I'm aware of, nor any 'fight the great druid' type rules in that game. So if we restrict ourselves to the original topic, then class appears clearly to be a meta-game construct.If you stick to AD&D (and some parts of OD&D/BECMI IIRC) then there are mechanics which clearly reference class, though its still not at all clear that class is intended to be a narrative in-world concept. IMHO it just wasn't a concern to Gygax, he wrote down what he did and that was what was 'rules', but we really don't know how it was presented in-game. You'd have to go over to RPG.net and invoke Old Geezer or someone like that who's still around and played with him in the days of yore. IMHO AD&D wasn't intended to be taken as strictures at all, its intended to provide ways to do things. PLAYERS might be 'breaking the rules' in some sense if they pass over those strictures, but EVERY SINGLE PLACE WHERE THEY EXIST in AD&D is related to the DM and NPCs, aside perhaps from who can use what magic items, which is a pretty weak peg to hang the whole thing on.I won't even venture an opinion on 3.x d20-era D&D. I've played, but I don't own the books and the way MCing etc work it looks to me like 'class' is just a convenience to organize what is effectively a point-buy character system (though you can certainly play it straight up without MCing much and then it mirrors 2e fairly well). I suspect there are a few 'class mechanic' rules, but they're similar to 2e's and not as prevalent.4e simply flat out disposes of class as any sort of in-world concept AT ALL. NPCs are universally represented as stat blocks and there are an array of tools provided outright to facilitate modelling any sort of NPC character concept. WotC NEVER ONCE presented in any material an NPC with class levels. There's a sort of rump of the concept at the back of the DMG, but they never even bothered to extend it to cover classes post-PHB1. Clearly if we were to have this discussion about 4e it would have ended on page 1 of the thread.5e IMHO carries on where 4e left off. It does leverage class to a slightly greater extent, by for instance using spells in monster stat blocks. It doesn't however appear to contemplate that NPCs will generally be characters with class and level, though it seems to be more agnostic than 4e about whether the DM might use that technique. I don't personally know of any place in 5e where the rules clearly present a mechanic that would, even very strictly speaking, require an NPC with class levels, or that NPCs of some ilk in general are classed.</blockquote>

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