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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6780637" data-attributes="member: 82106">Obviously we're not going to ever agree, but again, nothing about there being level titles tells me that the expectation is that every single person in the whole world that someone calls a 'warlock' is level X magic user. It says that a level X magic user (7th IIRC, but whatever) CAN call himself a 'warlock', but WHY actually shouldn't you use your class name? Because class isn't an in-game concept! That's my conclusion! Characters don't go around calling themselves 'Fighting Men' because there's no such concept in the game world. Level 4 PCs may call themselves 'hero', but that doesn't preclude there being other heroes that aren't level 4 Fighting Men, nor that if you're level 5 you have to suddenly call yourself something different and everyone can see the stripes change on your sleeve. That's a very narrow and rigid interpretation of the game.And, really, beyond that, early D&D wasn't focused on any sort of great high ideal of narrative coherence. It was meant to be entertainment and the tone of the game was IME largely rather informal gamist. So the rules were relatively simple, instead of trying to have a big complicated discussion of how the Druid needed to be narratively balanced against the other classes and an elaborate discussion of how a druid organization could exist in a campaign world to do that via ritual combat, they just provided a simple rule, there's so and so many druids out there and you have to fight them at X levels. Likewise the level titles, they're just some very generic descriptors you could use to make your dialog in-game a little less clunky. In a game where there's a real concern for a high fidelity campaign setting and social organizations and such that might bestow titles in a narrative fashion, then the DM would develop that and the default level titles probably wouldn't be used (they are pretty silly anyway, again, it was very gamist). This all leads me, based on a lot of experience with those early games, to conclude that there's no real merit to the idea that levels are INTENDED to be an in-game thing. There may not be an intention of any sort. I doubt there is personally. Early D&D was a very ad-hoc thing. Today all these OSR people run around worshipping the details of how exactly this or that subsystem uses a certain type of die or claiming that the saving throw categories are some deep work of genius, but its nonsense. People just made stuff up. Surprise uses a d6 because that's the die that was near to hand on the day that Gary or Dave first needed to resolve a surprise situation (or it was grafted on from some earlier game system, I don't know). Likewise they made up opponents, monsters/NPCs in whatever way was convenient on that day, and whoever probably had no clear idea or concern about whether or not class was an in-game concept or not. If you could go back and ask Dave or Gary about that in 1975 they'd probably scratch their heads and say "I don't know, is it?"</blockquote>

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