Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arial Black" data-source="post: 6783700" data-attributes="member: 6799649">Totally agree so far.The trouble with all this is that what you know is not what they are, but what they do; their field of expertise as we choose to define 'field'. Are physicists, chemists and biologists different paths of their 'class', chosen at 3rd level? Are they different classes? Are they all commoners with different skill and feat choices? We cannot know, and in a game which included rules to create scientists those guys could not know their own class in rules terms, even though they could and would divide themselves into factions in game which may or may not match the game rules governing them.All true. But these do not perfectly map to the game rules of 'class' in the game they are avatars in.Oh, some of the game rules definitely are observable in game, and spell level is one of them. What they call it may or may not be the same thing the PHB calls it.Perhaps I over-emphasised it, but my point was that a creature cannot know its D&D class any more than it can know any other game rule, like hit points. Few would argue the second, but there are plenty arguing the first.But their D&D class is unknowable. They can certainly describe themselves in similar ways (fighter, wizard) and the names of the classes are supposed to resemble the role they play, but anyone in game describing themselves as a fighter may or may not have fighter class levels.What exam could the creatures in game give the 12 classes to prove that they must have levels in that class? How would you test, say, a paladin? Earlier in this thread it was asserted that a pit fiend would absolutely know that the party contained a paladin if most of the party made their saves, because paladins have an aura that adds to saves. What? It couldn't be that they have Rings of Protection? Or simply rolled well? The pit fiend could not know about the aura; he's much more likely to blame bad luck than blame a game rule he could not possibly know about. "I knew I should've worm my lucky pants today!"Even the paladin doesn't really know about his aura! How could he test it? Just because the aura gives +5 to saves does not mean that it changes a definite fail to a definite save, because all the paladin can see is the result of a save, not the numbers or die roll that went into it. He cannot know what the odds were before, or what they are now. His party may have rolled well before he arrived, and start to roll badly once he turns up. How could he know that his aura made things better when the evidence shows that he made things worse? As interesting as your personal example is, it doesn't prove that the rules mandate that creatures are aware of their D&D class. What you've done is carefully create a world in which they somehow do, and then hold that up as evidence. But it is only evidence of what you have done, not what the PHB made you do!</blockquote>

Verification