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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6784141" data-attributes="member: 6790260">All of those things you have suggested are possible ways a game could choose to do it. That there are multiple possibilities does not mean that you can say that absolutely every world can't do it.You seem to be arguing two different things here. On the one hand, your first sentence suggests you are arguing that class is unknowable, even in principle, to characters--it is never, ever something they could be aware of under any circumstances. But the other sentences, and some of your other stuff (like the "I may be over-emphasizing" bit), seem to indicate that you are merely arguing that it isn't knowable in some universes. These two are fundamentally distinct things, yet you appear to be fluidly moving between them as though support for one indicates support for the other. That's not a thing you can do, because they're logically different claims. The first is "class-awareness is never possible," while the second is "class-awareness is not guaranteed." I fully agree with the second claim, but completely disagree with the first.What if I told you that, in my campaign world,* every Paladin has a particular feel to their spiritual aura, the "scent" their essence exudes? What if I told you every class had such a particular "scent," and having training in different classes merely blended their scents together? A normal human might be inured to such scents--hell, all mortals might be unable to sense such things. But angels and infernals, oh, they're quite different. Their fundamental nature is spiritual. Just as a Paladin's blessed blade "knows" (in the sense that, on average, it deals more damage to) whether a being is a fiend or undead as opposed to a natural creature, fiends and angels can "know" the natures of the beings they meet. The feral, red-and-green must of Druidry; the salted-steel of Fighters; the flavored-cream subtleties of Cleric; etc.There's nothing logically preventing this from occurring. The choices you make mark your soul--in the same way that a spiritual being might be able to simply know if a person has raped or killed or stolen, purely from the spiritual-sense data they can detect.So that would be the "exam" you'd ask for. Summon an angel, or a devil, or...I dunno, some being of perfect law or whatever. Whether by persuasion or contract, have it examine and share the information it can see imprinted on the subject's soul. Another possible exam could be that, in a certain world, training in a certain class causes a physical brand on the person's body--because Heroes (people with class levels and HD) tap into the powers of Fate, empowering them in ways mortals cannot be, and that power leaves marks--sometimes many marks, for those who tempt Fate by dipping into its coffers a second, or third, or fourth, or more-th <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt="(:" title="Smile    (:"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname="(:" />P) time.*I don't actually have a campaign world. But this is a cool setting conceit, so I might actually use it if I ever did make a campaign world.And here you are again with the arguing that I have to prove it's universal. You have, repeatedly, claimed that it is universally IMPOSSIBLE for a character to know their class. That claim IS invalidated by my example: to prove that something is not impossible, I only need to prove that it has happened at least once. That leaves you only with the much weaker claim, that it is not guaranteed--a claim I have already long granted you.Yes, because that's a potentially interesting story. DW even recommends it, after a fashion, and I'd call it a pretty fair game.</blockquote>

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