D&D General "Hot" take: Aesthetically-pleasing rules are highly overvalued

[Lanefan]

It just means to "take something abstract and treat it as a concrete thing", or (I'm assuming this was what the guy who used it first here meant) to take some abstract game concept like 'class' or 'level' and treat it as if it was a real part of the game world. So if you play as if every 'character' in the world ACTUALLY PICKS (consciously or not) a CLASS and IS that class and is literally the same, in some sense, as all other characters of that class, that would be 'reifying class'.

Gotcha - thanks!

Right, and I don't disagree with that. I mean it makes sense that an NPC who is, mechanically, a 'priest of Zamorra' is ACTUALLY called in-game "Priest of Zamorra" and considers himself as such. Now, suppose you have 2 characters who are pretty functionally equivalent in a 5e game (this is so in our current game). Mine is technically a Battlemaster Fighter, and the other one is technically an Arcane Trickster. They both wear light armor, and my character's 'urchin' background grants proficiencies with thieves tools, etc. My character is high DEX and INT, and uses two weapons in combat, and does a lot of scouting, lock picking (he's quite good at it) etc. While there are some mechanical differences, it would be quite legitimate to lump the two of them together as being "the same sort of thing" within the game world. Call that 'thief', 'adventurous rogue', whatever you want. I would look askance at some ruling which handled them differently on the basis of their CLASS, because it just doesn't mean anything. It isn't MANIFEST in any important way within the game world, and I would call doing so 'reifying class'.

Which raises a rather obvious question: if the two classes are that similar why haven't they been combined into one?

I see your point, though, in a system like 3e-4e-5e where there's a huge number of classes, builds, and combinations - identity by class gets pretty blurred. I look at it from a more old-school perspective, where there were relatively few classes and each of them often had quite strong and obvious in-fiction markers. There, even if people didn't self-identify as a class, external identifiers would (most of the time) peg them as being what they were.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Gotcha - thanks!

Which raises a rather obvious question: if the two classes are that similar why haven't they been combined into one?

I see your point, though, in a system like 3e-4e-5e where there's a huge number of classes, builds, and combinations - identity by class gets pretty blurred. I look at it from a more old-school perspective, where there were relatively few classes and each of them often had quite strong and obvious in-fiction markers. There, even if people didn't self-identify as a class, external identifiers would (most of the time) peg them as being what they were.

Right, but even in the old days we had the questions which came up "why can't my fighter pick up a magic wand and say the command word and make it work?" If it was a fiction book, that probably WOULD work (maybe not, we can invent magic to be any way we want, but still). So it was a legitimate question, and you could see that rule as being one that tended to support reifying class.

It doesn't help that the obvious reason which would be given (and was surely EGG's reason for this rule) is a completely gamist one "because it is part of magic user's niche in the game." That may explain the purpose of the reification, but it is still weird, awkward, and kind of bizarre. It is amusing how many of the 'classic' versions of classes, like Ranger, literally have specific class feature 'loopholes' that allow them to emulate specific fictional characters (the famous example being rangers and crystal balls).

As for why the two classes (or sub-classes in this case) aren't combined... Each one has a range of ways it can be played. In OD&D you COULD have played a leather-clad fighter who was high dex and did a lot of scouting and such. He wouldn't have had the special abilities of a Greyhawk thief, and he would fight a good bit better than one, but the same questions could arise!

I'm not really against the strong thematics of classic D&D classes though. I think it is an aid to RP and makes the game easier to play, mostly. OTOH I'm not too sad that they can be bent in newer editions. In fact my 5e Battlemaster calls his maneuvers 'magic' and that makes things even more blurry! but it works. I think classic D&D was often a bit far in the other direction.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well... D&D REALLY wasn't ever much of a 'simulationist' game in GDS terms. Actually there are VERY few such games, and none of them are very mainstream. Aftermath (and its various cousins) springs to mind as one of the few which has attained some level of popularity (albeit it is still a pretty obscure game these days). Truthfully, you have to back BEFORE D&D to find the true RPG simulations, which were forms of Kriegsspiel. These were of course true wargames, who's explicit purpose was utmost realism (at least in certain dimensions). I'm not sure about the 'Braunsteins' that Dave Arneson was engaged with, they sound like they were more recreational, but I'm not sure.

[/quote]

I'd argue there were a number of games of that era that leaned in that direction including Runequest and Traveller.

HOWEVER, a lot of players, particularly older ones, do have a somewhat 'realism oriented' bent. This seems to take the form, often, of an extreme aversion to any game mechanics which don't map very closely onto elements of the game world's fiction. This is where the whole weirdness of reifying things like Class come in. The general concern is similar to what has been put forward in this thread, that any game process which is detached in any way from the fiction breaks immersion.

Maybe what we should be talking about then is 'immersionism', but I have never seen a theoretical elaboration on that dimension of RPG play, nor any developed terminology to describe it.

First you need to get a common agreement on what support immersion. Good luck.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Hence "officially", the odd corner-case of elves being able to switch notwithstanding. 1e was the first run for dwarven thieves or mulitclasses.

As that poster noted, to the best of my knowledge as of Greyhawk all races could be thieves.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It just means to "take something abstract and treat it as a concrete thing", or (I'm assuming this was what the guy who used it first here meant) to take some abstract game concept like 'class' or 'level' and treat it as if it was a real part of the game world. So if you play as if every 'character' in the world ACTUALLY PICKS (consciously or not) a CLASS and IS that class and is literally the same, in some sense, as all other characters of that class, that would be 'reifying class'.

Correct.

Right, and I don't disagree with that. I mean it makes sense that an NPC who is, mechanically, a 'priest of Zamorra' is ACTUALLY called in-game "Priest of Zamorra" and considers himself as such. Now, suppose you have 2 characters who are pretty functionally equivalent in a 5e game (this is so in our current game). Mine is technically a Battlemaster Fighter, and the other one is technically an Arcane Trickster. They both wear light armor, and my character's 'urchin' background grants proficiencies with thieves tools, etc. My character is high DEX and INT, and uses two weapons in combat, and does a lot of scouting, lock picking (he's quite good at it) etc. While there are some mechanical differences, it would be quite legitimate to lump the two of them together as being "the same sort of thing" within the game world. Call that 'thief', 'adventurous rogue', whatever you want. I would look askance at some ruling which handled them differently on the basis of their CLASS, because it just doesn't mean anything. It isn't MANIFEST in any important way within the game world, and I would call doing so 'reifying class'.

Yeah. I had an argument on the Paizo forum not long ago on this very topic.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I see your point, though, in a system like 3e-4e-5e where there's a huge number of classes, builds, and combinations - identity by class gets pretty blurred. I look at it from a more old-school perspective, where there were relatively few classes and each of them often had quite strong and obvious in-fiction markers. There, even if people didn't self-identify as a class, external identifiers would (most of the time) peg them as being what they were.

Sort-of. Relatively early on there were abilities some classes had that there were NPCs who had similar, but not identical ability sets. The easiest is some incarnations of "fighting man" or "fighter" who had particular tricks they could do that various kinds of NPC warriors, well, didn't.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sort-of. Relatively early on there were abilities some classes had that there were NPCs who had similar, but not identical ability sets. The easiest is some incarnations of "fighting man" or "fighter" who had particular tricks they could do that various kinds of NPC warriors, well, didn't.

This was a point of argument in a number of cases where people claimed that you couldn't have a PC adopt some ability, like a fighting technique, which was in a 'monster' stat block. I never bought this. 4e very specifically calls out 'reflavoring' of powers and other elements for one thing, which is pretty darn flexible. Beyond that it is easy enough to invent a new power or magic item, you can pretty much just steal the text from the stat block in most cases. The argument then devolved down to a non-negotiable demand and statement that the exact details of the rules ARE THE WORLD in every detail, and if the PC doesn't get the same recharge dice and every other mechanical detail exactly the same as the monster, then its "not doing the same thing" even though you would never be able to tell the difference, fictionally.

So, needless to say, I just came to the conclusion at that point that the whole line of argument was basically about not liking a specific system for entirely other reasons. If you took those statements literally they are demanding that every line in the rulebooks be reified! There was literally a poster on the old WotC D&D forums who flat out demanded that (and mysteriously claimed that 'D&D Next' (5e prototype at that time) was somehow a holy grail of this sort of play, lol. It was funny, but kind of eye-rolling too.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm arguing on your side on this one if that isn't clear. My argument is more than trying to make the argument moot by going back to OSR versions of the game doesn't really work; these sorts of things have been true well before feats or what we'd consider class abilities were really that big a thing.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm arguing on your side on this one if that isn't clear. My argument is more than trying to make the argument moot by going back to OSR versions of the game doesn't really work; these sorts of things have been true well before feats or what we'd consider class abilities were really that big a thing.

Yeah, I didn't think we were really disagreeing 2e was kind of the inflection point. Kits and such marked the transition from sort of "customize in an ad-hoc way based on the details of your game, working with the DM" to "pick from lists of options." I can recall my sister's (@Gilladian) dwarf who's hand got chopped off and eventually became the proud possessor of a 'soul blade' in place of a hand, which had various tricky implications... IIRC he had a hook for a while before that, which let him get away with a few tricks as well. That was the "old way" of doing things.

Now, in my own hack of 4e, things are kind of in a 3rd way. You don't get to just pick any old thing from lists, but there are still a lot of things that are fairly standardized that you can 'pick up' as part of the narrative and then use/become part of your character. This also drives leveling (you could see that as either a new thing, or a sort of almost return to "XP for GP" in a sense).