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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8121783" data-attributes="member: 82106">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'.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'.</blockquote>

Verification