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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9373942" data-attributes="member: 7026617">A lot of traditional fantasy assumes a set of relatively narrow set of training and experience that makes it easy to justify class structures.  Someone might carry a few skills in from his youth that run far afield, but they're liable to be somewhat limited, and that made classes relatively palatable until we got into the modern period and that sort of assumed medieval structure has stopped being the default; its why even in fantasy most modern class systems are far less rigid than ones of older years.On the other hand, that sort of tight barrier never made much sense in modern to futuristic settings outside of some special cases.  I mean, I spent most of my life as a library assistant and freelance editor, but in my youth I had a period where I apprenticed with a gemcutter as a gem assessor (I was theoretically going to train to be a gemcutter too, but my nerves and some of the problems I had at the time never made that more than theoretical) and also worked as a demolitions apprentice for a bit.  That sort of wandering from thing to thing is a much more modern concept, and usually is difficult to represent in class systems.Levels are a more complicated question.  Honestly, they're a historical artifact; with the schematic way OD&D was designed they made advancement easy, and then the combination of the sometimes pleasing chunkiness of that advancement and the fact people got used to them all over the place with the uptake of D&Disms in computer games meant they defined how advancement worked for many people, even though there were other methods (used by any number of games over the last 40 years, some that were as well known in their day as anything outside of D&D was).  Levels also tend to play a lot better with a zero-to-hero assumption, which is far, far rarer in SF than in fantasy (and isn't even as common in fantasy as you'd think from its prominence in fantasy gaming).Essentially, class-and-level systems are a particular stylization that got its start with D&D, and was relatively easy to keep justifying in zero-to-hero narrow fantasy, but starts to fail out more and more the farther you get from that.</blockquote>

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