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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6173049" data-attributes="member: 4937">I agree very strongly with this point, but don't strongly agree with your examples.I believe that there is at most a 1 to 1 correspondence between classes and archetypal roles characters can have within the imagined world.  There might be fewer classes than archetypal roles, but there are never more than that.  And the number of true archetypes is always small.  And further, the number of classes most all be small for mechanical reasons.If you look at your examples, even within your examples you have a tendency to hedge your assertions.  First you assert something, then you in a few sentences tend to hedge - ok, maybe not.Whether a class fits into your list depends on whether it is really core to the myth of your world.  If you find you have some concept that is core to the myth of your world that can't be easily done by a class on your list, you have to add the class or alter an existing class mechanics be broad enough to encompass the concept.   Whether you go with a broad class or narrow one depends on how out there the concept is and how centrally placed it is.For example, your world might feature as an essential characteristic characters that do battle with origami and paper planes.  Or your world might feature as an essential characteristic characters that can kill with jokes, or who transform parts of their body into plants - growing vines, taking root, sprouting thorns, or covering themselves with bark.  It's possible your existing magic using class is flexible enough to cover those concepts well and make it intuitive to make such a character, but you haven't really made the concept archetype in doing so (players will be tempted to dip into areas outside the concept) and its probable that existing magic using classes just don't really have the options you'd need built in and the cost of providing them is about the same as the cost of creating the class.  If you want every village to have multiple paper folders, then it might well be a class in its own right.Most settings would have no need for those concepts to be archetypal.  Characters of that sort might exist, but they aren't important to the identity of the world and they aren't just running around everywhere.  Fitting the unique concept into a well designed flexible spell-caster would probably work perfectly well and probably would be even better than providing a narrow class (and then finding yourself needing an infinite number of narrow classes to the same standard).Likewise, you might have races that are so different than human norm - a race of naked mole rats that share a group mind when in close proximity to each other, or a bodiless race of living daydreams - that normal classes don't really fit with what is most special and important about those races.   So you might have quasi-racial classes that have to do with exercising and developing the skills that are unique to that race.  Personally, I don't think that on the whole Arcana Unearthed worked that well.  It had some really novel game concepts, but the classes themselves for the most part fell pretty flat for me.  It was an interesting exercise in creativity to eschew any of the usual broad and flexible archetypes from generic fantasy and instead create an entire world with nothing but specific and novel archetypes, but I think it also showed just how powerful of a hold the convention archetypes have over the imagination.  And I think it also shows just how cluttered the world would get if you tried to drop them in together with normal archetypes - something I don't think a lot of people tried to do for intuitive reasons.   Ultimately, a good list of classes lets you take pretty much any literary figure and immediately class him successful.The above esoteric classes I invented on the spot may sound cool, and in some ways they are, but I don't doubt that for many they'd just fall flat and others would quickly lose interest.   Both the Arcana Unearthed and I have created class concepts that you'd almost never choose as the ideal class when trying to fit in some literary character that plays large in our imagination.   Monte's book is like a fantasy book for a world other than our own that has different myths than ours.   Two or three unique archetypes might have worked better than a whole palate of them.Well, I would.  I can't think of what to differentiate them on.  And if you wanted to differentiate them on some sort of internal magical ability - 'ki' let's say - that was highly important to your world, then I think you'd be better off with a generic martial magic hybrid.  After all, even in Japanese anime or Wuxia - at least of the sort where 'anyone who is anyone can leap over tall buildings in a single pedaling bound-  it's not uncommon for western themed characters to also possess the same sort of internal power.</blockquote>

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