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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6286883" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm not really talking about classes at all.  I'm talking about professions.Suppose a character's class is fighter?  What could we say about his profession?  Only that it probably evolves something that requires him to be a skilled combatant.  It could be knight, baliff, field marshall, prison warden, pirate, bodygaurd, big game hunter, soldier, mercenary, courtier, gladiator, duelist, animal handlerer, groom, assassin, night watchman, or what not.  He might not be well suited to the profession in every degree, but he's be well suited when it came time to fight.  By profession I'm talking about the social and economic station that a character has in the game world.  It's not something D&D usually deals with, since in D&D money is typically found all over the place waiting to be picked up.  To the extent that PC's have a profession it is usually 'mercenary'.But that's also a good jumping off point for reversing this.  If I give a profession like mercenary, what class does it imply?  What about assassin?  What about noble?  What about pirate?  I would argue that its possible to see just about any class fulfilling those roles in some fashion.To a certain extent I agree with you, but that sort of view I find tends to create problems with certain types of play.  Take again the example of wanting to play a 'pirate captain'.  We could probably delay entry into the profession as long as we like in theory.  We could have every pirate captain be 20th level and the crew be 10th level, in theory.  But the problem we would run into is that RPGs tend to require a certain amount of setting forethought if we aren't going to have the PC's wreck the game by pointing out all the plot holes and inconsistancies by actually using those plot holes and inconsistancies during the game to help solve problems.  One of those potential problems is that the profession 'pirate captain' may, if we aren't very careful, quickly become one that is obselete not long after 10th level.  For a 2nd or 4th level character, a sailing ship is an asset and the wealth invested in it is reasonable and justifiable.  For a 15th or 20th level character, a sailing ship tends to be a liability under RAW.  The 15th or 20th level character lives in a world where everything can fly, many or most things can teleport, and objects like ships regardless of size can be sunk or disabled with the merest application of force.  At 2nd or 4th level a sailing ship magnifies a character's importance and freedom.  At 15th or 20th level, a ship - even a bigger ship - tends to contrain and reduce a character's importance.  If the world is such where 10th-20th level NPCs are common, given the liabilities of sailing ships and their cost, we might wonder why they existed in the first place.  If you have an army of 10th level characters, the ship is their weakpoint and probably the thing easiest to destroy.  Tall sailing ships after all have no particular value in this world, as they've been replaced by superior technology or obseleted by advances in weaponry.  Magic is superior technology and advances in weaponry.  The further back into sailing history we ground our warships, the more that is true.  Incidentally, this is the reason the sailing technology of my games tends toward psuedo-18th century.The truth of the matter is that unless we greatly alter the RAW in some fashion, or we largely elimenate magic, or introduce fantastically powerful ships that can fly, have magic resistance, can quickly repair themselves, and so forth (or perhaps ships like the USS Missourri), the game of playing 'Pirate Captain' is probably over not that long after 12th level anyway.  It will have had its run, and a good run, but the campaign may soon need to grow.Likewise, that style of play may work fine when you - like World of Warcraft - regularly move the PC's to new settings where everything levels up with them, but it doesnt' work so well if you want a world that doesn't have the property of leveling up with the characters.  If there are whole cities and ships of 10th+ level characters out there, then this isn't really a world where 1st level characters are anything but helpless.  Just as in World of Warcraft, if you stop and think about it as anything other than a game, you might wonder why one of the 40th level gaurds from the next zone over doesn't just wander over and resolve every single problem experienced by the 25th level zone - as he could do easily - so in such a game you might wonder why there has been so careful stratification between the problems you experienced at 1st level and the problems you were no experiencing at 10th level.  Why is the party of 8th level NPCs in the tavern comparitively broke, when there has been all of these dungeons packed with treasures you've been exploring that they could have claimed with the greatest of ease?  Why are dungeons only plundered by characters that can just barely do so?</blockquote>

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