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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mortaneus" data-source="post: 64530" data-attributes="member: 485">So, Psion, basically what you're saying is that the main benefits the class system in D&D give are as follows:1.  Balance among characters2.  Ease of Adventure Design3.  Clearly delineated character design4.  Genre AdheranceWell, here's the problems:1.  Balance among characters:  D&D is hardly balanced.  Archers are almost universally more powerful than melee combatants.  Clerics have WAY more advantages than wizards.  The sorcerer, unless they specialize at blasting things, generally sucks.  A 17th level wizard vs. a 17th level fighter will almost always rock the fighter's world.  Not only can he time stop, and then horrid wilting and meteor swarm him into kibble, but also dominate his mind, switch bodies with him if the mage wants better physical stats, and has contingencies set to go off if the fighter so much as looks at him wrong.   It seems classes do a poor job of ensuring balance among characters, and ensuring that characters don't step on each other's toes.  In many high level parties, the mage and the cleric are the only ones who wind up doing anything effective.  Everyone else's main features can be replicated with spell power. 2.  Ease of Adventure Design:  I guess if your party is a generic bunch of hack and slashers, this is true.  However, I have yet to see any published module for D&D 3e where a party of diplomatic and sneaky types have a chance of victory.  Almost univerally, adventures are designed with the plot being nothing more than a backdrop that leads the characters from one fight to another.  Even those that aren't so combat intensive, still necessitate a level of brute force for their resolution.  The system is designed that way.  Look in the PHB.  How many spells are there for combat purposes?  Most.  How many of the classes have combat as the primary focus of their class abilities?  Most.  How much of the book is dedicated to butt-kicking?  Most.  D&D is a game about fighting.  It's written for people who want to kick butt.  Where are the rules for detailed intimidation and interrogation attempts?  Nowhere.  Where are the rules for getting better at what you do by finding and hiring a qualified teacher?  Nowhere.  According to D&D, unless you're out sniffing out traps, butchering monsters, and ransacking bastions of evil for loot, you can't learn anything. So, of course adventure design is easy in D&D.  Just come up with a couple of fights, a goal, and a loose plot thread tying them together, and you have an adventure.  It's the system and game focus that make adventure easy.  Classes really have nothing to do with it.3.    Clearly delineated character generation:  Well, it does do that quite well.  If you, as a player, prefer to have your character ideas crammed into predetermined types, which give you a pile of abilities that probably make no sense for your background, and prevent you from aquiring any real degree of proficiency in any skills that deviate from the very stringent norms of your class without hamstringing your character by multiclassing, yes, it works quite well.  If you, as a GM, don't trust your players to make characters that are more than a collection of stats and death dealing, and are so insecure in your abilities as a teller of stories that you must institute iron-clad regulations to prevent the game from getting out of hand, then it's great.If, on the other hand, you want to play a game, have fun with it regardless of 'power level', and are versitile and dynamic enough that you can run with whatever the players want to do, then you have a problem.4.  Genre Adherance:  The class system in D&D does this quite well too, provided the genre is D&D.  It's most certainly NOT generic fantasy.  If it were, Gandalf have fireballed the orcs, Li Mu Bai would have been immune to the poison in the dart, Ged would have been toting around a spellbook, Belgarion would have screwed up his magic every time he put on armor, Lancelot could have healed himself after Arthur struck him down, and Raamo D'ok would have been carrying around a pet rock in the folds of his shuba.Archetypes are all well and good, but isn't breaking outside one's own place in society an integral part of a great deal of heroic fantasy?  The downtrodden whelp who miraculously reveals some innate and previously hidden talent, which winds up saving the world?  With the class system, however, this can never happen, because a whelp (1st level commoner), has only one feat, no special powers, and a pretty pathetic skill list.Basically, from what you have said, for D&D to be capable of telling a story with anything other than fairly generic archetypical main characters, you have to start changing the system.And if you have to change the system, then what's the point of having it to begin with?  Why not use something that can reflect the archetypical characters, as well as anything else you might possibly come up with?  Personally, I'd rather play a system that does a genre well, but also allows one to challenge it, rather than one that drives you into following the conventions, and falls apart when you try to resist them.</blockquote>

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