D&D (2024) Should a general Adventurer class be created to represent the Everyman?

[Micah Sweet]

I think this exposes the flaw inherent in Experience-based advancement, especially when the required amount is whittled down to almost nothing relative to actual in-game adventure time.

It's why, as a GM, I've always banned Multiclassing.

I'd rather just houserule in training time.

 

[Minigiant]

In D&D, they absolutely do.

D&D does not make any pretense of realism about training time. The difference between level 1 and level 20 is enormous to the point of absurdity, but you can develop those skills in a few months of adventuring.

So why assume that your 1st-level abilities took years to learn? Especially when another PC can pick up those same skills in a blink via multiclassing?

That to me is short sighted design. 5e has a bunch of ideas it locked itself into that designers wished they could change.

D&D assumes you are taught the entire basis befind a class at level 1 and it take the winds of time or fire of XP to advance.

One of my hopes for 6e is that training time is built into class design and multiclassing.

Low training classes like barbarian, warlock, and sorcerer might have their core class features come online later and require a 13 to multiclass in.
High training classes like cleric, druid, monk, and wizard would be frontloaded, but require a 15 to multiclass into and add +25% of your base adult age to start in.

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On another note, what if multiclassing was limited by Intelligence. You have to be smart to study and maintain 2 or 3 full classes. And only a D&D via campaign reasons would let to bypass the Int limit (via demon pacts or time skip training).

 

[Hriston]

The "Everyman" stock character is supposed to represent the typical person you meet every day. In the modern sense, your average middle-class working person.

That doesn't quite capture it, and I don't think being average really comes into it. Ordinary is closer to the mark, but not average because the everyman must also display benign conduct for easy audience identification: things like being kind, gentle, good-natured, and friendly. The average person doesn't have enough of these positive qualities to make an effective everyman.

Hamlet is absolutely not that. He is a prince (technically should have been king if not for Claudius's machinations), a learned scholar (away from his studies in England), and far too cerebral for the Everyman.

From this, it seems you would think it's a problem if a player chose the Noble or Sage background for the same character for which they chose the Everyman class, a sign, perhaps, that this formulation of the concept is too narrow for a class. Maybe that's your point. I don't recall Hamlet being portrayed as particularly academically inclined, though, just that he went to school, like a lot of people. Also, the average person in a courtly drama is noble, so you seem to be saying you can't have an everyman character in a story about these sorts of people.

Compare him to Charlie Brown (a good-hearted but hopelessly average person) or Homer Simpson (probably the closest to a true Everyman) and Hamlet is not in the same field.

I think you're confusing the fact that Hamlet's lines were written by William Shakespeare with his being a different quality of person. I mean, Charlie Brown also waxes philosophical (as does Homer Simpson too, probably), he just does it in naturalistic, 20th-century American boy sort of way.

As one person in a class of mine stated "he is an inaction hero", the action hero in perfect reverse. Hamlet in fact does NOT rise to the occasion; he only manages to kill his enemy once he realized he is going to die and Claudius had won. I pyrrhic victory if there ever was one.

Yes, and I think inaction is key to the identity of the protagonist everyman, whether or not Hamlet is one. Inaction through ambivalence or avoidance should be the go to for the character until something important is at stake. For Hamlet, it was the prospect of dying without exacting his revenge, which is an extreme example, but the class could offer an ability along the lines of an ability to make a special attack against an opponent when the life of the everyman or a loved one is at stake, perhaps turning their own "vile" means against them.

Anyway, that has less to do with the idea of an Everyman class and more to do with nitpicking a Wikipedia article,

Well, someone agrees with you because I looked at the article, and Prince Hamlet's been removed from the examples.

but I think its worth noting that the Everyman doesn't just mean "an unskilled person" but literally "the closest to average human a person can be." So when the Everyman finds out he has a secret destiny, lineage, or hidden talent, he is NOT an everyman anymore.

I don't know where "unskilled" came from. I mean, ordinary people have all kinds of skills. And I don't agree an everyman must be strictly average. But I do agree that a character possessed of unusual skills or a special destiny is a departure from the Everyman archetype and is instead an expression of The Chosen One. Perhaps someone would like a chosen one class too.

And that's very hard to do in a RPG.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Why would anyone want to play an everyman who's not an everyman?

 

[Remathilis]

Skipping over the Shakespeare literary critique (I could do that all day; Shakespeare was my focus in college). I want to get to this...

I don't know where "unskilled" came from. I mean, ordinary people have all kinds of skills. And I don't agree an everyman must be strictly average. But I do agree that a character possessed of unusual skills or a special destiny is a departure from the Everyman archetype and is instead an expression of The Chosen One. Perhaps someone would like a chosen one class too.

The OP's argument is that every class in the game is "highly skilled". That is, they have to spend time (usually years) learning swordplay, spell use, or both. They are looking for an experience where a character who has not trained in such feats but only in what a common every-day person in a D&D world would know. No weapon mastery, no spellcasting, no skill expertise, no rages, sneak attacks, or martial arts. So, when I say "unskilled", I mean lacking any special training that would constitute having one of the 14 character classes currently in the game.

I would tend to think such a character class could be done, but the niche for it is extremely thin. You are playing a commoner with the power-budget of a full PC class, but it doesn't look like any class we have so far. What makes that difficult is that the Everyman can't "learn" specialized skills (by that I mean class features) because that would be anathema to the concept of the Everyman. For example, an Everyman cannot "learn" how to evade fireballs the way a Rogue does. He can still have a feature that makes damage from Dex saves half or nothing, but it cannot be something he trains to learn how to do, it's just something that happens to him. Every time he makes a save, Fate/luck/the Gods/whatever conveniently puts him close enough to a wall/pillar/cover that he never takes the full blunt of the blast. He can learn mundane things like skills or languages, but not special features like weapon masteries or cantrip. Essentially, the character survives by Dumb Luck.

Literature does have such characters. We talk about LotR's hobbits like Samwise mostly surviving through luck and persistence, not training or combat prowess. His skills as a cook and gardener aren't winning him the day. I would argue Tasselhoff is a better example though; the handler class is essentially a kender-everyman class (it takes the main kender racial trait: thief skills and lets him improve them. It's the closest to a kender race-as-class as AD&D would allow). Tass is absolutely not a trained "thief", his abilities are just innate kender curiosity that manifests as thief skills. And while he lacks the full power of a proper Thief (no sneak attack/backstab) he's close enough that he can hang with the other Heroes of the Lance. (At least in AD&D, I could make an argument that the Thief class itself barely hangs with the others, but that's a debate for a different topic).

So, for me, the Everyman class would feel a little like Tasselhoff: a character who innately can mimic enough of a character class's power to not feel burdensome, but not so much that he loses the feeling for playing an elevated commoner. Can such a class be done? Yes. Is it a lot of work for a class that for the most part has a limited niche? Also yes.