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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8655167" data-attributes="member: 87792">My point exactly. The class/level system hard-locks things that shouldn't be and makes them difficult to break out of, restricting roleplay.So what happened to him? He got mind-wiped? This confuses me in terms of actual character growth. He decided to never again hide? Or he forgot all his skills enabling him to hide?And this is one reason I have a strong liking for the 5e subclass system. If you'd been playing 5e and had him ditch the assassin subclass in exchange for a custom-crafted cleric variant of the Arcane Trickster so he remained a rogue but a less razor-honed one this would have been excellent. But chucking in Thieving to the point it was as if he'd never been one is essentially hollowing out his mind and body and taking away all his previous abilities in exchange for new magic is just creepy and a major change in personality.Like I said, I don't believe in completely erasing someone's past or that they can. I'd have given him a new subclass representing him letting go of the being an assassin and both losing and rejecting his edge, and becoming a spellcasting cleric. But he could never be a completely new person merely a changed one from who he had been.I don't like alignment in the first place and consider it to be a strong flavour that simply ruins dishes unless used very carefully. I can understand alignment-restricting assassins (although disagree) but the worst possible thing to do to paladins was alignment restricting them; I can't improve on <a href="https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/918554281015377922" target="_blank">UrsulaV's Paladin Rant, or "Crapsack Jedi with Guilt Issues"</a>.There is an old saw  "Measure what you value or you end up valuing what you measure."If an action has mechanical success/fail chances in the first place and they are not impacted by something (and you don't use [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] style justifications (which are fine)) then the mechanics are taking the active stance that it doesn't matter and either (a) only raw skill matters or (b) there are environmental factors that do matter but emotional connections don't.It's not that mechanics need to be involved. It's that they are involved. A mother will be no more formidable and unyielding in defence of a child in D&D than she would in defence of an outhouse.  And this makes a strong statement about worldbuilding and has a major impact on worldbuilding.And if it doesn't then there is no mechanical difference.Except that retreating in D&D is normally a fool's option unless you are either a rogue or have magic to pull you out. Meanwhile if you were playing e.g. Fate which has actual mechanics for surrendering then the characters surrender.And when you say "roleplay" in that context I hear "top down author stance, imposed on the character" rather than flowing organically. Fate, in my experience, encourages far more in the way of in character decisions as characters act in response to the gameworld and less author stance in which the player tells the character how they should act because the rules can't be bothered to underscore anything like emotional connections.</blockquote>

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