Class warfare continues as I float a notion of a functional model of class that may bring an entirely new way of thinking to the table.
In the last article, we talked about how to conceive of character class, and basically witnessed D&D struggling between two extremes: either a class was entirely a mechanical construct, without much bearing on the flavor of your character (a la OD&D’s concept of defining class by access to weapons, spells, and skills, or 4e’s dissociated mechanics), or they are very narrow archetypes that are defined by very specific abilities and activities (a la 2e’s kits, 3e’s prestige classes, or 4e’s themes). That's how D&D has parsed what a class is and has been, but it's certainly been a fraught journey. So here, I'd like to explore what a class actually DOES, in the playing of the game.
What The Story Suggests
5e seems to be trying to parse this difference by using “subclasses,” but you can see the struggle here: a subclass can be a mechanical trope (such as “uses complex abilities”), but can also be an evocative flavor trope (such as “gladiator.”) . One can have a point-based spellcasting mechanism a la psionics, but have the flavor of a studious academic wizard or a blood-powered mystical sorcerer or a pact-sworn witch or warlock. The rules and the story do not –necessarily – reinforce each other.
That’s a conflict of interest. A mechanical fob doesn’t necessarily imply any specific kind of character in the story – “uses slot-based spellcasting” has represented academic arcanists, supernatural characters, miracle-working priests, and dragon-blooded mutants throughout D&D. A character can use point-based spellcasting without having to be a mystical pulpy psychic, and they can use complex fighting abilities without being an arena-trained warrior.
When you think of what it would be like to play a “Gladiator” in purely story terms, this doesn’t necessarily include complex, strategic combat maneuvers. It probably includes images of ancient Rome, slave trades, exotic combat styles, bets made with blood, life and death at the behest of lords and stable-masters, a cult of celebrity, the yearning for freedom or the broken spirit of the wild warrior, of violence as a performance, of making the crowd cheer for death and blood. To support that story mechanically might suggest rules like a way to track fame, attacks that use Charisma more than Strength, a price for purchasing a slave, a way for crowds and observers to influence your fighting (perhaps some sort of morale system), and probably other rules fobs. This kind of character isn’t necessarily complex or more involved to play at the table, it doesn’t necessarily require more decision points or involve more details than, say, a soldier or a mercenary.
The tension here is that mechanics and flavor don’t necessarily come bundled together in how we think about our character archetypes. If you’re a “gladiator,” you are not defined by the complexity of your abilities. “Gladiator” is a useful narrative shortcut for an achetype, but it’s not an archetype that automatically comes with an assumed level of complexity. If 5e’s gladiator has a complex attack maneuver, but doesn’t have a rule for tracking fame, it’s not going to be meeting the story needs of a gladiator character
Ultimately, this means that if your goal is to link the story and the mechanics tightly, it’s smart to go with an approach that asks first, “What kind of story do I want to tell, here?” and then asks “What kind of rules do I need to support that story?”
Is this guy using powers, feats, energy points, slots?
Flexibility vs. Specificity
Of course, it is open for debate if this goal is one worth pursuing. 4e D&D got significant mileage and praise out of breaking the link between mechanics and story – the rules would tell you the mechanics, and it was up to you to use them to inform your archetype. My current Dark Sun 4e game, for instance, has my character mechanically as a swarm druid. But, as far as the story of the game is concerned, she is a druid who transforms into rainstorms and seeks to bring a blue age back to Athas. Her class mechanics – and even her race – don’t speak to that story, they just provide a mechanical chassis on which to hang a story that I’m inventing myself. In a similar vein, I’ll soon be starting a Planescape 4e game where one character is a blink dog. Mechanically, it’s an eladrin swordmage, but that’s just about bonuses and powers: story-wise, it’s a blink dog.
There is a trade-off involved when you disentangle the fiction from the rules so thoroughly. Namely, that the more broadly a given rule can be applied, the less it can be used to tell a specific story. Since all design is local, we ultimately want to tell our specific stories – the worlds that we create with our friends at our tables – with the best, most specific rules that we need. If we could have whatever we wanted out of D&D, we’d probably have a few game designers sitting in on our games and improving them as we go. That’s unrealistic, and so the designers of the game need to cast a broader net. They need to make rules that can be used to tell your story, but also my story, and the story of Gary down the street, and Mitsuko in Japan and Klaus in Germany. So, it’s more feasable to write broad material, even if we all ultimately want material specific to our games. It’s something we’re going to have to be able to dial in on at our own tables.
A Class Is A Conflict
So to parse how to create a class that can be intensely campaign-specific, let me first talk about being specific to a particular campaign.
As DM’s, our job is often to create oppositional forces to the PC’s, things that they can overcome to be heroic. So any world we create or adopt should have active and sinister antagonists – from the orc army amassing to the north to the remnants of the thieves’ guild that control the city to the evil lord to the demon-summoning cult in the forest. In fact, just picking from the Monster Manual, our world gets filled with things that the PC’s can interact with and work through and fight against. That is, our world gets filled with conflicts.
Those conflicts already have perpetrators and victims when they exist in your game. And where you have conflicts, you also have possible resolutions. If you have orcs to the north of the village in your world, for instance, you probably have a conflict where their violence threatens the village. The resolution suggests itself: stop the orcs from hurting that village. Your heroes, then, are, at least in part, defined by their antagonists: they want to stop the orcs from hurting the village. The more conflicts there are in your world, the more possible kinds of PC’s can exist. For instance, perhaps another antagonist is the evil lord who wants to exterminate all orcs in a massive genocide. Now, your PC’s can want to save the orcs in addition to or instead of wanting to save the village. More conflicts in your world permit more complex characters and a more detailed characters.
In this example, you’ve taken the “generic” idea of an orc, or an evil lord, and applied it specifically to your setting: there is a specific land that they inhabit, a specific town that they threaten, perhaps a specific leader of the orcs, or a specific NPC who is the evil lord. You’ve localized the generic conflict into something specific.
By having these antagonists, you also have specific people who work against them. There is a reason the orcs haven’t quite crushed the town yet, yes? Perhaps a military that works to defend the people? And there is a reason the military hasn’t exterminated the orcs, too, yes? Perhaps a powerful orc leader who cares for his people? With those specific world elements, you have specific kinds of heroes specific to your setting: a military officer who wants to end the war, perhaps, and an orc who wants to save their tribe.
These specific kinds of heroes imply certain mechanical abilities. Your military officer probably fights in an ordered, regimented style, working well with allies, with a voice of commanding authority. Your orc probably fights wild and untamed, savagely beating the opposition, displaying great strength, and roaring with a will-shattering fury.
Through creating the conflicts, you have made niches for certain classes of heroes. For this campaign, the division between a wild, rampaging warrior and a disciplined, reliable warrior is dramatic and important and key, and so you would probably not want one class to represent both of them – they’re entirely different in your world, formed of different elements and dedicated to different conflicts.
You can see classes growing out of conflicts in the Core Four classes, as well. Clerics, with their fights against undead and extraplanar creatures. Fighters, waging war against the warlike humanoids (the orcs, goblins, gnolls, and whatnot). Rogues are made to fight against the dungeon itself, disabling traps and sneaking through corridors. Wizards are born of the riddles and puzzles that D&D contains, with high Intelligence and spells that transform the environment. The things we handle in D&D are puzzles, dungeons, and monsters both natural and unnatural.
So you can see that a class exists in the game to fight against a specific threat – that classes are born out of conflicts, out of the problems in the world that have need of a solution. In our example, a DM needs a disciplined warrior and a wild warrior to serve the conflicts that they are making in their setting. Class can exist here at the same level as an individual monster: something that you can take and make an element of your specific world by adding only a handful of details. In this case, it would seem that a Fighter and a Barbarian would serve nicely as “generic enough to be published” but still “specific enough to be adapted to my home game.”
A class like “Mage” doesn’t work as well for that purpose – it doesn’t suggest any sort of story. A class like “Sorcerer” might, though, with the focus on the story of having a powerful supernatural bloodline.
What this also means is that mechanics are only relevant in as much as they support a specific kind of story. Sorcerers don’t need to be “spontaneous slot-based spellcasters,” because that’s largely irrelevant to “powerful supernatural bloodline.” In our example above, our Fighter doesn’t need to have complex maneuvers, or simple maneuvers; our Barbarian doesn’t need a Rage that is an ability bonus to a Strength score. Those specific mechanics are irrelevant to what the story of the class, to the story of the conflict the class represents.
Custom Classes
As far as D&D in specific goes, it’s unclear whether a certain Rubicon may have already been crossed or not. Though there’s no story reason for sorcerers to have slot-based spontaneous magic or fighters to have simple abilities, the expectation of almost 50 years of gaming may have produced this implication anyway, so that if you try to extricate Vancian slots from the Wizard at this point, you may hit a brick wall of angry fans.
Maybe.
For my purposes here, though, of identifying what a class can function as, I think I’ve found something useful and constructive: classes are the potential resolution to conflicts that exist in our settings, they are the solution to problems in the D&D world, linked by story to the troubles that exist.
So, my question for you this week: What conflicts in your world bring about which classes? What can the classes in your current campaign contribute to thwarting the various villains in your world?
In the last article, we talked about how to conceive of character class, and basically witnessed D&D struggling between two extremes: either a class was entirely a mechanical construct, without much bearing on the flavor of your character (a la OD&D’s concept of defining class by access to weapons, spells, and skills, or 4e’s dissociated mechanics), or they are very narrow archetypes that are defined by very specific abilities and activities (a la 2e’s kits, 3e’s prestige classes, or 4e’s themes). That's how D&D has parsed what a class is and has been, but it's certainly been a fraught journey. So here, I'd like to explore what a class actually DOES, in the playing of the game.
What The Story Suggests
5e seems to be trying to parse this difference by using “subclasses,” but you can see the struggle here: a subclass can be a mechanical trope (such as “uses complex abilities”), but can also be an evocative flavor trope (such as “gladiator.”) . One can have a point-based spellcasting mechanism a la psionics, but have the flavor of a studious academic wizard or a blood-powered mystical sorcerer or a pact-sworn witch or warlock. The rules and the story do not –necessarily – reinforce each other.
That’s a conflict of interest. A mechanical fob doesn’t necessarily imply any specific kind of character in the story – “uses slot-based spellcasting” has represented academic arcanists, supernatural characters, miracle-working priests, and dragon-blooded mutants throughout D&D. A character can use point-based spellcasting without having to be a mystical pulpy psychic, and they can use complex fighting abilities without being an arena-trained warrior.
When you think of what it would be like to play a “Gladiator” in purely story terms, this doesn’t necessarily include complex, strategic combat maneuvers. It probably includes images of ancient Rome, slave trades, exotic combat styles, bets made with blood, life and death at the behest of lords and stable-masters, a cult of celebrity, the yearning for freedom or the broken spirit of the wild warrior, of violence as a performance, of making the crowd cheer for death and blood. To support that story mechanically might suggest rules like a way to track fame, attacks that use Charisma more than Strength, a price for purchasing a slave, a way for crowds and observers to influence your fighting (perhaps some sort of morale system), and probably other rules fobs. This kind of character isn’t necessarily complex or more involved to play at the table, it doesn’t necessarily require more decision points or involve more details than, say, a soldier or a mercenary.
The tension here is that mechanics and flavor don’t necessarily come bundled together in how we think about our character archetypes. If you’re a “gladiator,” you are not defined by the complexity of your abilities. “Gladiator” is a useful narrative shortcut for an achetype, but it’s not an archetype that automatically comes with an assumed level of complexity. If 5e’s gladiator has a complex attack maneuver, but doesn’t have a rule for tracking fame, it’s not going to be meeting the story needs of a gladiator character
Ultimately, this means that if your goal is to link the story and the mechanics tightly, it’s smart to go with an approach that asks first, “What kind of story do I want to tell, here?” and then asks “What kind of rules do I need to support that story?”
Flexibility vs. Specificity
Of course, it is open for debate if this goal is one worth pursuing. 4e D&D got significant mileage and praise out of breaking the link between mechanics and story – the rules would tell you the mechanics, and it was up to you to use them to inform your archetype. My current Dark Sun 4e game, for instance, has my character mechanically as a swarm druid. But, as far as the story of the game is concerned, she is a druid who transforms into rainstorms and seeks to bring a blue age back to Athas. Her class mechanics – and even her race – don’t speak to that story, they just provide a mechanical chassis on which to hang a story that I’m inventing myself. In a similar vein, I’ll soon be starting a Planescape 4e game where one character is a blink dog. Mechanically, it’s an eladrin swordmage, but that’s just about bonuses and powers: story-wise, it’s a blink dog.
There is a trade-off involved when you disentangle the fiction from the rules so thoroughly. Namely, that the more broadly a given rule can be applied, the less it can be used to tell a specific story. Since all design is local, we ultimately want to tell our specific stories – the worlds that we create with our friends at our tables – with the best, most specific rules that we need. If we could have whatever we wanted out of D&D, we’d probably have a few game designers sitting in on our games and improving them as we go. That’s unrealistic, and so the designers of the game need to cast a broader net. They need to make rules that can be used to tell your story, but also my story, and the story of Gary down the street, and Mitsuko in Japan and Klaus in Germany. So, it’s more feasable to write broad material, even if we all ultimately want material specific to our games. It’s something we’re going to have to be able to dial in on at our own tables.
A Class Is A Conflict
So to parse how to create a class that can be intensely campaign-specific, let me first talk about being specific to a particular campaign.
As DM’s, our job is often to create oppositional forces to the PC’s, things that they can overcome to be heroic. So any world we create or adopt should have active and sinister antagonists – from the orc army amassing to the north to the remnants of the thieves’ guild that control the city to the evil lord to the demon-summoning cult in the forest. In fact, just picking from the Monster Manual, our world gets filled with things that the PC’s can interact with and work through and fight against. That is, our world gets filled with conflicts.
Those conflicts already have perpetrators and victims when they exist in your game. And where you have conflicts, you also have possible resolutions. If you have orcs to the north of the village in your world, for instance, you probably have a conflict where their violence threatens the village. The resolution suggests itself: stop the orcs from hurting that village. Your heroes, then, are, at least in part, defined by their antagonists: they want to stop the orcs from hurting the village. The more conflicts there are in your world, the more possible kinds of PC’s can exist. For instance, perhaps another antagonist is the evil lord who wants to exterminate all orcs in a massive genocide. Now, your PC’s can want to save the orcs in addition to or instead of wanting to save the village. More conflicts in your world permit more complex characters and a more detailed characters.
In this example, you’ve taken the “generic” idea of an orc, or an evil lord, and applied it specifically to your setting: there is a specific land that they inhabit, a specific town that they threaten, perhaps a specific leader of the orcs, or a specific NPC who is the evil lord. You’ve localized the generic conflict into something specific.
By having these antagonists, you also have specific people who work against them. There is a reason the orcs haven’t quite crushed the town yet, yes? Perhaps a military that works to defend the people? And there is a reason the military hasn’t exterminated the orcs, too, yes? Perhaps a powerful orc leader who cares for his people? With those specific world elements, you have specific kinds of heroes specific to your setting: a military officer who wants to end the war, perhaps, and an orc who wants to save their tribe.
These specific kinds of heroes imply certain mechanical abilities. Your military officer probably fights in an ordered, regimented style, working well with allies, with a voice of commanding authority. Your orc probably fights wild and untamed, savagely beating the opposition, displaying great strength, and roaring with a will-shattering fury.
Through creating the conflicts, you have made niches for certain classes of heroes. For this campaign, the division between a wild, rampaging warrior and a disciplined, reliable warrior is dramatic and important and key, and so you would probably not want one class to represent both of them – they’re entirely different in your world, formed of different elements and dedicated to different conflicts.
You can see classes growing out of conflicts in the Core Four classes, as well. Clerics, with their fights against undead and extraplanar creatures. Fighters, waging war against the warlike humanoids (the orcs, goblins, gnolls, and whatnot). Rogues are made to fight against the dungeon itself, disabling traps and sneaking through corridors. Wizards are born of the riddles and puzzles that D&D contains, with high Intelligence and spells that transform the environment. The things we handle in D&D are puzzles, dungeons, and monsters both natural and unnatural.
So you can see that a class exists in the game to fight against a specific threat – that classes are born out of conflicts, out of the problems in the world that have need of a solution. In our example, a DM needs a disciplined warrior and a wild warrior to serve the conflicts that they are making in their setting. Class can exist here at the same level as an individual monster: something that you can take and make an element of your specific world by adding only a handful of details. In this case, it would seem that a Fighter and a Barbarian would serve nicely as “generic enough to be published” but still “specific enough to be adapted to my home game.”
A class like “Mage” doesn’t work as well for that purpose – it doesn’t suggest any sort of story. A class like “Sorcerer” might, though, with the focus on the story of having a powerful supernatural bloodline.
What this also means is that mechanics are only relevant in as much as they support a specific kind of story. Sorcerers don’t need to be “spontaneous slot-based spellcasters,” because that’s largely irrelevant to “powerful supernatural bloodline.” In our example above, our Fighter doesn’t need to have complex maneuvers, or simple maneuvers; our Barbarian doesn’t need a Rage that is an ability bonus to a Strength score. Those specific mechanics are irrelevant to what the story of the class, to the story of the conflict the class represents.
Custom Classes
As far as D&D in specific goes, it’s unclear whether a certain Rubicon may have already been crossed or not. Though there’s no story reason for sorcerers to have slot-based spontaneous magic or fighters to have simple abilities, the expectation of almost 50 years of gaming may have produced this implication anyway, so that if you try to extricate Vancian slots from the Wizard at this point, you may hit a brick wall of angry fans.
Maybe.
For my purposes here, though, of identifying what a class can function as, I think I’ve found something useful and constructive: classes are the potential resolution to conflicts that exist in our settings, they are the solution to problems in the D&D world, linked by story to the troubles that exist.
So, my question for you this week: What conflicts in your world bring about which classes? What can the classes in your current campaign contribute to thwarting the various villains in your world?
