What classes should 5e actually embrace? What should be relegated to the subclass bargain bin? Actually. there's a different way to look at the endless debates about what should or should not be a class, one that's more useful and productive than trying to draw lines in this ever-shifting beach sand. Come with me and discover it.
“Psionicists and wizards are fundamentally different!”
“Barbarians and Fighters are basically the same thing.”
“Isn’t a paladin just a multiclass Cleric/Fighter?”
“What the hell is a Seeker and why should I care?”
“Monks don’t belong in pseudo-European fantasy!”
The debates and discussions swirl about in a chaotic storm of preferences and lines drawn in the sand and then washed away by the tides. What deserves to be a class? What should be a subclass, or a multiclass? What should be a feat? The storm rages most strongly in the run-up to a new edition, when, presumably, the lines are more fluid and open to redefinition. A “class” has never represented one coherent thing in D&D, the definition has always been fluid and malleable. What’s more, because all design is local, the choices for the D&D game have never matched perfectly with the choices that any one table would prefer.
But why is what you scribble on your character sheet a matter of such importance? And how should we conceive of character class? And what purpose does it serve? When someone says “Rangers should be a subclass of Fighter!” and someone else says “Rangers should be their own class!” and someone else says “Rangers are just Two Weapon Fighting feats and the Nature skill, they shouldn’t even be a subclass!” who is right?
Let me help you with this.
Why Does Class Even Matter?
To start with, we can look at why a game like D&D even has classes. Certainly it doesn’t need to be that way – plenty of games exist out there where there are no classes. Classes also tend to silo abilities – why CAN’T my elite warrior or my learned sage learn to hide in shadows or open locks as well as a thief? Why is the cleric the only one who can heal?
The first answer to the question is “That’s the way it’s always been, and D&D is tethered to its history.” While true to a degree, this answer is pretty flaccid. D&D has done away with REAMS of mechanics that it has no use for. Unarmed combat tables, weapon vs. armor tables, the bohemian ear-spoon, gendered ability score adjustments, Comeliness, heck, even random encounters. If D&D had no use for classes, they’d probably have been booted to the curb along with the triapheg. By this point in time, class may be something with enough history to be difficult to budge, but there’s something deeper at work than slavish devotion to the past.
It’s certainly not that classes are necessary in any real sense, either. If you take a 4e Wizard power and slap it on a Fighter in place of one of her Fighter powers, the game doesn’t become wildly unbalanced. Toss in a barbarian power and an invoker power, too, why not. Balance is entirely possible to maintain without the class structure.
Ultimately, this means that character class is an organizational thing and a descriptive thing. It’s not necessary by any means, but it’s useful in terms of describing a certain kind of character you can be. You can be a character who is an expert in arcane magic without belonging to the “Wizard” class, but belonging to that class communicates what your abilities are likely to be fairly effectively. It communicates both what you can do (make magic), and what you’re likely to pursue (more powerful magic), and maybe even your background and world links (where did you learn to make magic?). It’s a cognitive shortcut, a useful category, a reference point. If the Wizard class didn’t exist, you could still have multiple levels of spells that any character could learn, and have a character who learned them all, thus looking identical to a wizard from any D&D edition. You just wouldn’t have all of the natural assumptions and details that flow from putting “I am a wizard” on your character sheet, and those assumptions and details provide greater context and meaning for your imaginary character. There is one noun that defines you: Wizard. It is the core of your identity.
It should be fairly evident at this point that the associated assumptions and details and goals and links are highly variable. “I am a wizard” means different things if you are playing in a pseudo-European Arthurian land than if you’re playing in a sword-and-sorcery pulpy world of barbarians and ancient empires. Even within a given setting, that archetype may contain multitudes. Are you a trickster and deceiver who weaves illusions? Are you a spiritualist who lives in a hut and talks to spirits? Are you a semi-angelic supernatural creature yourself? A shapechanger who spends years in animals’ skins? A person who has woven a pact with supernatural forces? A “Wizard” could be all those things and more.
Which is really part of the problem, here. Those are all very distinct types of characters. Though they may be mechanically identical, they may also not be. That illusionist might have slot-based magic, just like the supernatural person. Does that make them the same class? Or, two different illusionists might have two different methods of spellcasting: one uses points, one uses slots. Are they the same class because they’re the same TYPE of character, or do the mechanical differences negate that? And if all characters use the same mechanics, a la 4e, does that mean that there’s no real “class” anymore?
We all have different ways we think about what a class should be because we all have different mechanics and different character types and different levels of focus at our own games. Even if we all played the same setting (say, Dragonlance), we’d all have different kinds of characters, often with different mechanics, under one class umbrella. Classes are amorphous and flexible and there’s no good line in the sand that is useful to draw between one or the other at every table.
Is this guy a fighter, a rogue, or a...mage?
A Chronology of Class
It can be useful to look at how classes have been used in D&D historically to see how the designers have previously parsed the difference between very similar classes.
The original, primordial D&D had three classes that were largely defined by their access to the daily abilities known as spells and their access to different kinds of equipment. Fighters used weapons and armor, but not spells. Magic-Users used spells and magic items, but had more limited equipment. Clerics were the original “gishes,” fighting at a mid-level and casting at a mid-level. These were the distinctions that mattered: mechanics. If you had a character who was a sagacious worshiper of a god of knowledge, you probably had a Magic-User, despite the cleric-like flavor. If you had a warrior who could stand toe-to-toe with enemies and weave powerful magic, you probably had a Cleric. If you had an elite survivalist who was capable in the wilderness, you probably had a Fighter.
The very first supplement threw a wrench into that design, however, by introducing the Thief, and the skill mechanic, using percentages. The thief was in many ways like a magic-user, but who employed a list of skills instead of a list of spells. As time went on, more specific classes like monks and assassins and paladins were also included, changing the dynamics of the original “spells vs. equipment” axis. They were also more flavorful and evocative, less about the mechanics of the game and more about the type of person your character could be. By the time 1e rolled around, a change as simple as “a different spell list” would be an entirely new class (illusionist vs. wizard). By that standard, a 4e Greatweapon Fighter and a 4e Brawler Fighter should be entirely different classes! Classes by this point were very much tethered to specific archetypes: assassins with the Assassin’s Guild, and druids with the Hierophant.
2e took a step back, but only a slight one. While a slight spell list change was still enough to distinguish the specialist priest or wizard from the generalist cleric or wizard, the game encouraged people to think in terms of a more limited palette of classes: assassins could be thieves, barbarians could be fighters. On top of this, they layered kits, which brought back much of the specialization from 1e, just as sort of “sub-sub” classes. Your warrior was a ranger who was a greenwood ranger. Your rogue was a bard who was a jester.
At about the same time, BEMCI D&D was flirting with being VERY specific in terms of classes. While the original set had only four, the Gazetteer series for Mystara was adding classes so that there was a clear difference between clerics and dwarf-priests, and shamans, shamani, shadow-elf shamans, and wise women, and between merchants and merchant-princes.
3e took a step toward specificity from core 2e, but it was still in many ways more general than 1e – wizards had certain class abilities, certain mechanics, but your spell list didn’t necessarily make you an entirely different class, just a slightly different flavor of wizard. 3e also took 2e’s kits in a few different directions: there were now feats and prestige classes as well. In some cases, there were new base classes, but these were mostly justified on mechanics. The Favored Soul is different from the Cleric because their spellcasting is different, even if they may look very similar in terms of the story (both of them getting power from their gods).
Most recently, 4e defined class as an intersection of how you act in combat and how you fluff your attacks – a martial striker was defined as someone who did a lot of damage without any magical fluff, while an arcane striker was someone who did a lot of damage with magic. They occasionally double-dipped when big mechanics were brought out: a druid and a seeker are both primal controllers, but one relies more on up-close abilities and mobility, while the other relies on ranged attacks. This was complicated with the addition of themes, which served a more flavorful purpose, and lived independent of your class.
The pattern at this point is pretty clear: sometimes, D&D says a class is mostly something mechanical, and then, inevitably, it becomes less mechanical and more about the kind of character you play, in one way or another (kits, prestige classes, themes) until we get to a point where we have more kinds of characters than might be useful, and at about that point, we react by severely curtailing the list.
That’s D&D over time. But what are we to do at our own tables?
Empowering DMs
Ultimately, all design is local. The kinds of characters the people at your table play are unique to your particular table. If classes are to serve the point of “what kind of character I am,” then the mechanics are only useful in as much as they support that kind of character. This means that class is subjective -- arbitrary. What is worthy of a class at one table might not be worthy of a class at another.
Conceiving of class primarily as a construct of the needs of our own worlds and stories, it’s easy to see that the traditional D&D classes and definitions can be much improved for our own games. Rather than cling to typical D&D classes, my own ideal scenario would have DMs making classes that are unique to their own worlds. If I’m playing a Planescape game, for instance, my faction affiliation is probably more important than whether I use spells or swords, so maybe THAT can be my class. Maybe in a 13th Age game, I use the Icons as classes rather than the typical classes. In Dark Sun, I have gladiators and templars; in a Steampunk game maybe nobles, scientists, soldiers, and explorers.
So what I want is less debates over what SHOULD be a class and what SHOULDN’T be a class, and more conversation about the basic elements of class-building that we can teach to any DM, so that ANYTHING can be a class, depending on what your own games need. Are you with me?
“Psionicists and wizards are fundamentally different!”
“Barbarians and Fighters are basically the same thing.”
“Isn’t a paladin just a multiclass Cleric/Fighter?”
“What the hell is a Seeker and why should I care?”
“Monks don’t belong in pseudo-European fantasy!”
The debates and discussions swirl about in a chaotic storm of preferences and lines drawn in the sand and then washed away by the tides. What deserves to be a class? What should be a subclass, or a multiclass? What should be a feat? The storm rages most strongly in the run-up to a new edition, when, presumably, the lines are more fluid and open to redefinition. A “class” has never represented one coherent thing in D&D, the definition has always been fluid and malleable. What’s more, because all design is local, the choices for the D&D game have never matched perfectly with the choices that any one table would prefer.
But why is what you scribble on your character sheet a matter of such importance? And how should we conceive of character class? And what purpose does it serve? When someone says “Rangers should be a subclass of Fighter!” and someone else says “Rangers should be their own class!” and someone else says “Rangers are just Two Weapon Fighting feats and the Nature skill, they shouldn’t even be a subclass!” who is right?
Let me help you with this.
Why Does Class Even Matter?
To start with, we can look at why a game like D&D even has classes. Certainly it doesn’t need to be that way – plenty of games exist out there where there are no classes. Classes also tend to silo abilities – why CAN’T my elite warrior or my learned sage learn to hide in shadows or open locks as well as a thief? Why is the cleric the only one who can heal?
The first answer to the question is “That’s the way it’s always been, and D&D is tethered to its history.” While true to a degree, this answer is pretty flaccid. D&D has done away with REAMS of mechanics that it has no use for. Unarmed combat tables, weapon vs. armor tables, the bohemian ear-spoon, gendered ability score adjustments, Comeliness, heck, even random encounters. If D&D had no use for classes, they’d probably have been booted to the curb along with the triapheg. By this point in time, class may be something with enough history to be difficult to budge, but there’s something deeper at work than slavish devotion to the past.
It’s certainly not that classes are necessary in any real sense, either. If you take a 4e Wizard power and slap it on a Fighter in place of one of her Fighter powers, the game doesn’t become wildly unbalanced. Toss in a barbarian power and an invoker power, too, why not. Balance is entirely possible to maintain without the class structure.
Ultimately, this means that character class is an organizational thing and a descriptive thing. It’s not necessary by any means, but it’s useful in terms of describing a certain kind of character you can be. You can be a character who is an expert in arcane magic without belonging to the “Wizard” class, but belonging to that class communicates what your abilities are likely to be fairly effectively. It communicates both what you can do (make magic), and what you’re likely to pursue (more powerful magic), and maybe even your background and world links (where did you learn to make magic?). It’s a cognitive shortcut, a useful category, a reference point. If the Wizard class didn’t exist, you could still have multiple levels of spells that any character could learn, and have a character who learned them all, thus looking identical to a wizard from any D&D edition. You just wouldn’t have all of the natural assumptions and details that flow from putting “I am a wizard” on your character sheet, and those assumptions and details provide greater context and meaning for your imaginary character. There is one noun that defines you: Wizard. It is the core of your identity.
It should be fairly evident at this point that the associated assumptions and details and goals and links are highly variable. “I am a wizard” means different things if you are playing in a pseudo-European Arthurian land than if you’re playing in a sword-and-sorcery pulpy world of barbarians and ancient empires. Even within a given setting, that archetype may contain multitudes. Are you a trickster and deceiver who weaves illusions? Are you a spiritualist who lives in a hut and talks to spirits? Are you a semi-angelic supernatural creature yourself? A shapechanger who spends years in animals’ skins? A person who has woven a pact with supernatural forces? A “Wizard” could be all those things and more.
Which is really part of the problem, here. Those are all very distinct types of characters. Though they may be mechanically identical, they may also not be. That illusionist might have slot-based magic, just like the supernatural person. Does that make them the same class? Or, two different illusionists might have two different methods of spellcasting: one uses points, one uses slots. Are they the same class because they’re the same TYPE of character, or do the mechanical differences negate that? And if all characters use the same mechanics, a la 4e, does that mean that there’s no real “class” anymore?
We all have different ways we think about what a class should be because we all have different mechanics and different character types and different levels of focus at our own games. Even if we all played the same setting (say, Dragonlance), we’d all have different kinds of characters, often with different mechanics, under one class umbrella. Classes are amorphous and flexible and there’s no good line in the sand that is useful to draw between one or the other at every table.
Is this guy a fighter, a rogue, or a...mage?
A Chronology of Class
It can be useful to look at how classes have been used in D&D historically to see how the designers have previously parsed the difference between very similar classes.
The original, primordial D&D had three classes that were largely defined by their access to the daily abilities known as spells and their access to different kinds of equipment. Fighters used weapons and armor, but not spells. Magic-Users used spells and magic items, but had more limited equipment. Clerics were the original “gishes,” fighting at a mid-level and casting at a mid-level. These were the distinctions that mattered: mechanics. If you had a character who was a sagacious worshiper of a god of knowledge, you probably had a Magic-User, despite the cleric-like flavor. If you had a warrior who could stand toe-to-toe with enemies and weave powerful magic, you probably had a Cleric. If you had an elite survivalist who was capable in the wilderness, you probably had a Fighter.
The very first supplement threw a wrench into that design, however, by introducing the Thief, and the skill mechanic, using percentages. The thief was in many ways like a magic-user, but who employed a list of skills instead of a list of spells. As time went on, more specific classes like monks and assassins and paladins were also included, changing the dynamics of the original “spells vs. equipment” axis. They were also more flavorful and evocative, less about the mechanics of the game and more about the type of person your character could be. By the time 1e rolled around, a change as simple as “a different spell list” would be an entirely new class (illusionist vs. wizard). By that standard, a 4e Greatweapon Fighter and a 4e Brawler Fighter should be entirely different classes! Classes by this point were very much tethered to specific archetypes: assassins with the Assassin’s Guild, and druids with the Hierophant.
2e took a step back, but only a slight one. While a slight spell list change was still enough to distinguish the specialist priest or wizard from the generalist cleric or wizard, the game encouraged people to think in terms of a more limited palette of classes: assassins could be thieves, barbarians could be fighters. On top of this, they layered kits, which brought back much of the specialization from 1e, just as sort of “sub-sub” classes. Your warrior was a ranger who was a greenwood ranger. Your rogue was a bard who was a jester.
At about the same time, BEMCI D&D was flirting with being VERY specific in terms of classes. While the original set had only four, the Gazetteer series for Mystara was adding classes so that there was a clear difference between clerics and dwarf-priests, and shamans, shamani, shadow-elf shamans, and wise women, and between merchants and merchant-princes.
3e took a step toward specificity from core 2e, but it was still in many ways more general than 1e – wizards had certain class abilities, certain mechanics, but your spell list didn’t necessarily make you an entirely different class, just a slightly different flavor of wizard. 3e also took 2e’s kits in a few different directions: there were now feats and prestige classes as well. In some cases, there were new base classes, but these were mostly justified on mechanics. The Favored Soul is different from the Cleric because their spellcasting is different, even if they may look very similar in terms of the story (both of them getting power from their gods).
Most recently, 4e defined class as an intersection of how you act in combat and how you fluff your attacks – a martial striker was defined as someone who did a lot of damage without any magical fluff, while an arcane striker was someone who did a lot of damage with magic. They occasionally double-dipped when big mechanics were brought out: a druid and a seeker are both primal controllers, but one relies more on up-close abilities and mobility, while the other relies on ranged attacks. This was complicated with the addition of themes, which served a more flavorful purpose, and lived independent of your class.
The pattern at this point is pretty clear: sometimes, D&D says a class is mostly something mechanical, and then, inevitably, it becomes less mechanical and more about the kind of character you play, in one way or another (kits, prestige classes, themes) until we get to a point where we have more kinds of characters than might be useful, and at about that point, we react by severely curtailing the list.
That’s D&D over time. But what are we to do at our own tables?
Empowering DMs
Ultimately, all design is local. The kinds of characters the people at your table play are unique to your particular table. If classes are to serve the point of “what kind of character I am,” then the mechanics are only useful in as much as they support that kind of character. This means that class is subjective -- arbitrary. What is worthy of a class at one table might not be worthy of a class at another.
Conceiving of class primarily as a construct of the needs of our own worlds and stories, it’s easy to see that the traditional D&D classes and definitions can be much improved for our own games. Rather than cling to typical D&D classes, my own ideal scenario would have DMs making classes that are unique to their own worlds. If I’m playing a Planescape game, for instance, my faction affiliation is probably more important than whether I use spells or swords, so maybe THAT can be my class. Maybe in a 13th Age game, I use the Icons as classes rather than the typical classes. In Dark Sun, I have gladiators and templars; in a Steampunk game maybe nobles, scientists, soldiers, and explorers.
So what I want is less debates over what SHOULD be a class and what SHOULDN’T be a class, and more conversation about the basic elements of class-building that we can teach to any DM, so that ANYTHING can be a class, depending on what your own games need. Are you with me?
