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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6639715" data-attributes="member: 6775031">Maybe I gave a bad example. Your class should be obvious to anyone who has read the rule book, not just the DM.And I agree that the player should be free to make whatever character he or she wants, within the restrictions of the game, but I'm also saying that fluff is immutably linked with crunch. That is one of the major restrictions which exist for any given game. You can decide whatever fluff you want, and take the crunch which is the one true way of representing that fluff, or you could pick the crunch you want and work backward to figure out the fluff that gets you there.The only thing the player can't do is to decide which fluff corresponds to which crunch. That's the job of the system. That's the reason we even have a system. The best the player can do, if no suitable class is available (on grounds of crunch or fluff), is to petition the DM to change the system. If you really want to use the druid mechanics, but the fluff says that druids are all wild hermits and you wanted to play a city rat, then the DM has the power to say that druidic magic can be taught in schools, even in big cities.Remember, though, the DM has put a lot of work into building a campaign world that is both interesting and internally consistent. Some DMs might invite their players to help develop the campaign world, deciding how the world actually works, but that's the exception rather than the rule. And in the end, you still need to develop an objective in-game reason for why druids operate differently from nature-clerics, even if it's just the difference between which schools they attended.Do rangers gain magical powers through devotion? Or do they gain spells because they just understand nature that well? And some of their spells replicate combat tricks, although they do so in an overtly magical way. I would almost consider the ranger to be a variant of sorcerer, in that regard. In any case, they don't gain their powers through devotion to a higher power; they don't have a code which, if willingly violated, may cause them to lose their magic.There's definite gray area, granted, but they seem distinct enough to me. They're at least as distinct as the wizard and the sorcerer.Back in the day, the druid was invented because the cleric was the cleric of light and healing. The druid was an example of how you could modify the priest class, to cover a distinctly different concept. That edition (AD&D 2E) spent a lot of effort in showing different ways that the DM could create variations within the priest class, but it wasn't until 3.0 that the druid and the nature cleric appeared together. I consider that to be one of the mistakes of 3E; they should have either expanded the other domains out into full classes, or gotten rid of the druid.Notably, they (more-or-less) fixed this in 4E, since the cleric went back to the light and healing concept. They could have continued with that distinction, in 5E, but I think they wanted to appeal back to the 3E crowd :-/</blockquote>

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