Character concept and character class

[ewilen]

Split from here: odd74.proboards76.com/index.cgi?board=philosophy&action=display&thread=1135&page=3#17729

This is sort of an OD&D recollection, though it'd be hard to say exactly where OD&D breaks off and the particular homebrew we used starts. Anyway, I played in a heavily-modified D&D variant back in the 80's, but still recognizably "part of the family", just with a bunch of custom classes. One thing that happened though was that I didn't treat my character's class as his identity: he was a Trickster, I suppose that'd be a kind of rogue/illusionist, in terms of class, but in terms of his place in the world, he was a prince of a minor state somewhere on the continent.

Now, OD&D has a somewhat limited set of classes, with no multiclassing, but I still think the basic principle applies: you can use the character's class to regulate their mechanical interaction with the campaign world, but their social role can be something else entirely. E.g. does a thief really have to be a lowlife? Can a cleric be something other than a member of a holy order?

Anyone else have examples of this, particularly in OD&D? Other thoughts?

[korgoth]

I think that classes should not be narrowly defined as to their social role, etc. At bottom, you've got Guys Who Fight and Guys Who Use Magic... you could boil everything down to Fighting Men and Magic-Users, which cover your basic Sword & Sorcery archtypes (guys with swords and guys with sorcery).

You get the Cleric as a sort of hybrid class, distinguished in that his magic is divine rather than sorcerous. Sometimes I think of this class as a bit of an interloper, but I suppose it's a matter of taste.

Anyway, you've certainly got all the bases more than covered with those three: Warrior, Wizard and Holy Man. The fact that these classes have few specific powers makes them all the easier to fit into whatever particular role you can imagine.

The more specificity you build into the rules for a class, the more you constrict its application to possible roles. Of course this can be overruled by the Ref, but nonetheless it's there. If all you have to pick from are FM, MU and CL then when the player says "I think I'll be a pirate" it's clear that you want a FM. Then you say something like: My pirate will never wear heavy armor, but he can do pirate stuff instead. Fair enough. But once you introduce a bunch of specificity, like with the Thief class, there's more to fiddle with. Like "Wait... I'm glad my pirate can climb, but why can he pick locks and disarm traps? That's not what pirates are into." So then what... leave him with those abilities, or delete them and pump up other abilities? Not that I think the Thief is a disaster (though I prefer not to use it), but you can extrapolate the effects of going down this path.