# Forum > Gaming > Roleplaying Games >  Character Classes and World-building

## not_a_fish

Something I've seen remarked on in a few places here - and in my own experience as a player and GM - is that it is common in D&D and similar games to use the race-class combination as easy shorthand for a character's persona.  I don't think that this is a bad thing, necessarily. Leaning into tropes or playing against type can be fun, and the shorthand is very helpful for describing my character to friends outside the game who might be interested in a story about an exciting moment, but are not invested in the campaign or my character's backstory.

As I'm getting more into homebrew and class/subclass design, though, I have wondered whether the tendency to merge combat mechanics and character background/character arc is a problematic design choice for D&D-likes. The example that is foremost in my mind is the 5e Barbarian.  While I could craft a character with the Barbarian mechanics that is an urbane enforcer for a city mafia, I will be fighting the implied fiction of being a tribal outsider that is packaged with the class - both with my own internal story and also with the DM and other players when it comes to how they describe their reactions to my character.  While I could re-skin the class as an "Enforcer" rather than a "Barbarian", that means that the rest of the table needs to do more work to engage with my character.

Conversely, the Fighter class is defined by what its tactical role is on the adventuring team. The trade-off here is that the Fighter class feels bland compared to all the other classes on offer - the PHB and other material give you very little help in describing your character beyond their proficiencies, which may or may not be your cup of tea. A big part of the appeal of old-school rulesets to me is that the fighter/thief/magic-user framework seems more focused on what the class roles are on the adventuring team, rather than having some classes defined by tactical roles while other classes are defined by their social standing in the game world AND their role on the battle map.

I also think there is a temptation to tie character arcs and archetype qualities to mechanical benefits, even when this makes the game fiction feel forced.  I know I'm not immune to this in my own homebrew. However, while tying personal growth to combat prowess makes sense in something like a martial arts epic, it doesn't fit the fiction in all games.. in fact, I think this is why I personally don't enjoy character levelling, since the experiences gained in the course of gameplay don't ever seem to correlate with the skill gains dictated by XP charts.

The next time I DM, I am planning on asking myself how the characters in the setting engage with the classes as defined in the rules.  Will the adventurer's guild be advertising for Barbarians, Warlocks, and Rogues, or will they be seeking soldiers, mages, thieves, and other Beings of Talent? I don't know that the answers will have all that great an effect on the gaming experience, but I am curious about the extent that it changes the flavor of the setting.

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## Pauly

A lot of the questions you raise are the reason why ai have mostly moved to playing classless or skill based rpgs.

As a soft, easy to understand introduction to these types of systems I highly recommend Barbarians of Lemuria, which you can download for free here https://barbariansoflemuria.webs.com/earlier-editions

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## False God

> A lot of the questions you raise are the reason why ai have mostly moved to playing classless or skill based rpgs.
> 
> As a soft, easy to understand introduction to these types of systems I highly recommend Barbarians of Lemuria, which you can download for free here https://barbariansoflemuria.webs.com/earlier-editions


Seconding this.

D&D and D&D-likes comes pre-packaged with a LOT.  Stripping that out is exceptionally time consuming and difficult.

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## Martin Greywolf

> As I'm getting more into homebrew and class/subclass design, though, I have wondered whether the tendency to merge combat mechanics and character background/character arc is a problematic design choice for D&D-likes.


It's, while not necessarily a problematic, a choice. And when you make a design choice, you need to make it with purpose, good reasoning and aware of the consequences and implications. DnD doesn't really do this, but we'll get to that.

What this choice gives you is an almost medieval world, where your job is not just what you do for a living, but comes with a set of social obligations and dictates how you should behave. A noble will behave differently than a burgher in HRE than a hussar in Poland than a Hungarian hospes. This can give you a really solid base for what your world works like from class list alone, and some settings have exploited this fairly well - some L5R incarnations are a good example.

What you give up is the ability to model a more free world, and while the connotation is that USA tries to insert its values into medieval worlds once more (and it isn't an entirely baseless criticism), there were parts of history when you had a gigantic melting pot of an area where these lines blurred - whether it is Wild West frontier or Black Sea steppes before Mongols showed up. And classes make a lot less sense there.

So, it is neither good nor bad, but you have to think about it.




> Conversely, the Fighter class is defined by what its tactical role is on the adventuring team. The trade-off here is that the Fighter class feels bland compared to all the other classes on offer - the PHB and other material give you very little help in describing your character beyond their proficiencies, which may or may not be your cup of tea. A big part of the appeal of old-school rulesets to me is that the fighter/thief/magic-user framework seems more focused on what the class roles are on the adventuring team, rather than having some classes defined by tactical roles while other classes are defined by their social standing in the game world AND their role on the battle map.


This is where DnD has gone wrong, IMO. Picking either a specific class tied to specific mode of conduct is fine, picking a class that is agnostic of societal stuff is fine, but having both in the same system without a distinction causes... trouble. You get exactly this weirdness, where some classes have a pretty hard fluff baked into their core idea, and others don't.

Prestige classes were sort of originally meant to solve this issue - base class is generic and without fluff, prestige class is more baked into the worldbuilding. Then some prestige classes became base, and we have today's chaos.




> I know I'm not immune to this in my own homebrew. However, while tying personal growth to combat prowess makes sense in something like a martial arts epic, it doesn't fit the fiction in all games.


DnD is a game that is primarily about fighting battles - if you don't like that, you should look at some other system. While you can strongarm DnD into a political intrigue game or some such, it is not where it excels, because it doesn't want to excel there.




> The next time I DM, I am planning on asking myself how the characters in the setting engage with the classes as defined in the rules.  Will the adventurer's guild be advertising for Barbarians, Warlocks, and Rogues, or will they be seeking soldiers, mages, thieves, and other Beings of Talent? I don't know that the answers will have all that great an effect on the gaming experience, but I am curious about the extent that it changes the flavor of the setting.


There is a very bad problem with this. The worlds created like this feel very game-like/issekai-like/artificial, because how is anyone supposed to differentiate in universe between a barbarian and a fighter that is really angry? Sure, you have different combat systems IRL, but a difference between, say, Musashi, Lichtenauer and Fabris and how they approach the fight isn't as great as fighter/barbarian. And those three are a continent and several centuries apart.

To keep that feeling of verisimilitude, you almost need to create a society that has clearly defined classes, much like middle ages were. Then, you can tie a specific class to a specific, well, class and call it a day.

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## not_a_fish

> There is a very bad problem with this. The worlds created like this feel very game-like/issekai-like/artificial, because how is anyone supposed to differentiate in universe between a barbarian and a fighter that is really angry? Sure, you have different combat systems IRL, but a difference between, say, Musashi, Lichtenauer and Fabris and how they approach the fight isn't as great as fighter/barbarian. And those three are a continent and several centuries apart.
> 
> To keep that feeling of verisimilitude, you almost need to create a society that has clearly defined classes, much like middle ages were. Then, you can tie a specific class to a specific, well, class and call it a day.


I'm not sure I follow which is the bad idea in your opinion - a world that recognizes the character classes, or one that doesn't. I think you are suggesting that I don't have a guild that distinguishes between a Barbarian and a Fighter, and in general, I would agree with you. 

In most story campaigns I'd prefer to be able to have city-bound aristocrats call tribal cultures barbarians without any implication with regard to rage mechanics. In a dungeon crawl, I care much less - I also care much less about xp-based leveling in those sorts of campaigns. 

On the flipside, I do think that you could have worldbuilding that supported the classes as easily-distinguishable in-world, but it would be tricky to make it not cartoony.  A sourcebook or DM notes would need to lean even harder into the worldbuilding aspects of the classes - maybe giving all of the classes some kind of innate hook on the level of the Warlock's Patron or the Paladin's Oath. It would not be a generalizable setting, for sure.

I agree with you that there are better games for story-based games than DnD, (and better dungeon-crawlers than 5e), but that's where a lot of my experience is, and my familiarity with 5e's imperfections helps me to clarify some of my more general game-designy thoughts. :Small Big Grin:

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## Psyren

Nothing is forcing you to tie specific classes to specific attitudes, values or personalities but you. This is especially true in 5e, where for the first time in D&D history alignment is completely optional and no class requires it.

Your Paladin could be the standard defender of the innocent archetype, like Uther Lightbringer, or they could be a brutal tyrant like Shao/Kotal Kahn. 




> While I could craft a character with the Barbarian mechanics that is an urbane enforcer for a city mafia, I will be fighting the implied fiction of being a tribal outsider that is packaged with the class - both with my own internal story and also with the DM and other players when it comes to how they describe their reactions to my character.


For the former - in what way? What about the Barbarian is making you a "tribal outsider?"

For the latter - your DM and other players are not something the books can solve for you, that's an out of game conflict.

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## not_a_fish

> For the former - in what way? What about the Barbarian is making you a "tribal outsider?"


In 5e, nothing is "making me," other than me and other players' preconceptions, the word "Barbarian", the class description, and the feature names. It's not a dealbreaker, but there is a "civilization versus nature" theme being hinted at that never really comes into play other than cosmetically, and it makes me wonder whether its something worth investigating further. 

Alignment restrictions can be annoying and hard to interpret, but now that I consider it, they do provide an avenue for the players and DM to impose narrative direction on the class. The build is part of the character narrative in 3.5 in a way that it isn't in 5e. Even though 5e jettisoned alignment restrictions, I think it might maintain aesthetics that were solidified in part through the alignment mechanics of earlier editions.

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## Pauly

> In 5e, nothing is "making me," other than me and other players' preconceptions, the word "Barbarian", the class description, and the feature names. It's not a dealbreaker, but there is a "civilization versus nature" theme being hinted at that never really comes into play other than cosmetically, and it makes me wonder whether its something worth investigating further. 
> 
> Alignment restrictions can be annoying and hard to interpret, but now that I consider it, they do provide an avenue for the players and DM to impose narrative direction on the class. The build is part of the character narrative in 3.5 in a way that it isn't in 5e. Even though 5e jettisoned alignment restrictions, I think it might maintain aesthetics that were solidified in part through the alignment mechanics of earlier editions.


Which comes back to the point of why have classes at all?
There are 3 basic models of character building in RPGs, although they might be seen more as a continuum than separate discrete choices.
1) Class based - classic D&D. The character class determines what skills and abilities the character may have.
2) Profession (aka mixed) - The character has a profession which makes choosing skills from that profession cheaper/easier to obtain than skills not belonging to that profession. Some games may lock certain skills to certain professions.
3) Skill based aka classless. Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, GURPS. The character can acquire any skill at any time.

From a gameplay perspective class based is easiest. From a world building perspective Skill based is most immersive.

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## gbaji

> Which comes back to the point of why have classes at all?
> There are 3 basic models of character building in RPGs, although they might be seen more as a continuum than separate discrete choices.
> 1) Class based - classic D&D. The character class determines what skills and abilities the character may have.
> 2) Profession (aka mixed) - The character has a profession which makes choosing skills from that profession cheaper/easier to obtain than skills not belonging to that profession. Some games may lock certain skills to certain professions.
> 3) Skill based aka classless. Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, GURPS. The character can acquire any skill at any time.
> 
> From a gameplay perspective class based is easiest. From a world building perspective Skill based is most immersive.


Totally agree. One of the great things about class based games is that they inject the PC directly into their "role" in the party. The problem, however, is that over time there have grown certain assumptions in terms of personality types that are associated with specific classes (and yeah, this was made even *worse* with the introduction of prestige classes IMO).

The result is that it's often hard for players to conceptualize the fact that a single class like "fighter" can and should be able to encapsulate an infinite variety of different personalities. And as a player, you should be focusing your roleplaying elements on those things that don't have to do with the class (my opinion, of course). A "fighter" could be a mercenary who is willing to do anything for money. Or could be a soldier fighting for the local baron. Or a noble warrior with a strict code of conduct. And that's just stuff that intersects with the core abilities of the class that was chosen. Maybe the fighter is a hopeless romantic who is always seeking love. Or a cynic who always assumes the other shoe is about to drop. Or maybe he has a gambling problem, and never met a gaming table he wouldn't sit down at. Or is a nature lover (that's not just for druids, you know), and will not allow others to chop down live trees for making fire, for example (only dead naturally fallen stuff can be burned). Maybe he's superstitious, constantly tossing salt over his shoulder and afraid of walking under ladders (or insert new setting appropriate stuff here).

There's an unlimited number of personality elements you can put into any given character that have nothing at all to do with the actual chosen class. So yeah, it's amazing to me how many players have a hard time with this. It shouldn't be difficult.

Your character's class is just what they do and what they are good at doing. it does not tell you what they like, dislike, want, desire, need, hate, obsess over, fear, etc. Those are the things that the player should be adding to the character, and those are the things that make the character who they are. Those are the elements of roleplaying that should be focused on. Not sure how this fits into worldbuilding, except that on the rare occasions when I'm running a class based game, I do try to "lead by example". I create NPCs that are absolutely *not* stereotypes of whatever class/race combo they are. SoldierA and soldierB are going to be very different people with different personalities (even if I didn't bother to come up with names for them). My hoped for outcome is that this will encourage the players to break out of those same stereotypes as well.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes, it doesn't.

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## PhoenixPhyre

I try to avoid reifying classes where I can avoid it. The PC Classes (written hereafter in Title Case) are bundled game-level abstractions around in-world concepts, but they are not themselves in-world concepts.

So the Barbarian class is a wrapper around the power-source concept of "someone who draws power from strong emotions in the form of physical prowess." Now that's _often_ coded as "wild", because civilization and strong emotion are considered (thematically) at odds. That doesn't mean that individual people with this source of abilities are all from outside of civilization or are tribal. They might be so more frequently, but it's 55-45, not 90-10. It's just the civilization tends to channel people toward "power from training", rather than "power from emotions" where possible. And have fewer direct needs for "can survive being mauled by a bear on the regular".

And that doesn't mean that everyone who "draws power from strong emotions" in that way is a Barbarian either. That particular powerset/progression path is mostly a game-side thing.

In general, the PCs may be anywhere from the _only_ person with that particular power set to one of a relatively few number. A school associated with "wizardry" may have anywhere from PC-class Wizards and Sorcerers and Warlocks and Bards (rarely) to general arcanists (people who wield unspecified arcane powers) to a whole lot of people who have no substantial power at all but are great scholars of magic. And they may all call themselves "wizards". A priestly order might have between 0 and a few clerics (lowercase c, meaning people whose powers are directly tied to being chosen by deities) and between 0 and a few Clerics. Most of the priests (in my setting) are either capable only of ritual work (no actual spells) or are closer to _warlocks_, whose patrons are the churches themselves. You could very well have someone whose only power is to cast _divination_, once per day. No other power at all. Or people who entirely break the PC-equivalent mold. Orders of paladins (little p) may have mostly oath-sworn knights, warriors, squires, etc. Even those who have powers from Oaths will not, generally, have PC-Paladin powersets in their entirety. Thieves guilds are likely not full of Rogues. Etc.

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## Pauly

When you drill down into it classes really dont make a lot of sense from a world building perspective. I first ran into this when I had character concepts that AD&D didnt allow to happen (iirc a 3 musketeers type swashbuckler, an officer who lead men, a riverboat gambler). I mean I could kind of sort of try and make them work, but the class system forced me to get abilities I didnt want and stopped me from getting abilities I did want, also it hurt the party because my character wasnt good at their expected role based on their class name.

Im settings where character classes are more closely defined through training and/or social standing, then classes can make sense. For example in a Star Trek game it makes sense for a StarFleet Officer, a Spy and a Diplomat to have widely differing skillsets that have little overlap. In broad generic settings such as D&D classes make little to no sense from a world building perspective. 

The way D&D solves the I want an X who can do Y conundrum is to say you can multiclass into an XY. Whilst that ameliorates some of the game play difficulties caused by strict classes, it creates a whole world of other issues from a world building and game balance perspective.

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## KorvinStarmast

> A lot of the questions you raise are the reason why ai have mostly moved to playing classless or skill based rpgs.
> 
> As a soft, easy to understand introduction to these types of systems I highly recommend Barbarians of Lemuria, which you can download for free here https://barbariansoflemuria.webs.com/earlier-editions


 Ooh, nice, thanks for the link.  :Small Smile:

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## Pauly

Thinking about it some more, there are 4 essential questions you need to ask yourself to arrive at classes in a RPG.

1) What does a class represent?
Is it years of training and background knowledge that gives the character affinity to a set of skills and abilities. Even if the character doesnt have a skill listed on their character sheet they have sufficient pre-existing training/knowledge to pick up that skill as they progress on adventures. Skills that would take much longer to acquire if the character had to start from scratch, and timeframes outside the scope of a campaign.
Or is it a bunch of data that can be downloaded into the characters cortex Matrix style? Which is how modern D&D operates.
1a) How does the answer to Q1 affect multi-classing because you know the players will want to.?

A class can be seen as a group of 3 sets of skills - skills that are limited to the class; skills that are excluded from the class; and skills that a character may choose to acquire.

2) Why should these skills be paywalled to this class? 
Using D&D (3.5 and earlier) as an example. Skills like quivering palm being restricted to Monks or divine smite being restricted to Paladins makes a lot of sense from a fiction/world building view. Paywalling evasion to Rogues (I know monks got it later, but iirc it was originally a Rogue only skill) or weapon specialization to Fighters makes a lot less sense. Theyre useful abilities that dont have strong world building reasons to be restricted to a particular class.

3) Why should this class not be able to obtain this skill?
Wizards not using armor because it interferes with magic casting as a classic example, with a plausible rationale. Fighters not being able to cast magic even if they have sufficient intelligence because learning magic takes years of study is another. 

4) Why is it reasonable for a character from this class to learn this optional skill?
Is it a generic skill open to anyone, such as a social skill? However D&D makes some interesting choices in other areas. For example if it is reasonable for a Barbarian to learn how to use heavy armor, why is it unreasonable for a Rogue to learn the same skill

In the push-pull between players wants and world building D&D has consistently chosen players wants over world building. Obviously theyve been very successful, but in part thats because D&D is generic and whats true for one world in the D&D multiverse isnt true for every world in the published and homebrew multiverse of D&D.

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## kieza

I prefer systems that don't tie mechanical abilities to social status or fluff any more than absolutely necessary:
-Why should, e.g., barbarians be the only people who can rage? There are plenty of civilized archetypes who have "gets angry and smashes things" in their purview.
-Tying social status or fluff to mechanics, in my experience, makes some character concepts tricky to build. You have situations where the class with the desired mechanics either has unwanted baggage, or lacks desired flexibility.
-Sure, you can refluff, but A) you need a group that's cool with it, and B) if refluffing is common, that means the designers wasted effort tying fluff to the class.

My ideal system would have separate character building resources for, what they do vs. who they are, or to put it another way, how they interact with the world vs how the world interacts with them.

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## King of Nowhere

> Something I've seen remarked on in a few places here - and in my own experience as a player and GM - is that it is common in D&D and similar games to use the race-class combination as easy shorthand for a character's persona.


never seen it atmy tables, ever




> D&D and D&D-likes comes pre-packaged with a LOT.  Stripping that out is exceptionally time consuming and difficult.


how so? just take the classes for their abilities and ignore/refluff what you want.

to give an example, i have two characters in mind that use the vow of poverty, and neither fits the description of this penitent guy with roots in christian mythology.
one is a monk that thinks hardship makes you strong. magic items make things easier for you, so they make you weak, so they are to be avoided at all cost, period. while he also is averse to riches because an easy life makes you weak, he has nothing against carrying around a lot of gold that he uses for weightlifting purposes.
the other is a wizard who wants to improve the world by teaching magic to everyone and using it to improve society, much like an industrial revolution. and if he wants to teach magic to anyone, magic cannot cost a fortune, and it can't be a thing of the rich. so he takes an oath of... not poverty, more like middle-classery. he preaches that the common man should know wizardry and use it professionally, and that a wizard should be a respected professional with an honest income. not a haughty noble, but not a poor either, or what would be the point of studying wizardry?

those are two very different takes on the vow, both very removed from the original concept; the first character does not even need being good. the only thing they have in common is the idea of somebody wanting to avoid magic items for some reasons.




> I try to avoid reifying classes where I can avoid it. The PC Classes (written hereafter in Title Case) are bundled game-level abstractions around in-world concepts, but they are not themselves in-world concepts.


+1
in my world, the fighter calls himself a fighter. the barbarian calls himself a fighter, just with a different fighting style. the rogue calls himself a fighter, one specialized in teamwork and precision damage instead of brute force. the ranger/fighter/barbarian multiclass calls himself a fighter too. the ranger, if specialized in scouting over fighting, may call himself a scout, because that would be his job. the wizard/archmage/incantatrix and the wizard/war weaver/initiate of the sevenfold veil both are called wizards, they just specialized in different kinds of magic. 
the clerics call themselves clerics because they draw power from a god and they are members of a church, the druids call themselves druids because they draw power from nature, but that's a job description more than anything else. the sorcerors call themselves sorcerors because they have innate arcane powers, but that's a superpower description more than anything else. the paladins call themselves paladins because they made wovs and joined some orders and receive powers from a god in a different way than a cleric, again it's a job description. 
none of that has any specification on the background. the rogue/assassin, the barbarian with a couple prestige classes, the wizard who took a personal interest in the mechanics of divinity, the paladin with a bodyguard build - all those were close relatives stemming from a noble family that trained their children for combat from a young age. after the first couple years of general training, they each picked a different specialization according to attitude and preference.

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