Character Class II: Cooler and Meaner

I firmly believe that images like this have seriously fucked
up our capability of seeing these classes as larger than the wooden
depictions that have been shoved down our throats from the
beginning of this game.  While praising them, we've failed to
see how the discourse has been limited by an insistence of
seeing these classes as a bunch of cool mary-sues, with clean
clothes, hairdos, special effects, movie-star looks and with
weapons constantly at the ready. Do you have any idea how
hard it is to find fantasy art that does not depict characters
in this frame of reference?  It is like the way the film
Pleasantville scoffs as the manner of depicting the 50s
and 60s on television.

I don't know what I can say about character classes that hasn't been said.  I'm discovering that the subject is a trigger for me.  I was ready to hack and slash three people who made innocuous comments, because at first read I took their position as anti-class.  I wonder where that came from?

Yet obviously the subject is of great interest to people, grist for the mill as it were ... so I'll try and say something.

Much of the problem seems to be combat.  G.B. Veras' comment about "sneaky fighters" and "burly fighters" for example, or Slick's identification of the fighter as good at wrestling and axes ... but I don't call these out to cut into these guys.  This is how we all tend to talk about the classes.  The mage "throws" spells and the thief backstabs.

While of course the descriptive fits in those moments of direst threat, I don't see any of these classes in the light of what they do when they fight.  They have more character than that.

Take the fighter for instance; we have an ex-fighter, probably someone who's spent time on the brute squad or taking a small part in a battle before reaching 1st level.  This is someone who can talk to soldiers, who can appreciate the life of a guard and who sees the importance of town gates and shaking down citizens.  It isn't just what the fighter does, it's what the fighter sees ~ that peace and order is maintained through force ... a force that may need to be applied gently or not.  Fighters looking at a tower will automatically envision how to take it down or how to defend it; the fighter will gently move the illusionist or druid to the other side of the walk, putting body and responsibility between them and strangers ... and thinking, "Why does the druid never understand they should walk on the inside?"

It's a mindset.  The fighting is a small part of that mindset; something that has to be done but isn't defining of who or what the fighter is.  A dumbass fighter, a kid, a punk, wants to start a fight in a bar; an older fighter calmly steps over to the table with the louts, takes the beer out of the one fellow's hand and puts it down firmly on the table.  "I think it's time for you four to leave.  There are folks here just out for a good night."

That's not "lawful."  That's sensible.  Where's the percentage in tearing apart a bar?  There's no money here, there's a police force outside and it's just dumb for an adventurer who knows where there are fights that will yield a thousand gold.

I don't think players, in their modular perception of movie filler scenes, comprehend the background to each of these classes.  How does the druid become a druid, do you think?  What sorts of troublesome efforts has a cleric endured to encourage a seminary or lamasary to condone their use of clerical magic?  How many times has this mage been humiliated as a child, as Master Igran chose to dump yet another bowl of porridge overtop his student's head as punishment?  The road to class proficiency isn't an easy one.  It changes children in the way it makes adults, forcing perspective, prejudice and most of all patience into the psyche.

Take away the class set-up and we get mongrels, blank slates who are full of skills and cheesy backstories, but nothing to suggest how that individual acquired this hodgepodge of game functions.  I'm not ready to sacrifice the class myself; the class helps organize the larger picture behind the character ... it tempers how this character comes from a family of sailors, while that one came from a family of farmers.  Likewise, it helps paint how this elf thinks as opposed to that elf (because I don't think every elf thinks alike), particularly if this elf then came from a seaside town, while that one was born in a glorious elven city.

Most of all, perhaps this is a deeper reason why I have a problem with classes like barbarian, cavalier, tinker, healer or acrobat.  Let's take them quickly, one by one.

A barbarian is a fighter from a wildland.  That's easily understood, and while I can see why a barbarian might be stronger on average, why does this translate into being better with a weapon?  Surely the heightened training of a civilized fighter is a counterbalance to the barbarian's grit and enthusiasm.  I love Conan; but I don't view him as automatically more deadly than D'Artagnan, Lancelot or Robin Hood.  Any of these could give Conan a run for his money, and do as much damage ... so why make special rules for this kind of fighter?  Isn't Conan just a 22nd level fighter with a 19 strength and the normal number of multiple attacks per round?

Mentioning Lancelot brings us to the cavalier ... but the same arguments apply.  Why should a first level cavalier have any special fighting abilities based on the concept of a horse-soldier?  Aren't we already covering the better horsemaster by running a character with greater dexterity or strength, who chooses to ride a horse well?  Lancelot is clearly covered in the paladin ... so why create a subclass of paladin, which is already a subclass of the fighter?  Besides, all paladins are given horses ... so isn't a cavalier just a paladin that decides to use the horse a lot?  The class adds no unique backstory at all ... it just doesn't work.

The tinker makes things, invents things, specializing in hydraulics, chemistry, kinetics and a whole lot of other things that are so simple in the 14th century that literally anyone who was prepared to screw around with such things could build them.  I have a source here that tells me tinkers are always gnomes.  Why?  Don't humans build things?  Hold on ... I think they do.  How does this nonsense not explode the brain of the designer?  My larger point, however, is that a tinker is a profession, not a class ... and ought to be defined by the class it is a part of, just as a fighter might be a sailor, a farmer or a prospector.  A mage who tinkers would be interested in energy, a fighter who tinkers would be interested in fortification or ballistics, a druid that tinkers would be interested in biology, etcetera.  The very notion suggests the designer doesn't understand that modern "engineering" is not just one profession, but hundreds.  And not interchangeable, not once you've been poisoned by the field you're in.  I just don't think that "tinker" is definitive enough.

"Healer" ... hm.  The less said about this, the better.  This class has spells, so it's not a doctor.  It has no religious responsibility, but it can still "detect evil."  Why?  And why detect magic, haste, invisibility, speak with dead and blade barrier?  What do any of these things have to do with healing?  The concept is so rooted in corporate motivation to distance themselves from religion in an era of satanic accusations from a now-defunct moral majority that I can only shake my head at those who can look at this mishmash with the necessary cognitive dissonance.  If we must separate out the skills from the theology, can we at least: 1) not make the ability based on spells; 2) explain the class in terms of the Knights Hospitaller, which would at least be adventure fuel; 3) create completely new abilities that don't overlap with clerics!  For my money, a Knight Hospitaller is properly a human cleric/paladin, but if we MUST make a class to satisfy Mrs. Grundy, can we please for the love of green fucking apples make a gawddamned effort?

And the acrobat.  This I've saved for last.  This, at least, does suggest a very specific background.  And the 14th century had jugglers, gleemen, fools, jesters, bards and troupes of gymnasts. Such things have existed since the weakest cro-magnon man in the tribe discovered that enough food could be gotten by balancing a club on the end of the nose.  But does the acrobat in the book reflect this?  Nope.  In fact, it plays into the worst racist stereotypes that groups like gypsies, who were prevalent in this profession in the middle ages, were all thieves and cretinous persons.  We don't make the acrobat a sub-class of the bard, where it belongs, but a subclass of the thief.  And that is where it goes wrong.  It strips the camp & nomadic life of the performer (which continued to be more important than the profession itself) out of the class and replaces it with the medieval equivalent of the 20th century catburglar.  Cheese.

Perhaps I've gotten something across here; I doubt it.  This last few days I've gained an insight that many people don't seem to see what the class does for the game, far, far apart from the position a particular class takes on the battlefield.  That's pretty sad, given how many times I've been accused of being a roll-player ~ and here I am making a role-playing argument.

I don't think people seem to have the first understanding of what role-playing is.