Class-Backward

As I work my way through the wiki, with some of my focus on shifting over old content and some on making what's needed, I can't help noticing how many things in old D&D are never properly explained in the original books.

Things come up because I am following the guidelines of the image on the right.  These show pages that don't exist, that are yet wanted by pages that do.  Right at the top, "cantrip" is mentioned on at least 8 pages in the wiki (and probably more often, where it isn't linked), yet there's no page for it yet.  Logically, this makes it more important that all the other 1600+ pages that are also linked but less often.  "Clan," "natural abilities" and "progenitor" are just as important, but we're going through this process alphabetically, also.  Basically, I want to concentrate on "what's next."  I like that something mechanical is telling me what that is.

This makes it easier to get things done.

As far as I know, none of the original books explains what a "natural ability" is.  It isn't even called that.  Generally it is used on monster pages to describe powers the monster can perform "at will" ... but there are no strict guidelines established for that, either.  How long does this take?  How often can it be done?  If a demon can gate in other demons at will, does this always mean it will do so?  What if the other demons don't want to be disturbed?  Demons are "chaotic," after all ... and if we don't use alignment at all, where is the acceptable limit for the number of associates a demon can pester?  If we're talking devils, who can also do this, surely there must be rules in hell about it.  There are rules in hell about everything.

Most important of all, how many powers can be performed at will per combat round?  One?  Two?  Ten?  No definite idea.  It suggests a limitation on some monsters in the old Monster Manual, but there is no reference anywhere else about this ability, and certainly no standardization.  As DMs, apparently, we were expected to have gotten this information from our mothers while we were in the womb.

This post isn't about natural abilities, however.  I haven't gotten to those yet.  Instead, I completed something today that there is an explanation for -- which, I have to say, I very much do not like.

The damned idiot notion that a character class is a "profession" and not an education comes straight out of the prevailing 1950s university dictum that people go to school to learn how to do a job.  Different job, different schooling.  This has been proved wrong only about a billion times, more or less literally, but it helps sell overpriced university degrees so here it is, still with us.

A fighter's training ought to be sufficient to perform any of the hundreds of character classes that have been invented in the last forty-plus years that stand side-by-side with the original fighter.  As if learning how to fight with weapons and organize oneself in the military can't be applied to hundreds of professions.  No!  We must have a perfectly individual specificity to every operation that humans can perform!  We can't have all this fluidity!  Stamp that person a teacher when they get out of school and DON'T let them use that degree for anything else!

Exactly why do clerics principally function as "supportive"?  True, priests support people, but they LEAD their churches, they don't stand behind the throne.  This is military speak for doctors, not religious leaders ... which is why we had to eventually gut the class and rename them after doctors.  We never gave the religious profession a chance, because it was too "squicky" for atheists.  And I know of no druids whom the players run as support-staff.  Just because a druid has 2 less hit points than a fighter and less armour, doesn't exactly kick them to the curb.  The description might as well say, "Fighters don't think."  It's all hideously two-dimensional and purposefully propagandistic ... and because no effort to do better was ever really made, the subject of what a character class is or what it stands for became hopelessly and appallingly polluted.

This shit is no better than the kobald crap I railed about yesterday.  It just takes less space and, because it is really, really old, it is venerated more.

We should be clear about D&D design always being absolute shit.  I didn't know that when I was 15; but I know it now.  I may run a game "based" on old AD&D, but I am so far from the original philosophy and approach I can't begin to find any relationship between me and the dreck written by Gygax.

The wiki is forcing me to address these things for the first time in writing.  "Character Class" comes up a bunch of times as I'm writing some other page, and I duly make a link to it, thinking, "One day, I'll have to write a definition of that."

Then, it's today.

The idea is to build a functional concept that expands character understanding and conjecture, not one that narrows it.  Don't tell me how a cleric principally functions.  Tell me how a cleric gets made.

With some game play and experience, I'll probably expand this page over time.  It deserves to be.  Given good reason, it would be worth the effort to delve into the exact procedure of education for every class.  But I don't need that just now, and I have a lot of other topics to write on.