Does your OSR game suffer from class struggles?

This video has been a struggle! But I've finally got something that I THINK lays out what I want to say: think about classes and why you may or may not be open to expanding them. If you are not, why?

Transcript

There's a bit of a class struggle in OSR games, not [Marxist] kind of class struggle, more like the struggle to define, defend, assault, or reason around the number of classes, and the nature of whatever the number of classes are, that exist in a particular OSR system. You'll find folks who feel very strongly that one number of classes, and that consisting of a certain set of classes, is the only thing that should be, and other folks who want to go a little bit more expansive, and other folks who want to go a lot more expansive, and I want to talk about it.

First off, it's been a real struggle to record this video. I'm still not sure I've got it right. So bear with me, hopefully this will translate all the different ideas that are in my brain, and get them out onto the screen. Hopefully this will all make sense at the end.

Before I go any further though, I'm not here for dogmatic arguments. If you believe that because in a certain book, there were a certain number of classes, and that those classes were certain ones, and that's all you want, and the reason why you believe that, is because they were in that book, or because they're by a certain author, I'm not here for it. I mean, that's great for you, your table, do what you want, but I'm not here for that kind of argument. I don't care about dogma. I'm not doing gaming as philosophy, I'm gaming. So I'm interested in the more practical things, the things that make, hopefully make your gaming experience better, or improve it, or enhance it, just make it more fun.

I'm not interested in the, well, this is not OSR because X, or I won't do it because Y on a philosophical level. I know this won't stop comments coming in to the extent that I get comments on these videos, but I'm just letting you know, if your reason falls upon, if your reason for disagreeing with something is done on the lines of philosophical lines, or because of some kind of other dogmatic reason, I'm not interested.

I was gonna start with the white box, which was in the three little brown books. But actually, I think I wanna go even, not before that necessarily, but beyond that. Let's just talk about what a class is. At the end of the day, put everything aside, trying to be just, I don't know, super generic, classes are expectations.

When you pick a class, let's say fighter, or like they call the white box, a fighting man, or a cleric, or a wizard, you're getting this expectation of what that character is, what it can do. The referee has an expectation of what that character is, what it can do. Other players have an expectation of what your character can do. Those expectations are mechanized in various ways, in things like what abilities or skills you get, things like in the progression of certain attributes like hit points, or your saving throws.

We believe fighting men are strong, and they're great in battle, and they're resilient. And so we model it mechanically with hit point progression, and hit bonuses, and things of that nature. We think wizards of casting spells and getting more spells as they grow, and this, that, and the other. So we build that accordingly. But it starts with the expectation. Now, I find classes that are very, very, very, very, very different from the expectation.

Now, I find classes very handy, because when you have someone new, you can hand them basically this recipe, this concept that's kind of pre-built for them. You want to play a warrior of some kind? Great, here is a fighting man or a fighter, and its expectations will match your expectations. When you pick a class, you get to take advantage of the fact that this clear set of expectations has been made for you. You don't have to try to construct it out of a whole bunch of different skills, or abilities, or bonuses, or however you want to do it. It's here, there's this nice template for it wrapped up with a ribbon, here, just take it. And when your character concept matches, more or less, this set of expectations, you're hunky dory. Everything's great. I'll play a warrior, here's your fighter class, we're good to go.

As your concepts diverge from the expectations of the class, this is where you can get into some kind of friction into those disagreements, in which your concept and the class with all its expectations don't jive together, and it can be tough. And this is where I think a lot of referees lose their way a little.

So you'll take someone who says, "Hey, I want to play a fighter, but I don't want to play the plate male shield and sword, or sword and board, or two-handed fighter. I want to play a fighter who's light-footed. They're kind of a skirmisher. They're dancing around the battlefield in leathers with a bow and arrow, or maybe a crossbow, or however you envision it. And that's what they're doing." Now on paper, you might say, "Great, you can do that." If fighter is perfectly capable of wearing leather armor, they get access to better armors and heavier armors. But hey, your concept is you want to be light and fast. Yeah, you can do that. And if you've got the dexterity, you can be fast, kind of.

In play, broadly speaking, I don't want folks to get into, well, in my game or my table, I guess everyone's tables are different. Everyone's games are different. However, overall, if you were to go to a con game or play a game at just a gaming store, you walk in and you're being given pre-built characters. Here's your fighter. And because the GM's trying to make it easy, they've given you a character sheet with equipment. It's most likely gonna have heavy armor, a sword and board or a two-hander, because this is what the shared idea, expectations of a fighter is. Now, if you as the player say, excuse me, can we stop at the shop before we go to the dungeon, and the GM says, great. And then you go, okay, I'd like to sell my heavy armor. I'd like to sell this two-handed sword. I'd like to pick up a bow with 60 arrows and some leather armor. And when the party's getting in the mix, they might be looking at you and say, "hey, fighter, can you hold the line so I can cast a spell?" And you go, "nope, that's not me. I'm gonna be dancing in the background with my bow." On the one hand, you should be allowed to, right? Yeah, that's what you wanna do.

I think practically speaking, some people might get annoyed with that. Even if nobody's gonna get annoyed with that, I think the player who's trying to play that fighter may not feel comfortable doing it, because they know, as much as everybody knows, that the expectations for a fighter are not really what they're playing, even though, yes, the fighter technically can do that. Yes, could a fighter technically do without their heavy armor or even medium armor, just go light and go with a bow and sit in the back? Absolutely, it's possible, but it doesn't really match those expectations we have on our head about what a fighter is. You think of fighter in your brain, that's probably not who you think about. You probably think of Boromir rather than Aragorn, and that might be a loaded example, because Aragorn the ranger with the ranger archetype, and Boromir's more a classic fighter, but you might think of someone like Lancelot or Arthur, probably some other guy in heavy armor, maybe a samurai type or maybe a different type of heroic figure from history or myth, it's probably somebody that defender type.

This player, maybe they come to you and they say, hey, GM, maybe this is a game, you're ongoing game and not just a one shot at a con or something like, hey, I'd like to do something different. I really don't want that kind of fighter. I wanna be like a skirmisher, I wanna be like a scout. And so the GM says, hey, you know what? That sounds great, I got the class for you. It's a thief. And the player goes, okay, I'll try it as a thief. But the expectations of the thief don't match up either. This same person doesn't wanna be scouting in the dungeon. They do not wanna be up front. They get in the dungeon and the party's like, "great, you've got the move silently, you've got the traps. I think you need to take front, Mr. Thief guy." And the player goes, that's not me. And I mean, I know that as a class, I get those abilities, but I didn't want them. They're not part of my concept. My idea is to be in the back with my bow in my leathers and I'm making use of speed and yeah, I mean, I'm gonna use the hide, sure, hide sounds good. And the move silently actually might be good for me too, but I'm not the frontline person. I don't wanna be in front like that. I'm more of a out and about. Maybe in the woods, in the wilderness, I would like to be up front because that's kind of the skirmishers thing, getting out front, but not in the dungeon. That's just not, I just don't see it for myself. That's just not who I wanna be. And again, there could be frustrations. Maybe not at your table, maybe not at your game, everyone will say, great, that's what you wanna do, do. That same player may feel uncomfortable again because their concept doesn't fit that neatly into the thief expectations either. So what do you do?

Now, a lot of GMs will say, oh, just do nothing. Or at least in the OSR space, yeah, you do nothing. They'll get with it or you just gotta live with it or just tell the other players to pipe down. However, in the case of the rangery type as a thief, they are skills that they don't want, that they don't need, or that not necessarily they don't need them, but they don't want them. That's not something they're trying to do when you had the ranger type as a fighter. It's kind of the same thing. They get heavy armor, they don't, they're not interested in that. And as a class, that's maybe that thing that there are only a couple of things that fighters really hang their hats on and being able to wear heavy armor is one of them. So not having that just means you're leaving part of the class behind. You're playing very inefficiently and some folks take efficiency in characters very seriously. Others don't, but you're just leaving stuff on the table that you're not using. What do you do with that as a referee?

Well, the obvious answer is make something that fits that player's expectations. But folks don't want to do that often. I spoke about dogmatic reasons: it wasn't in the white box, so I'm not doing it; or I just don't believe in it. And I'm not interested in that part. The other part of it is I think this element of, well, they can just kind of do it, right? Oh, you want to be a rangery fighter? You just do that rangery fighter and all else will follow.

The problem with that is, is there's no modeling for that. It's great to say, and in a perfect world, you could do that, absolutely. And the referee who was running that game would simply see what this player's trying to do or better yet talk to them about what they're trying to do and figure out some things, right? Okay, we'll handle this like this because of this, or we'll do this like that because of this other thing. Great, and the players will all understand and that's how it will work. But we're in the real world, we're in the practical world, and people like those being able to look at something and see those expectations, to see a class that models the expectations that you have, see it mechanically, see it in a way you can kind of wrap your brain around. Having something written down to rule, I mean, why do we have rules? Why do we have rules at all? Because it's some things we want as ourselves and maybe for others too, to be able to hang your hat on it and say this is something that concretely I can do. It's not about whether I'm lucky or not, it's not about whether my GM allows it or not. It says here fighters can wear heavy armor. I don't need to beg for it. I don't need to make grand arguments for it. I can just do it, that's what I can do. I'm a fighter, I can do that, that's mine. And I can look at the piece of paper and say, whatever else is going on, this is me. Same thing with a thief, same thing with a cleric, same thing with a wizard. But those work for those classes in those archetypal concepts.

When you're outside that concept, you don't have that. So you want to be a range refighter and you want to be sneaky in the woods. What can you hang your hat on? You have to hope that your referee, your GM, gives you bonuses just because, but they could decide to or maybe don't. Maybe you're playing it with different folks and oh, this GM on Tuesdays, yeah, they give me a plus one bonus, but the one on Thursdays doesn't. Isn't it nice? Isn't it reassuring? Doesn't give you just a level of comfort to know that you can just look at your sheet and say, ah yes, I have this that I can do and I can do it well. Or at least I'm allowed to do it. That doesn't resolve based on fiat, based on having to make eloquent arguments or discuss it every time. You just get to do it. I think that's not a problem. I think that's something that people appreciate. And I don't think it's something that we could balk against.

It seems to me something that is a fairly easy ask, especially when we're talking OSR games, they tend to be rules light. Some of them are really rules light. It's not that onerous to take a class and tweak it, to take a fighter and say, hey, you know what? We're gonna give up the heavy armor. We'll give you a slightly toned down, move silently at heightened shadows. And is there something else we want? Maybe at tracking. So we'll do a couple of things. We'll lower your hit bonus slightly, because you're not the fighter's fighter. There's your ranger. Or you can take the thief instead. All right, we're gonna take a thief. We'll add medium armor on top of light. We'll move, backstab, we'll remove, pickpocketing, maybe we'll add something in. Great, there you go. It's a ranger. Now the player who's playing the ranger can look at their sheet and say, ah, I can move silently. Maybe it's we cross out or we put a little parenthetical, "move silently outdoors". They're not that silent in the dungeon setting, but they're great at moving in the wilderness. Not very hard to do and you can make a player happy.

You can make your job easier, because it's like that when you create a ruling, and that ruling becomes a house rule. You may have in your brain, you may have talked to the character about a concept, and you guys have said, hey, when you're outdoors, so yeah, I'm gonna give you, it's usually a one and six chance, well, I'm gonna give you a plus one, two and six chance. And as you level up, I'll add a couple other bonuses as you go up level. And we're just gonna write this down. It sounds good to me. It sounds good to you. We might test drive in a session, and great. We got it set. We're gonna write this down. You'll lose this ability, and you'll gain this one. Sounds good to you. Sounds gonna be great. That's a new class. That's all it is. It doesn't have to be brand new from scratch. It doesn't have to be totally unique. It just has to fill, fulfill the particular expectations for a particular character concept.

Often we worry about niche protection. I like to think about niche protection. If you have a thief and a ninja, and they 99% do the same stuff, and you think about, well, mechanically, what's the difference between a ninja and a thief? And someone says, well, you know, ninjas were really experts and thieves weren't. I'm like, well, I don't care about that in fiction. Ninjas are always experts, but they're expert thieves too. That's fine. The abilities are basically the same, right? Hide in shadows, climbing sheer surfaces, backstabbery, right? So, okay, so take those out of the way. Well, then what else is there? The abilities are basically the same. I think the progression's fine. You start off being not that great at a ninja, like you're not that great at a thief, and then you go up. So what else we got? Differences. Oh, well, they don't use these weapons. They use throwing stars and nunchucks, and okay, great. So we'll swap out their weapons for throwing stars, nunchucks, and whatnot. Sounds good? Great, go. In that case, we don't need a new class, because the expectations are so similar that when you drill down into them, it ends up being something like a cultural difference or a equipment difference, but fundamentally, they're pretty much the same. I mean, the thief in D&D is a whole hodgepodge of things.

What differentiates a bandit from a brigand? There's no classes for them, but they're different NPCs, so clearly someone felt like they should be somewhat different, a little bit. There's enough difference that they're different monster types? Do we need to have two different classes if we're playing kinds of classes in a game? If we wanted to have players that were brigands and bandits? Maybe, maybe not. You sort it out. You talk to your players. You figure out your concept. You go on your theme, and you decide that there's enough differentiation for it or not. And if you're not gonna have multiples of a type in a game, then niche protection doesn't really matter. If you're not gonna have thieves, but you're gonna have burglars, then it doesn't matter if burglars have most of the thief skills. Of course, in my mind, burglars, in my mind, burglars are not going to have backstab or pickpocket, so we can cross this off the list, but the other ones are the same. But if we're playing in a game, maybe we're playing a game based on the hobbit, in which clearly burglars are a thing because these dwarves come looking for a burglar, but maybe just a generic thief isn't really a thing, then the niche protection doesn't matter. We're not gonna run into regular thieves because the theme, the world, doesn't have thieves in it. They're gonna have burglars, and maybe they will have brigands, and maybe they'll have someone else who then between them might all be covered somewhat by a thief umbrella, but since there is no thief, they can all run free.

If you do have multiple things, like the different fighter types, you might have a fighter, a paladin, and a ranger or some combination of those three, all on a squad at the same time, then niche protection becomes a little bit more of a concern because you don't want someone with one character to just do something flat out better than another without there being an associated cost. And that's where we get into the balancing of the classes. And of course, more of an art than a science, I think, but it's certainly not an insurmountable obstacle.

You don't need to create 500 character classes for your campaign starting, just ask your players what they want to play. Hey, we're gonna play a game and it's kind of a high fantasy Arthurian game, but there's gonna be some politics and maneuvering in there. So you think about maybe a little bit of Game of Thrones plus a little bit of Dune mixed in, but then kind of Excalibur, because overall it's gonna be sort of an Arthurian setting. What do you guys want to play? If you like this concept, right? If we just get past the campaign pitch of, hey, does this game sound good to you? Hey, what would you guys like to play in? One person raised their hand, said I'd really like to play at night. Great, that's essentially a fighter. Maybe you want to add in something with horseback riding, or you just kind of put it in as, yeah, it's just kind of in the setting baked in, whatever, it's basically a fighter. Okay, or you could even think of Paladin maybe, but it's, you pretty much got it. All right, great, someone else. Oh, I'd like to play a druid type. Okay, I want to be in the path to being a Merlin or the Merlin or some other Merlin-ish character. Great, a wizard. Maybe you want to go druid or a cleric, depending on the old religion, cleric. That's great. Then someone else comes along and they say, well, you know, I'd really like to be some kind of, fighter, but they're not in the knightly class. Kind of barbarian-y, a little ranger-y, maybe a ravager, more rough, they're not as organized-- a berserker type, maybe a little bit of that. And you go, okay, and you take those pieces and you kind of weave it together. You talk to your player about, hey, well, what's important to you with this ravager, reaver, berserker type character? And they might come up with, well, you know, I think that they, maybe they're looking at kind of Viking or that sort of archetype, whether it's historically accurate or not. You know, horned helms, which I know we're not in history, but yeah, you know, horned helms and two-handed axes and fur vests, and they kind of live in the wild and they get kind of a crazy gleam in their eye and, okay, great. You know, they're also speaking multiple languages because they're trading and they're traveling all over the place, so I'd like to work that in there. Okay, great. So you get those few things together and you put together that class. So for this game, for this campaign, you're starting up, you maybe have to make one.

I saw on Reddit a discussion. Someone was talking about their game, saying there was a player and they wanted to be a paladin and they were thinking, "hey, you know what? They just gotta do it and find a Holy Sword and then they'll become a paladin." And their player didn't understand that. I don't know, not enough context to tell me whether they had conversations or not about that. And if you want to do something, if you want to do something like that, have a class tied to some kind of accomplishment in the fiction, what you'll hear is diegetic. It happens kind of in the world. So to become a paladin, they have to find the Holy Sword and finding the Holy Sword and maybe undergoing some ritual or maybe attuning or whatever you want to call it with that sword will turn them, if they're a fighter, into a paladin, then that's great. I love that stuff. I love it when you tie things that you want to do with your character, two things in the world. I think that's awesome. But the players need to know that. And I think there's a little bit of this going around where the GMs have in their minds, all they have to do is find this thing and then they can do it. But the players don't know that they can find it. The players don't know maybe what they have to find. And it hasn't been made clear that they can do that. So if you're telling a player that, hey, you can become a paladin, if randomly in the next loot pile and some treasure, there's a Holy Sword, then you can do that. But you got to find it randomly. That's not gonna make anybody feel great. Oh, so there's a 0.01% chance, if I continue playing for years, that a Holy Sword will show up in a loot pile. Yay! That's not great. That's not really what you wanna hear.

If you say, hey, you know what? You can find a Holy Sword. And if you ask Sages or you go asking, there will be legends and tales and you'll be able to do that. And here's an actionable, you can take actionable steps to get there. Then I think that's fine. I think, great, but just the fact that it might exist in some far off area on your world somewhere, but it's either tied to basically just random chance. Well, you might get a Holy Sword, you might not, I don't know. It's tied to your players asking you questions that they're not asking you or they may not even know to ask. In your brain, you could think to yourself and say, well, jeez, I have all these classes available, the party just has to do things and the classes will appear. But if they don't know that, then they might as well not be there. It's not a thing at all if it's only known to you in your heart of hearts as a GM.

If you're someone who lives and dies on that kind of diegetic hill, they'll find it in the world and then they will do it, that's great. I really, I think it's great. But they have to know that. They have to know that these are things they can do, questions they can ask, people they can talk to, quests that they can go on, essentially that they know that it's on the menu that they can find. But even then, what you have in your brain conceptually might not be what the player has conceptually. Yes, you have a paladin in your brain. It's that concept. If they wanna play that concept, you've got that class written. But that class hasn't taken any input from the player and maybe the player doesn't wanna play that kind of paladin. Maybe the player wants to be something more like, I don't know, a witcher type who, I guess in some ways, forgive me, I'm not super familiar with the witcher, is kind of paladin-esque, but in other ways, obviously, it's very not. And that's what they wanna play. So you having a paladin, a classic paladin class floating out there in your world in the ether doesn't do much if they don't wanna play the paladin. They wanna play a witcher. So then what do you do? Do you just say, well, sorry, there are no witchers in my world, which I think is fair, but again, might come across as being unfun. And I'm always one that thinks, hey, meet in the middle. Yeah, I actually had run a game that was part Dune and part Arthur and part this other stuff and somebody wanted to play a witcher. And I thought, you know, that comes with witchers, not quite me, but I figured out a way to take what they explained to me was their sort of focuses, their touchstones in the witcher class and turn into something else that did work in my world.

Just, you know, talk to your players.

I don't understand why folks are afraid of classes or they're super hesitant to have classes. No one's expecting you to come up with splat book after splat book with hundreds and hundreds of classes. If they are to say, hey, I'm not doing that. If someone says to you when you hand them, say a little booklet you've made about your campaign, and there's only three classes, and someone says, that's it, maybe you wanna overlook the fact they're being a bit rude about it, but you could say, well, hey, if those don't interest you, what would you like to play? Given the nature of the campaign we're gonna be playing and the setting and the theme, what's your feeling? And then work with them on that. I think it's very doable. I think it'll make a player happy. I don't know. I was trying to think of other reasons. I don't know if it doesn't need more reasons than that, that now you have a player who may be more enthusiastic to play than they were before, because now instead of having to sort of shoehorn what they want into these classes, or shoehorn the class into what they're trying to do, they just get to play something that they want, and you get to use your imagination to put together something. I think that's always fun. I think it's always great when you make something you put out in the world and someone's like, this is exactly what I wanted. What does it do but just enrich the experience? But ultimately you just made a player happy, and at what cost? Was it that much work? I suppose it was a little bit more work at least, because you're writing a new class, but in the grand scheme of things, what was the cost to you for doing that? That some kind of philosophical dogmatic expression or rule has been bent or broken, who cares? We're not playing philosophies. We're playing games. And it's all about fun, getting together with your friends, rolling some dice, having adventures, and it's not just fighters and clerics and thieves maybe who go on adventures. It's all kinds of folks with all kinds of different and abilities and concepts. And the great thing is playing in our imaginations. There's no end to what we can do. So let's not limit ourselves, right?

Well, that's all I got. Game on everybody. Talk to you later. Bye now.