Normally, I'm entirely in agreement that classes and skills don't mix. Yet, my class/skill game is working a whole lot better than my all skill game.
Well, I would say you're not in bad company. The most popular RPG ever that wasn't D&D or a D&D knock-off was Vampire: the Masquerade which I would describe as a class/skill hybrid system. Yeah, you can play games with definitions, saying the clans are really more like races or backgrounds. They feel like classes to me. If you go down the list of things I think makes a class system work, V:tM checks all the boxes.
In hindsight, that habit of mixing things up makes a lot of sense: the B/X and BECMI lines really were advertised as introductory sets to the main AD&D game.
Yes, exactly. That's a great point.
I know when I was a kid, I didn't read the entire books first, play second. I read just enough so that I could play first, fully read the book second. Some gamers, probably most, never assimilate every last rule of an RPG. So what we bring to the table matters. That's just about any RPG. With AD&D in particular, you have a primer in B/X, so in this case you can expect a great degree of commonality in what players and DMs are bringing to the table. And, yeah, that needs to be accounted for when you're trying to get an authentic picture of how a 1E game went in the old school days.
But when some newer editions happen to come along with interesting concepts that don’t always rely on any inter-editional statistical fiddling, you might find it *bloody* difficult to resist breaking that *fourth wall,* pilfering them for your own use with your favourite edition. Steal just the right ideas, and you can make a party of characters and quick backdrop setting in far less than 30 minutes!
Sure. But my main point was that the play pre-dates the print. The mission statement of 2E in particular aims to refine and streamline and present how people were already playing. Now I don't believe that 100%. And that might just be because before the world wide web gamers were less connected, and how we played here in the Northeast probably varied a lot more from how they played in the Midwest compared to the differences today. So a lot of 2E didn't reflect how I was actually playing, and I personally reject a lot of it. But if you take the authors at their word, there is virtually no original material in the 2E core books. It's all stuff that was out there in 1E regardless of whether or not you can find it in print prior to 1989.
Lots of referee’s are frustrated with their players trying as hard as possible to game the system rather than play the game, and I reckon you can see that from miles away just by their choices of alternative systems altogether; at least Neo was trying to break out of the Matrix, these guys just want all that gold just to have it but let the machinery of the game do all of the thinking for them… Seems like a lot of work to get somewhere with a fancy rule’s lawryn’ certificate, just to ignore all of the interesting shortcuts where the real fun is, and most of those don’t seem much at all that secret.
You've definitely said a mouthful there, and there are three separate points on how I address a lot of this stuff.
1) My way of handling rules lawyers is to out rules-lawyer them. I'm not saying that's for everyone. I'm a specialist. I'll give almost any RPG a shot as a player, but as a GM, I run a very small number of systems and make sure I know them better than anyone else. That's how I handle rules lawyers. It's definitely not the best way of handling them, but it's my way.
2) Players who want to game the system rather than play the game has a lot to do with why in that other thread I responded to you in, I raised the point of why the person who decides how the world works cannot be separated from the referee function. It's because I prioritize fidelity to the game world over the rules themselves. And that means if a player is out there trying to "win" at RPGs, the way I run them, your best strategy is going to be to get in character and pay attention. If your primary focus is the rules and min-maxing, you're actually not going to attain optimal results in my games.
3) I think players who don't want to break free from the matrix is just an example of a broader problem. It's bigger than just rules-playing. It's bigger than the matrix itself. To put it in monomyth terms, players too often refuse to take up the hero's journey. In decades of running RPGs, I can also say it's a relatively new problem. You barely even needed a plot hook in the old days. Players had more of a thirst for adventure. I can only speculate why this has changed. I don't know that I have any good answers.
Wait--you’re saying these books (even, er, Original-AD&D), are… more like guidelines, than actual rules?
Shiver me timbers, that sounds all too human! I can get on board with that!
I look at it like this: There's rules. Then there's rules. And then there's rulings.
The rules establish the language and basic procedures of the game. Imagine having to explain what it means every time you say, "Make a hit roll," "Roll for damage," "Make a save," "Roll initiative," etc. The game would grind to a halt. It would be impractical and unplayable. So my feeling is that these are things that should never be changed. Unfortunately some DMs do tinker with this stuff. Even more unfortunate is some of this stuff has changed from edition to edition. These things don't tell you how to play, how to rule, how to have fun, etc. There's no good reason they ever need to be changed, and a lot of reasons why it's bad to change them.
Then there's rules refer to rules of thumb. These are the guidelines. Things like magic-users can't wear armor. It's a suggested weakness for the magic-user class, one that reinforces the visual of the wizard in robes, one that's gotten a lot of mileage and works fairly well. These are the rules of game that tie to the setting, makes possible a lot of the strategic elements of the game, and quantifies things. If you have a specific vision for your rules that would require this to be different in your world, go for it. You'd be advised to do so carefully. Make sure you think it through, maybe test it out.
And then there's rulings. If you've ever flipped through the 1E DMG, you might notice it kind of looks like an assortment of oddly specific things. That's a tell-tale sign that the majority of what's in there are not rules at all, not even guidelines. They are solutions to tricky situations that have arisen in games. The rulings in this book I find to be very insightful and work well, and so I tend to use them all. But it's important to point out that the real rules of the game explicitly assigns the duty of adjudicator to the DM. You're not actually running a BtB game if you're derelict in that duty, even if you're abandoning that duty for the sake of executing the rulings exactly as written. The DM is expected to make sensible rulings.
Lots of parties think you need just one of EACH of the core classes, and find it “problematic” to be the same class as somebody else. Although, it would be much easier for one thief to go for a backstab against a goblin shaman, after another thief has drawn the attention that nearby goblin gaggle held in reserve, all while the three fighters take on the two bugbear mercenaries trying to guard the goblin’s stolen treasure.
One cool thing I give props for in the 2E splat books is that they propose doing things like all-fighters campaigns, all-thieves campaigns and so on.
In old-school, magic-users could be rendered useless in close quarters. You get in striking distance, you can interrupt their spells. So having a front line blocking enemies from getting to the magic-user was absolutely essential. Before WotC went with standard 5' squares, it was generally 3 abreast that could operate in the standard 10' wide corridor. So you needed a front line of 3. If you didn't have at least that, you didn't have a functional mage in a fight.
And that's fine. If you can look at your party makeup and realize it's going to be difficult for wizards to drop bombs in fights, then you memorize more of the miscellaneous spells rather than the combat spells. And then understand as a party you have to operate in such a way that you avoid most fights. Fighters should leave their heavy armor at home, because movement rate is going to be more useful.
It can be a problem if the game has different feats or subclasses for light armor fighters vs heavy armor fighters. Or magic-users that specialize in individual spells and to a lesser extent a school of spells. Anytime the mechanics get in the way of individuals being flexible enough to adapt to the situation and party makeup. If the game mechanics over-step that boundary, then yeah, then I can see the case for these idealized party makeups.
A lot of skill-based systems do have this problem. Defining the character more precisely than broad-based classes is exactly one of those things that can potentially be a barrier to flexibility. A lot of it hinges on just how good the game's skill list is.
Honestly, the monomyth doesn’t quite serve much of the same purpose as the class system, anyway…
We’re all just in it for the gold and glory!
… Right?
I'm fine with gold and glory as the motive and find it works with the monomyth.
In some sense, I view an adventuring party as entrepreneurs. They operate in realms of radical uncertainty with no guarantees of gain but the potential to out-earn whatever salary might have otherwise been justified by their abilities and experience.
Radical uncertainty fits the bill of the extraordinary world, the chaos, the underworld. Gold, or profit, is a fine fit for the ultimate goal, the treasure, the reward, the magical elixir.
A lot of "gamers these days" including the oldies who just feel themselves to have outgrown their former munchkin selves, poo poo money as a motive. I think they're wrong. Like objectively wrong. One of my all time favorite movie quotes puts this in perspective. The late great James Caan as Joe Sarno in The Way of the Gun:
"Fifteen million dollars is not money. It's a motive with a universal adaptor on it."
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But the way Sarno puts it is exactly what the goal, the gold, the elixir, the treasure in the hero's journey is supposed to be. It's supposed to be the ultimate goal. The thing everyone wants. The holy grail. It needs to be something with a universal adapter, indifferent to however you designed your specific character. And if your character is unmoved by it, you're not actually joining in the playing of the game. Sure. It's possible the GM can choose too weak an elixir. GMs aren't perfect. But if they're putting in an effort and trying, so should the players. And if it still just doesn't work for your character, you should make a new one.
There’s another class who’s colinear with the fighter and magic user, and I’d be tempted to appraise him as leaning towards the wizard with the intent of his design. He isn’t exactly the center point of the triangle, given that his purpose is also as specific as the fighter, so he doesn’t quite approach the miscellaneous functions that the wizard and the thief, for the most part.
Everyone desperately wants this cleric in their party, but for all of the thanks he gets for putting himself in the hotspot for all of them, some want to kick him out of the game altogether!
I think the core problem with the cleric can be summed up as: Too many players view the cleric as nothing more than a heal bitch. And perhaps this problem is exacerbated by attempting to ignore the religions connotations of the class in favor of it's function as a healer. Part of the problem is also the "meat shield" archetype. You get these barbarians with massive numbers of hit points. And they value each one of those hit points far less than, say, the magic-user who cherishes every last one of their hit points. So they blow through them more quickly, and that is really taxing for the cleric's healing ability.
One thing I really like about Jordan Peterson's take on the monomyth (and let's be clear, I don't really care for a lot of JP's politics, but his academic lectures are excellent), is he's got this evolutionary psychology element to it. Evolution being the key word here. Meat shield as a strategy is worthy of winning a Darwin Award. It's dumb and should not be an acceptable archetype. Conan was fast as a jungle cat and wore armor when it was available. He was tough, but tough isn't a first line of defense. And I don't know there was any expectation that berserkers would be healed. They kind of charged in with reckless abandon without thought as to how they were going to live, like kamikaze Vikings. None of the inspirations of the Barbarian had get sliced up then healed as a strategy. It's just goofy game design to do a barbarian this way.