Putting More Class In Your Setting . Part II: Why Classes Form

In Part I, I discussed opposing takes on the existence of classes as in-setting elements. In this installment, I will examine the question why societies in which magic and unusual powers are highly efficacious are likely to organize their wielders into groups and institutions that more or less resemble classes.

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The first and obvious question to consider is the social character of power. In itself, power - the ability to wield authority, control or influence over others - is socially corrosive. Because it rests on domination of others and is unevenly distributed, power generates social imbalances, which in turn breed social instability: these imbalances make those who lack power question the benefits they derive from belonging to groups and orders in which they are ostensibly participants. Thus, to perpetuate power, those who have it need to offer ways to distribute and regulate it. To be sure, in fantastic worlds, certain beings can have much greater individual power than an average member of society in comparison to our own, so that even strength in numbers might not guarantee a mechanism of control over the powerful. But even in fantastic societies, godlike beings require worshipers, which presupposes at least a minimal amount of buy-in by people without power into whatever recognizing the gods' paramountcy.

If distributing and regulating power is demanded by the powerless, who seek some guarantees and assurances of noblesse oblige so that their own interests will be respected to some extent, doing so is also in the interests of the powerful. Even fantastic cosmoi are not typically static, which means that power fluctuates: those who have it today may not have it tomorrow. Those who have it today will therefore do what they need to in order to still have access to the same power tomorrow, or better yet, that their right to that power is recognized as legitimate, so that they will not have to take undue risks to defend it. This means power has to be monopolized, protected and hidden: others have to be kept from acquiring it, from gaining access to knowledge that allows them to possess it. This further means that the powerful will construct laws and norms that prevent others from learning their secrets, punishing those who do so illegally, instituting specialized training techniques and secret societies that conceal the methods of gaining and exercising power, and so on. The idea that middling professions - carpentry, smithing, pottery, etc., are organized into guilds (as is suggested by the existence of the "guild artisan" background), but that warriors, arcanists, priests, and others who wield high levels of power lack their own organizations and orders just boggles the mind.

Power can be protected, monopolized and socialized in a number of different ways. One traditional way is to pass it down within family or clan structures, because real or imputed blood bonds typically create a higher level of trust between people who share power. This method of regulating power usually prevails in environments where a (smaller) group has conquered a (much larger) group of foreigners or outsiders, and maintains its grip on power by maintaining its identity as a distinct ethnicity, or a hereditary aristocracy. Societies that organized power along such lines generally had restrictions against non-aristocrats using weapons (or riding horses), because democratizing control over such implements of power would have led to their own downfall. Learning to protect themselves through techniques of unarmed combat - as was the case with Shaolin monks, for instance - was a 'weapon of the weak' that allowed the lower orders to fit into an existing power structure while generating a new technique of power of their own.

Meritocracy, though it is often seen as somehow fairer than aristocracy, represents another approach to monopolizing power. In societies without deep divisions of ethnicity or estate, some people can still rise to positions of great power and influence either through putting in the hard work of learning techniques of power, or through being born with inordinately large amounts of raw talent (or both). In either case, securing one's right to possess power - economic, political, symbolic, etc. - requires certification at the hands of established meritocrats, who administer systems of examinations and bureaucracies that require demonstrations of accomplishments before one is allowed to rise to the next power level. Examinations and bureaucracies are also schools of a professional ethos - how does one properly practice one's skill, treat those who are not in the know, and behave toward superiors and underlings? Exceptional candidates who are hard to entangle in such administrative boondoggles do crop up from time to time, and do undermine such systems of control, but the point is, meritocrats always try to control them, and, assuming a society does not collapse as a result of being challenged by upstarts, they generally succeed. At best, the upstarts are able to create and institutionalize a new form of power.

The social order of Latin Christendom

Simple schemes like hereditary aristocracy or meritocracy do not typically exist in pure form, or function in a vacuum. In most societies, they exist side by side, perhaps differentiating different power-holders, or elites, from one another. Most societies have multiple elites, and the various elites protect their power not only from the powerless, but also from one another. This may be demonstrated by the example of new and old elites, e.g. the Germanic warrior aristocracy, which had its rule legitimated by the Christian clergy that had taken control of the Roman Empire in the preceding century. These two elites became, respectively, the Second and First Estates of the medieval European political order. Similarly, the Tariqat, Shariat, Siyasat division of the Dar-al-Islam into a Persian-language scholarly and cultural elite, an Arab-language religious and judicial elite, and a Turkic-language warrior and political elite reflected compromises between old and new ruling classes in Islamic society as well. The origins of the Indian caste hierarchy is more shrouded in controversy owing to its greater antiquity, but some scholars regard it as another example of a compact between recent invaders and more established elites. The caste (more precisely, varna) system constituted an extreme instance of different elites protecting their power by differentiating oneself themselves in training, abilities, language, symbolism, etc. - as much as possible, to the point where the castes to have minimal physical contact with one another. In the European case, conversely, the First and Second estates interpenetrated one another to such an extent that while first sons of elite families inherited the family domain or realm, the second sons strove to become Princes of the Church.

The lower orders, numerous but subjugated and unorganized, often generated counterelites that challenged the established social order as well. Various "social bandits", including pirates, hejduks, uskoks, Cossacks, and Shaolin monks were not simply outlaw gangs, but groups that shared an ethos and a measure of support from the surrounding populations living within the law. The infamous ninjas were recruited from specific lower-class townships, while many of the Yakuza belonged to the burakumin outcaste, from which tanners, butchers and executioners also hailed. In medieval Russia, the izgoi - a term translated into English as "rogue" - were also members of an outcaste with no legal standing and no right to own property. They were not necessarily criminal, but they were literally outside the law, and dependent on their wits, rather than a master or any kinds of legal protections, for survival.

Some elites may cluster in specific geographic areas. These can include frontier areas dominated by tribal groups with special abilities, marcher elites on the margins of sophisticated (though frequently politically fragmented) empires, as well as merchant elites, which gravitate to commercial emporia that promote cross-border (or cross-wasteland) trade between empires. Though the designation may have been meant a joke, or simply an attempt to formulate real-world political forms in terms of D&D classes, the Companion Set DM's rules  characterized a republic (i.e. that form of government that prevails in interstitial commercial emporia) as "a democracy with elected rulers (or thieves)" (Mentzer, 1984, 11). Since then, of course, the term kleptocracy has become commonplace political vocabulary, though for some, it is only a specification of a republic, not its antithesis.

Common classes - fighters, rogues, priests, and possibly certain kinds of magic practitioners - would thus likely overlap with broad estates or castes. The commonality of the basic (or traditional) classes is accounted for by the near-universality of certain types of monopoly control - over violence, over symbolic power, and over the economy - of the imperial or quasi-imperial societies that serve as baseline models for most societies in the fantasy literary genre. Geographically localized elites, on the other hand, would likely represent the less common classes, like barbarians, or specializations within one of the larger classes. Many contemporary classes began as subclasses of the "Big Three" or "Big Four" with functional specializations - armed companions of a ruler or a monastic fighting order (paladins), a military outfit charged with the defense of a frontier (rangers), or a dethroned priesthood (druids). Some of the minor classes - meditative secret societies promoting communal self-defense (monks), or musical confraternities (bards) fit into this mold as well.

Magic, if it exists as a distinct force, would constitute an additional form of power that could be universally monopolized in such societies. However, almost by definition, magic is a superhuman force that people cannot regulate. That may be said for symbols (created by Thoth to represent the thought or speech of Amun, as the Egyptians had it), violence, or love (generated by gods such as Mars and Venus), but magic - the least stable and definable type of power, would have the most destabilizing social effect. Controlling magic would be one of the main functions of social institutions, or goals of social life in general. It was difficult enough to do in actual societies: Ashurbanipal's construction of the Great Library at Nineveh in order to discipline, regulate and professionalize divination has been compared to the Manhattan Project in the extent and importance of the undertaking; but how much more difficult would it be in an environment where magic had a much more visible and dramatic impact? One tactic, also paralleling what actually occurred in history, might involve differentiating divine from arcane magic: whereas divine magic leaves creation largely in the hands of the gods, and places only restorative power (healing, blessing, banishing evil spirits, in extremis - channeling divine wrath) in the hands of their human agents, arcane power is a hack - a mortal appropriation of the basic power of the cosmos. As such, it might be ruled out of court, as it for the most part was in societies dominated by Abrahamic monotheism; regulated at the margins, as was the practice of high magic like theurgy by university-trained intellectuals (at a time when the universities were controlled by the clerical estate); or forced to become handmaidens to imperial rule, as in China, where the shi scholar-administrators occasionally dabbled in alchemy, but only after they were brought under control by the system of imperial examinations, and the imperative to govern society on behalf of the Son of Heaven. A full magocracy might more resemble India - the Brahmin, although ritual specialists (hence priests) were often seen as superior to the gods, and therefore in full control of the creative power of the universe (though such power took purely non-material forms - otherwise it would be polluting); but precisely because it could be conceptualized as a society ruled by magi, access to that class was tightly regulated. It is perhaps no accident that a ruling magical caste is also depicted as essentially impermeable in the (otherwise forgettable) first Dungeons and Dragons film. Perhaps the wizards that rule such societies first take control over the cycle of rebirth upon taking power.

Varna (caste) in medieval South Asia

If some arcane casters can be policed by priests (and their divine masters), emperors (and their bureaucracies), literary traditions, and schools, what of those who possess natural magical talent (sorcerers), or those who cut a few corners by making a deal with otherworldly patrons in exchange for future considerations (warlocks)? Surely, as detractors like to point out, here we have two classes that can have no class structure at all, because there is no training, no techniques, and no necessary interaction with others who possess similar skills. Often, there is even no self-awareness and no individual choice about acquiring such powers - it just happens. To my mind, that represents less an inevitable conclusion than a simple failure of imagination. Those born with raw magical talent are typically scions of a magical bloodline, rather than simply freaks of nature (as commoners might think). An obvious course of development would be that a sorcerer turns to discovering her true family history immediately upon learning of her powers. Any social pressure - which is a likely response to individuals being born with raw magic - would almost certainly result in the isolated individual looking for allies - preferably among one's kind: only they understand the character's plight, and can help manage the dangerous aspects of raw magic. It is also quite possible that society would put significant resources into tracking such births magically, in order to eliminate or control all wielders of natural magical talent (the sarcastic suggestion that a society would institute a census to locate individuals in a certain class doesn't actually seem to me to be supercilious - the dominant religion of the Western world is premised upon the existence of a census dividing people into archaic categories, and also the capacity of Magi to be able to locate such miraculous children). Conversely, if sorcerers are descended from gods, they would form a ruling elite, while dominant figures within their bloodlines would act as sorcerer-kings - managing their populations to ensure that specimens with talent would be born in the safest and most propitious environments. As for pact-making warlocks, given their likely rejection of legitimate pathways to power, they would also require networks of support, which they would most likely find among covens or like-minded people contracting with the same entities. All these approaches strike me as more propitious to involving sorcerer or warlock PCs in a setting than simply assuming that they are one of a kind.

It is often objected that if the goal is to implicate PCs in social structures, it can easily be done without involving them as a member of a class: there are so many other options for structures to which PCs can belong to, while class is best left to player interpretation. To me, this makes little sense. Class is by far the greatest source of a character's power, so specially class abilities would be primary loci of social regulation, and developing or managing class powers would occupy a great deal of a character's training. Inventing yet other social categories to take the place of classes would be redundant within the setting, and aesthetically awkward from the point of view of gameplay - a kind of reinvention of the wheel. It is sometimes pointed out that class in the game sense is not the same concept as class in the socioeconomic sense. This is true as far as it goes - not all classes should overlap with broad social orders, but that does not mean that the terms are entirely unrelated in meaning, or that classes cannot denote similar categories. Another common assumption  - that placing characters within a preexisting class structure would constitute a trap - is unwarranted if the GM is not being heavy-handed (and a heavy-handed GM presents problems to players across the board, not simply in terms of imposing class structures on them). Within class structures, there is still more than ample room for player agency. Do you like being part of the elite? How well do you fit in with your peers? Are you a rebel against those who trained you? Does your background predispose you toward more than one class (and how would you respond to lobbying from multiple leaders and elites)? Are you on the run because of your talent, despite the fact that members of your bloodline are rulers of your society? Ideals, bonds, flaws, and personal histories can shape answers and approaches to class, instead of obviating them.

The same applies to backgrounds in general. Does having classes eliminate the need for backgrounds? Does it make certain backgrounds necessary counterparts to certain classes? Are all fighters nobles or soldiers, are all rogues criminals or charlatans, are all clerics acolytes, and are all wizards sages? Even if there is a degree of overlap (especially for NPCs), supposing so would again be a failure of imagination. A brawny commoner could have been noticed by the local lord at a young age (e.g. by saving him from drowning), and then trained in the use of weapons, and made part of his armed retinue. A wizard struggling to find tuition for university borrows money from the local loan shark, and, in the absence of collateral, is made to participate in break-ins and eventually integrated into the local gang structure. An aging artisan strives to escape from the pressures of family by entering a monastery. In an extreme case, a captured and enslaved tribesman is trained in the use of arms to protect his master, and then formulates a new approach to being a warrior (with the GM's approval, the GM and the player cooperate to design a Mamluk Fighter archetype, or find one online that the GM deems acceptable for the setting). The existence of other social pressures and mundane lives does not eliminate classes: the wizard running heists for the loan shark still wants to finish her education, and to be deemed legitimate by her wizard peers. Coming from exceptional circumstances and being able to bend the rules are the veritable exceptions that prove the rule, rather than arguments against the rule. And being a leveled cleric in an ecclesiastical institution that includes multiple priests with no discernible ability to cast spells does not mean that mundane priests are the distinct social category in question: star software engineers are more definitive of institutions like Silicon Valley, which exists to provide support for their skill-set, than the vast majority of mediocre ones receiving a wage, whom no one has ever heard of.

It is precisely the relationship between various class mechanics, which are far from a randomly thrown-together "bag" that the "no concrete classes" set somehow reads into the rules that speaks to the social character of class. Members of powerful groups frequently receive training that has no clearcut and immediate advantages to the increasing power in the short term, but that establish legitimacy and create solidarity within the group. For some classes (druids, rogues) these are class languages; for others (wizards), they are texts that organize knowledge into schools, and require extensive study for entry; for others still (monks, clerics) monastic or priestly institutions, or oaths (paladins) that stipulate their responsibility to society at large. For some classes, their various abilities are articulated by disposition toward certain terrains (which are, after all, social settings, too). The people who chafe at these restrictions and "useless" abilities are typically the same people that don't recognize that classes have any social standing. But this gets back to the crux of the issue: should a character's class always be about power projection in any circumstance (and in a parallel fashion, the display of the character's untrammeled individuality)? What is the impact of this approach on the social character of RPGs as a hobby?

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In the concluding part of this essay, I will examine variations of class composition and organization in different settings, and different stages of a character's career.

Putting More Class In Your Setting. Part I: Arguing About Class

I've observed and participated in debates about classes in fantasy-historical RPGs for about two years. Typically, a lot of people invest more time and energy in debating the game than playing the game. Disagreements commonly take the form of personal affronts, as if people who disagree with you are telling you how you should play. Or that they are dictating the terms on which you will join their game, which you will not accept. The fact that people are exploring variants and not asking you to play in their game is lost on many, many people. There is no earthly reason why every approach to the game has to be "for everybody" - to my mind, the more different playstyles and interpretations of the rules, the better.

The main stances in the debate - when it is a debate, and not a shouting match, boil down to these two positions. The first advertises itself as the more "modern" one in that it is willing to go beyond the letter of the rules, and thus, to promote player creativity. To gamers who hew to this line, classes (like fighter, wizard, rogue, and so on) are mere conveniences that have become ingrained in rule systems over the years. They have become refined over time by designers concerned that they are "balanced" and don't outshine one another, and that they should have plenty of built in options for players always looking out for new variants. Ultimately, classes are simply congeries of different mechanics that are grouped with one another for reasons of historical accident - once upon a time, thieves had various street-smart skills, and could effectively stab people in the back, so today's rogues are skill-monkeys who have sneak attack. Regardless of how little sense it makes to package these skills together, such players accept them with the proviso that they can portray the character who possesses such skills in any way they want, and that there is no imperative to play such a character as a member of a criminal underground. The notion that classes might be actual categories of people within the game setting strikes the proponents of this position as an anachronistic embarrassment - sure, there used to be names associated with every level in every class, and people would train to advance from a footpad to a cutpurse; but now, the game has evolved, and become much more complex. In the age of "player agency", we don't need built-in mechanisms in the rules to structure our relationship with the game world. My rogue can be a sleuth, my monk - a tavern brawler, and my warlock - a person who woke up with magical powers one day for no explicable reason whatsoever. The existence of monster statblocks, instead of NPC character sheets, for bandits and mages points to the fact that player characters are unique, as no class groupings into which PCs fit exist in the game world: class is a meta-game convention. So long as both you and I accept the mechanics - i.e. rules that stipulate how much damage I do, how fast I run, what spells I can cast - under particular circumstances - no one can tell me any different. And God forbid anyone suggests that a skill-based game may better meet this desire for flexibility - I'm playing this game - presumably, because there is a much larger pool of players available.

"Fluff isn't rules!"

The other position becomes, by default, the "traditionalist" position. Its proponents hold that what's inside the package called class should be, in varying degrees, reflected on the outside wrapper. The "story" part of the class - including membership in organizations (e.g. monasteries, thieves' guilds, temples, etc.), knowledge of class-specific languages (druidic, thieves' cant), explicit relationships with creatures granting powers (gods, warlock patrons, magical schools) - is no less a part of the "rules" than more explicitly "mechanical" aspects of the character. The notion that the two are separable, and the latter is freely jettisoned is a tendentious reading of the rules. Despite a more open design philosophy that allows playing against type, even the more recent 5e iteration, no less than the oldest ruleset (excepting the OD&D rules, where class remained undefined) stipulate that class is a profession - nay, more - a calling (PHB, p. 45). Adherents of this position often view ignoring the "fluffier" aspects of the class as a pretext to powergame - if you are not socially grounded in a class with a distinct structure, traditions, and training, then you can switch classes at the drop of a hat, to build a minimaxed machine - the real reason for the obsession with "mechanics", they aver. Even if a nominally classed character is built as a roleplaying challenge rather than an optimizer's dream, it can be aesthetically awkward. Since the game is a fiction, technically, everything can be reskinned - not only class, but race, weapons, skills, special abilities, etc. In extremis, the ruleset becomes a huge and clunky filter behind which the "real" character is concealed, and at that point, playing the character within that ruleset becomes rather awkward. An additional argument put forward by "traditionalists" is that characters in the setting - whether controlled by players or by the GM - should be able to get a read on someone's class by closely observing them - how often can a particular combatant strike in a given time period? What sorts of spells can a particular caster effect, and how many, per day? Since empirical observation of a character may provide verifiable data, that suggests that real in-game occurrences reflect real class differences, and not just metagame elements that are visible to players, but obscured from their characters behind a narrative veil.

Although my own take is closer to the latter position, I do not gravitate to it out of primarily "traditional" considerations. I also feel that much of the argumentation - on both sides, is quite weak. The idea that simple observation can generally yield accurate information on what class a character belongs to strikes me as quite faulty. Perhaps I can observe the kinds of spells someone casts - if I understand what they are doing (e.g. by making successful Arcana checks). I'm willing to allow that spells are cast pretty differently - they use different formulae and motions, the casting may have to integrate accurate astrological information and the position of the caster - all things that a non-expert would have a difficult time noticing. As for noticing that someone is "striking" several times in a six-second interval, that seems like a particularly weak argument. Hit points have always been an abstract measure, and being "hit" is not equivalent to sustaining a "wound".

But just because hit points or to-hit bonuses are abstract characteristics that should not have clearly defined counterparts in the game world, it does not follow that all in-game characteristics are of this abstract nature. Class seems to me quite distinct from characteristics that have simple measurements. Not only is it explicitly defined as a profession (or more), it is almost certainly the single-most important factor that determines what characters can do, and what makes characters different from one another. People can ignore classes as social structures if they like in their settings, just like some people (including myself) largely ignore alignment, but there is little support in the core texts themselves for treating class as just a bag of abstract mechanics. When the game's lead designers throw together a new variant, they are pretty explicit about the fact that they design the story elements first, and then throw up numbers to represent aspects of these elements. It is also not clear to me why only the "crunchy" elements should be regarded as "rules", whereas the "fluffy" elements are "optional".

Again, every group or GM can make their own decisions about this, but the uncritical "base-superstructure" reading, where numbers are primary, and mere words can be freely ignored, reflects a certain real-world philosophical positivism, and has nothing to do with how to properly approach the text of the rules. Why is the damage caused by a druid spell more of a rule than the druid's ability to speak the Druidic language (which a lot of "modernists" object to as an unnecessary sop to grognards, because their druid has nothing that binds them together with other druids, who may not even exist)? Typically, the "crunch first" positivism tends to run even deeper: ask most "modernists" if race, as opposed to class, is a "real thing" in the game, and they will usually say yes, because race is reflective of the belonging to an in-world biological group, and is therefore not just a "bag of mechanics" that can be interpreted in any way one wants. When you point out to them that they are transposing sociobiological "race realist" ideology from our world onto the game world, that nothing says that biological races in the game world are pure and have genetically hard-wired characteristics, and it's only one small hop away to accusations that you are a Social Justice Warrior, after which the game discussion inevitably breaks down. So, apparently, in D&D (!) race is real, and class is not, because Science.

But class is much more important than race, or any other game characteristic, in determining what characters can do. It is only in a class that one advances in level, and if level is better conceptualized as an abstract measure in many cases, a character's sense of advancement more broadly has a place in the game-world. The advancement is what draws a lot of players - its psychological rewards likely account for D&D's continued success in the face of competition from more "realistic" skill-based systems. While the psychological satisfaction from advancing in a class is felt by players, there is a case to be made that the purely qualitative advance in a class models in-game character satisfaction much better than simply increasing a score in a skill. Skills may be concrete know-how, but a class is an archetype, representing a heroic model developed by a hero, demigod, or important organization. Surely, the official use of archetype to refer to subclasses is not an accident - it represents the mythic quality of classes, meaning that the elements of a class are not some randomly thrown together abilities, but a particular archetypal pattern or style. And archetypes are culturally specific - the notion that every setting must contain exactly the same classes and subclasses - especially in this day and age, when variants are freely available and easy to make - is a bit silly. It may be objected that  non-official variants are not balanced - but that is really a misdirection. The official classes aren't perfectly balanced, either - you hear complaints about this constantly. Variants introduced in the Unearthed Arcana pdfs are in play-test mode, and have not been properly "balanced"; other designs deserve the same kinds of trial periods and considerations. And staking everything on balance does strike me as the kind of crunch-obsession that creative, role-play oriented types that want to redefine classes claim to be getting away from.

The notion that game settings should be open to all official (and semi-official) classes in order to accommodate player desires is a matter of taste, but there is no earthly reason why this has to be every GM's default position. Players do desire options, but there are few players who are committed to playing just this option in your game, no matter its flavor. If you explain your setting and present the new class options to new players, the vast majority of them will find something they like, and will often suggest several variants. There are people who insist that all Japanese restaurants should serve spaghetti and meatballs, but those who operate Japanese restaurants rarely build their menu around such expectations. It is similar with games - just make sure your setting is interesting and coherent, and that your class options work well together. And don't just take away options - provide new taste sensations.

Another argument against class as an in-game reality highlights the introduction of backgrounds as alternatives. If you want characters to fit into a setting - now you have a category explicitly designed for the purpose. The character can come from a noble, or artisan, or soldier, or hermit background. These place the character within a social category, and even provide guidelines for how they shape the characters' outlook on life, personality, and actions. But when it comes to classes, partisans of the no-class-in-the-gameworld approach insist that every character should be sui generis. But why should that necessarily be the case? As a fan of backgrounds precisely because they imbricate characters in society, I see no earthly reason why they obviate classes doing so as well. As characters grow in power, the background from which they originate fades into the background, while class becomes increasingly more important. Why does growth in power automatically make characters anti-social? Would not a real society put a significant amount of effort into regulating and institutionalizing power - regardless of the fact that these efforts would not prove 100% successful? Classes can be professions and callings - just of a different type than those represented by some backgrounds. They are professions and callings for those who wield a lot of power. People who wield a lot of power in our world may be special, but that does not stop them from belonging to (often special) social categories.

When it comes down to it, the underlying attitude of rejecting class as an in-game social structure stems from a real-world anti-societal ideology, rather than a disdain for old-school classes with their level designations as unnecessary crutches for a quality role-playing experience. The emphasis on mechanics (and the parallel belief in races as real in a biological sense) derive from a real-world worship of numbers and natural-scientific categories. But insistence that characters are bound by society is treated with suspicion: my character has completely untrammeled free choice in anything he or she does. In conjunction with the scientistic worship of crunch and race comes the Romantic cult of the genius: my character is a unique Renaissance Person, and possesses peculiar talents, not reducible to any training or structure. This is reflected in the common framing of "good role-playing": a good role-player is good at narrating his or her character's feelings, but not necessarily at figuring out ways to make a character part of the party, or the world. It remains a mystery, however, why people and monsters cluster around power-wielding people, ignoring the sea of mediocrity around them. It is similarly unclear how organized society survives in the face of their onslaught, or how monsters, who supposedly care not a whit for society, are sitting on piles of treasure that society produces and recognizes as valuable. Suspending disbelief to allow a very dense penumbra of powerful creatures around the PC party surrounded by a completely mundane world requires significantly more effort than just supposing that the world has classes to which a significant few belong. Moreover, the party is said to wield earth-shattering powers that developed completely spontaneously, and no one around them can have any sense whatsoever about what these powers are and where they come from - their attitudes toward the PCs can take the form only of overwhelming awe. It is curious that a people who are drawn toward D&D's high magic settings expend so much energy on spinning narratives that deliberately conceal magic's existence as a source of power.

The existence of monster statblocks is hardly a clinching argument in favor of classes being limited only to PCs. The statblocks are mere shorthand conveniences, because creating NPC character sheets is a more involved effort, and can be more difficult for a GM to manage during gameplay, since classes have become more complex, and have more whistles and bells than they did in many earlier editions, and since the GM is commonly managing multiple NPCs and adversaries during a typical encounter. But that doesn't mean they don't belong to classes. NPC statblocks are simplified variants of character sheets, and a glance at the spell powers of those monsters that are casters clearly shows that they possess spell slots, as would characters of a comparable level. On top of that, the DMG itself clearly cites "giv[ing] the NPC a class and levels" (p. 92) as one of the three main options for recording their statistics. The capacity of some people to misread the rules they cite as chapter and verse always astounds, (though I do allow that, as in poetry, religion and theory, there can be "strong" misreadings capable of generating creative approaches to the game).

In short, most of the typical arguments that modern (i.e. 5e) design militates against having classes as elements of game settings fall decisively short of the mark. Claims that even if the letter of the law does allow this (out of consideration for tradition), most people no longer play that way, has no substantial evidence behind it. One (admittedly unscientific) poll suggests that the community is pretty evenly split between "no", "yes", and "it depends" positions on "class in the game". A more scientific poll administered by lead designer Mike Mearls notes that 52% of GMs build their NPCs using the Player's Handbook - that is, with classes and levels. Having classes as in-game elements is therefore not atavistic or anti-modern, but neither does it have to be traditionalist. Every GM is within their rights to decide if the "traditional" classes are well-designed from a narrative point of view, and whether they fit into their settings. If some are found wanting, they can be jettisoned or replaced. Nor does the existence of classes as structures mean that everyone in the gameworld is clearly aware of them, or able to figure out the precise capabilities and levels of particular characters. In our world, the vast majority of the population doesn't really understand the difference between a molecular and a particle physicist, any more than a common peasant knows the difference between various spellcasting classes. But that doesn't mean that the differences don't exist in an institutional sense. Having classes also doesn't mean that they are all closed fraternities with their specific bylaws, symbols and chapter houses. Some classes are clearly more open along their perimeter than others. But again, that doesn't mean they aren't there.

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In Part II of this essay, I will examine the setting-based reasons why classes are likely to be organized as concrete social groups.