Chapter 3: Player Character Classes
Now we enter one of the areas of major revision by 2nd Edition. Since things are so different here, I probably won’t spend as much time comparing this to 1st Edition as I did with PC Races.
The chapter opens up with a quick intro to what a class is: like a profession or career that the character is assumed to have gone into before becoming an adventurer. Then we get into 2nd Ed.’s first major innovation: character class groups.
Warrior,
Wizard,
Priest, and
Rogue. Class groups share Hit Dice, THAC0, and saving throws. Each class group has a base class (Fighter, Mage, Cleric, and Thief, respectively), and then subclasses (Ranger and Paladin; Illusionist and Specialist Wizard; Druid and Cleric of Specific Mythos; and the Bard).
A blue box notes that while Fighter, Mage, Cleric and Thief are appropriate to any AD&D campaign, the subclasses are explicitly
optional at the DM’s discretion, and players should check with the DM before choosing one of them.
Then each group and each class within those groups are given a short summary: Warriors are trained in the use of weapons and skilled in martial arts.
Fighters are champions, swordsmen, soldiers, and brawlers, living or dying by their knowledge of weapons and tactics, and found on the front line of any battle.
Paladins are the uptrue exemplars of everything good and true, living for the ideals of righteousness, justice, honesty, piety, and chivalry.
Rangers are warrior woodsmen, skilled with weapons and knowledgeable in tracking and woodcraft.
Wizards strive to be masters of magical energies, casting them as spells. There are various schools of magic that a Wizard may specialize in, while a
mage studies all types of magic and learns a wide variety of spells.
Priests see to the spiritual needs of a community or location. The
cleric is a generic priest of any mythos who is both a protector and healer, and can seek out evil and destroy it. The
druid is an example of how the Priest can be tailored to a specific setting, serving the cause of nature and neutrality.
Rogues can be found wherever people gather and money changes hands. Some are motivated only by the desire to amass a fortune, while others use their skills to correct injustice, spread good will, or aid an adventuring group.
Thieves are skilled pilferers with cunning, nimbleness and stealth as his hallmarks.
Bards are talented musicians, walking storehouses of gossip, tall tales and lore; jacks-of-all-trades, but masters of none.
Next comes an explanation and table of the Class Ability Score requirements. I’ll skip the specifics of the table for now, but interesting here is the recommendation of asking the DM to let you reroll one or more stats if you can’t meet the requirements of a desired class, or to create an entirely new character. It says the DM may allow you to adjust some scores, in order to qualify for a class. Ah ha! I thought. Surely there is guidance about this in the DMG! But when I checked, I found the half-column spent on the subject surprisingly unhelpful.
Despite the then current D&D having a system of reduce a non-prime requisite stat by due to boost a prime requisite by 1, 2nd Ed. has no such guidance. Essentially, the DMG tells the DM to just raise the score, but not beyond the minimum necessary, and not above 15. I find the following two guidelines particularly frustrating.
- Only two classes have ability minimums higher than 15: paladin and illusionist. Only very special characters can become paladins and illusionists. If you give these classes away, they lose their charm.
- Think twice before raising an ability score to let a character into an optional character class if he already qualifies for the standard class in that group. For example, if Kirizov has all the scores he needs to be a half-elf fighter, does he really need to be a half-elf ranger? Encourage the player to develop a character who always wanted to be a ranger, but just never got the chance, or who fancies himself a ranger but is allergic to trees. Encourage role-playing!
So this leads me to a something rant about gating character classes behind randomly rolled ability scores. I understand and can allow for the historical context: people wanted to create distinct new classes with new abilities, and the basic paradigm was balancing extra abilities with ability score floors, so that the new classes didn’t render the old ones obsolete. And that’s fine for a supplement, or a magazine article, or something like that. I question the wisdom of giving exceptionally lucky rollers even
more benefits as a general principle, but let’s set that aside for now.
Once your introduce those classes to your core game, it makes no sense to gate them behind unusually high requirements. Gygax at least recognized this, and so introduced more generous stat generation methods, as well as introducing more bennies for the fighter (exceptional strength is only for fighters in 1st Ed., but this is expanded to the whole Warrior group in 2nd Ed., natch). He would go as far as to introduce a method in Unearthed Arcana that
guaranteed qualification of
any class. 2nd Ed. backtracked on all of this. But what is the point of spending all the time detailing a class that has a 1% chance of being qualified for by the default method? Heck, even the most generous method in 2nd Ed. only gives a 24% chance of qualifying for a paladin. And this is for a game which, generally, stresses being in it for the long haul, a campaign covering multiple character levels.
What's "charming" about having a class you never get to play? Why put these classes in the PHB, enticing players with their goodies, and then actually say, “Yeah, but does he
need to be that class? Why can’t he just role-play it?” I’ve gone into this Let's Read predisposed to be charitable to the game, but that passage in the DMG just pissed me off. If you don’t think a class is needed to fulfill a character concept, don’t put it in the damn book. If you want people to role-play, let them role-play. Don’t put these powerful classes in the book, and then wag your finger, saying, “Nuh-uh-uh, those classes are for people lucky enough to roll high. You shouldn’t want to play them, you should just role-play!”
Next up: Warriors and Fighters