AD&D didn’t have separate wizard, sorcerer, and warlock classes.
Anyway, as I said, it’s not a big deal.
I suppose it works as a way to help players customize their characters to some extent without requiring too much initiative.
Sorry, I misread and thought you were conflating clerics and druids into the mix. Though 1e did have a separate Illusionist class!
Certainly when I went to D&D conventions, you would see few PoC or females.
However , there are a lot of hobbies that seem to have few minorities- the SCA , LARP, SF conventions , bridge tournaments, chess, etc- although several of those do have a full share of the distaff side.
That is simple. D&D wizards used Vancian magic. You have a spellbook. You impress some of those in your mind, then once used, that spell is gone (until you impress it again, next day). The choice of spells for a certain adventure took forethought and planning. The wizard would have access to dozens of spells. A wizard will have battlefield control, general purpose, boosting and yes damage spells
Some players didn’t like forethought and planning, they just wanted to spam fireball. Thus the Sorcerer. The Sorc has access to a handful of spells, but can spam them. Generally battlefield control and damage. They simply don’t have enough spells to cover the general purpose spells needed.
The warlock is just weird. He basically is a spooky dude that spams one thing, over and over. He really is a archer. He has less spells than the ranger and the paladin in reality. If your only spellcaster is a warlock, you are SOL.
Then we have the Bard, who works like the Sorc, but is a master of boosting and GP spells, and a little healing.
I honestly don’t know how unfriendly it was. There was more cheesecake in D&D art back then, but I don’t recall depictions of minorities being all that bad for the most part. At least not in the core products most players would have been familiar with. For the most part, just about anything geek related was overwhelmingly white back in the 80s and a significant chunk of the 1990s. I rarely saw any African Americans at Star Trek conventions back then, though there were a good number of women, and even outside of RPGs, I didn’t see a lot of non-whites playing Battletech, Warhammer, or perusing B. Dalton Bookseller’s in the science fiction section. Maybe it wasn’t a friendly environment back then, but I think the dearth of black players is probably a bit more complicated than that.
Oh yeah, Vampire brought a lot of people to gaming who were never going to play D&D. Not just young women, but young men as well. In 1993, I could find girls willing to play vampire, but I only knew of one who was willing to play AD&D.
To be fair, a lot of male characters were depicted in “beefcake” armor, like the covers of Conan books.
Wisdom is will power, but CHA is force of personality.
A barbarian is a natural warrior, a Fighter is a trained one. The name isn’t the best, but it gets the idea across. D&D druids aren’t very druid-like either.
I always thought that “warlock” should just be a background variant of the other classes. A wizard who made an eldritch pact, a cleric visited by an angel, a bard with a sentient instrument, etc. The warlock doesn’t need its own thematic/mechanical space and none of the many arguments I’ve heard from defenders of the class has convinced me.
Also I dislike them being Charisma based and, from what I understand, they were intended to be INT based this edition but people complained and they got shifted back to Charisma, leaving us with the odd core setup of two Wisdom, three Charisma and one Intelligence based full caster instead of the more logical 2:2:2. People try to defend this by saying you need to be charismatic to make a Pact but (a) that isn’t true as a conversation with most contract lawyers will teach you and (b) your starting 16 Charisma wouldn’t have been any match for the arch-demon or fey princess or slumbering ancient godling you struck a deal with anyway.
I concur there. It makes Int the least useful stat overall.
Everyone can use or needs Con & Dex, Wis is very useful, since Perception is based off it, and Con & Wis are the best saves to have. Other than wizards, Int can be a 10 with little harm. Oddly what with Dex adding to both attack and damage (with certain classes of weapons) not to mention AC and some nice saves, Str isn’t that important either. A Fighter or even a barbarian with a str of 10, and a 18 dex is quite playable, moreso than a dex of 10 and a str of 18.
One thing- CHA is rarely a save, along with Int and Str.
I also dislike this meme of Bards trying to seduce everything, since that is not really a skill set for them. (Oh sure, they can be good at Persuasion, but so can a Sorc or Warlock).
People just want a grimdark PC that isn’t actually evil, and the warlock delivers.
In the group with which I’m playing 5E, our characters are:
- Half-elf bard (me)
- Human warlock (my wife)
- Halfling rogue
- Elf monk (multiclassed to cleric to give us a little more healing)
- Human fighter
- Half-orc barbarian
We, as a group, absolutely suck at anything Int-based; I think that the highest Int in the group is the rogue, at 11 or 12.
I definitely agree that vampire larping attracted women to gaming. And many of them stuck around for TTRPGs too. Definitely opened things up. Unfortunately there aren’t any women in my current group.
That doesn’t seem a fundamental difference in class to me.
Also monk … seemingly nothing to do with actual monks.
My understanding has always been that the class has nothing to do with European monks, and is instead inspired by Asian martial artists, particularly Shaolin monks, like the character in the TV show Kung Fu.
100% accurate. That was the inspiration.
A European type Monk would have been a Cleric. Or in a few cases a Paladin.
The monk was based on the The Destroyer book series (which would become the Remo Williams movie later) at the request of Brian Blume, a key player and investor in early D&D and TSR. Gygax supposedly disliked the class and thought it didn’t fit the milieu and would have completely removed it from later editions except he left TSR before 2nd Edition came to pass.
Now you are most of the way to asking, “Why does a game need classes at all?” Class was a way of defining character abilities in a discrete fashion that stemmed from Dungeons & Dragons origin as the Chainmail tactical wargaming rules (TSR originally stood for “Tactical Studies Rules”) and doesn’t really reflect any particular need in a roleplaying game to have pre-defined character roles. It is an artifact of the heritage of the game and while many other games have adopted the convention some of the most successful games even from the same era (e.g. Traveller, Runequest, Call of Cthulhu) did not have classes per se but rather had “professions” or “careers” that defined character backstories and skills/talents/abilities but allowed essentially freeform development. This isn’t as linear or regimented and begs more engagement with the GM than the level-based progression of character classes that D&D and many other games adopted but it does allow the players a wide brief on developing and maturing their characters instead of being stuck in one path indefinitely.
No doubt, but when someone like you is not depicted in the art and the only people playing games are a pretty uniform subculture it is difficult to break into that even if you are genuinely interested. Although there were not negative depictions specifically of human races, all of the heroes were essentially white (even the elves and dwarves that were technically non-human) while monsters and alien races were often dark-hued. It is easy to dismiss these as considerations because, of course, they aren’t representative of human ‘races’ until you actually hear from people who describe how revelatory it was to see a non-white human in any RPG art. Chris Spivey of Harlem Unbound and the Haunted West Kickstarter campaign and Bridgett Jeffries have both described their involvement and challenges in the RPG community and how much it meant to see non-white characters depicted in art and the actual unfiltered history of indigenous and minority cultures being accurately depicted in RPGs versus the cliched and often offensive stereotypes as drawn from Tolkien and other traditional sources.
Of course, in Star Trek, Nichelle Nicholes as Lt. Urhura, as little as she was actually given to do, appearing as a bridge officer was a revelation for the time and inspired countless young black women into achieving professionally (astronaut Mae Jemison in particular cited her as a key inspiration); doubtless the same for George Takei. The same is true for Michael Dorn, LeVar Burton, and other black and minority actors in subsequent Star Trek shows. It is easy to diminish the impact of representation when you are sufficiently represented but these are real factors in appealing and inspiring others.
Yeah they’re both gratuitous, but the appearance of women in somehow literally skin-tight armor versus a Conan-like hero flexing his muscles is the difference between exploitation and inspiration, given the cohort they were intended to appeal to. This is all fantasy, of course, but some of it was barely short of soft-core porn while others were basically a Charles Atlas ad. None of it was realistic, of course; even the Vikings covered their loins and carried shields.
As I said, it is just my impression as someone who never actually played the game, but it presented an entirely different vibe of more narrative and character interaction than the munckin-appeal of hack & slash dungeon crawling. I mean, dungeon crawling is fine and can be a fun way socialize and shit-talk a few hours (or even taken more seriously in Torchbearer as a survival exercise) but it certainly doesn’t appeal to everyone and is barely roleplaying in the strict definition of the term. World of Darkness kind of tapped into a cultural zeitgeist of things going on under the surface in the post-Cold War environment and I think brought in a lot of people who were interested more in social conflicts and narratives than the tactical aspects. And, frankly, there is a lot to be said for that, not only on its own merits but its influence back into games like D&D in encouraging actual roleplaying despite the fact that the system mechanics don’t really encourage it.
Stranger
Bridgett is a good friend of mine (and one of the most amazing horror GMs I’ve ever played with), and she’s helped to open my eyes on this topic.
For me, the class issue is just a matter of curiosity. I don’t really understand how they decided what is a class and what isn’t. It’s still playable. And, as I said, above, I suppose it serves as a set of models for players. It seems to work.
What I consider an actual weakness of D&D is the leveling system. For me, at around levels 8-10 or so, the game stops being fun, because the characters are way too powerful. Continual progression up the chain of power seems to me to hamper the ability to tell a regular story.
And part of it is that I don’t really like playing games in which we battle gods or save the universe from destruction. I’d like to be able to play a character over a long term who might at first need to build abilities, but it should plateau at some point. I’m more interested in how that character interacts with the world and builds relationships and such, and it should continue to be fun to enter into small-scale conflicts and still face a sense of danger.
That is a common problem with most Role playing games. Powering up gets nuts. I know that is why 5e is so tight on Concentration rules for spells and attunement for major items.
That’s a pretty common complaint. I think surveys have suggested most games don’t go past 10-12th level and there’s “E6” house-rule modifications of the game where leveling caps at 6th (so 3rd level spells) and, past that, you only gain feats or other improvements without getting full levels.
In truth, looking back at it, the rules for Vampire didn’t really encourage playing the game as the creators intended. At least not in my opinion. Rather than being about supernatural horror, it was more like supernatural superheroes in trenchcoats carrying katanas and Desert Eagles. But still, you’re spot on, it was quite a different experience from what AD&D was offering at the time so it attracted a different crowd.
I think each edition has their own sweet spot when it comes to levels and fun. I agree with you, once you start getting high level the game isn’t as fun any more. Levels 3-8 are the best in my opinion. But I think the game has changed a bit because the target audience has been influenced by different media than we were. I didn’t grow up with Harry Potter, DragonBall Z, Pokemon, and Lord of the Rings was only available in book form or a rather tepid cartoon movie. I’ve got to think modern tastes have shaped the power curve of D&D.
GURPS famously has “character points” instead of levels, so that, depending on whether your character is supposed to be a normal human, or a (super)hero, or whatever, you use an appropriate number of points when making them up. Though I do not know enough about RPG history and lore to say who originally came up with that system.