Query for gamers, particularly inexperienced ones

[gothwalk]

Is there something counterintuitive about the principle in RPGs of race and class? I've been dealing with a number of newcomers to RPGs recently, and no matter how carefully I explain that you choose a race and a class, I get people wanting to play one or other, a gnome or a wizard, an elf or a rogue, and so on. These people are smart, and get the concept of roleplaying, and so on - it's just this one bit that seems to defy understanding.

Comments

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

I've witnessed this syndrome, but never myself had the problem, so all opinions should be taken with a grain of salt. I always thought the idea of "genetics vs skillset" was pretty straightforward, but I think people get muddled by fantasy literature and the real world.

In general, your elves in literature will be magical creatures and perhaps have some archery going on, your dwarves will be dour engineers and berserkers, etc. These stereotypes combine with the fact that "class" is such an arbitrary concept to create a muddle. I mean, honestly, am I a "dual" class programmer 1/actor 2/historian 2?

This, I think, is part of why so many later RPGs did away with class-based skillsets in favor of a la carte creation and expansion - while DnD's classes preserved the archetypes of Fantasy, they were counterintuitive and, by their interaction, muddled. As the system expanded, it grew more and more complex, and suddenly, instead of having the 4 basic Mage/Warrior/Priest/Rogue concepts that recurr, you had Wizards, and specialized wizards, and now sorcerors, and then warriors and paladins and rangers and berserkers, and you could, of course, be an Elementalist/Warrior, but not an Evoker/Paladin... Crazy stuff.

Essentially, in trying to make the system more "robust" to go beyond the stereotypes, they strayed away from the initial limited set of archetypes the game was really designed to leverage(a la sword & sorcery, epic fantasy), and so now the system is neither fish nor fowl, not realistic enough to think of in normal terms, nor traditional enough to think of in Tolkiennesque ones. So you get a lot of cognitive dissonance between the way you're programmed to think of traditional fantasy, and the way you think about realistic 3-dimensional people, and the balancing act is hard unless you evolved into it from the more traditional days, and thus had a framework to hang things on.