factoring ad&d classes: a modest proposal

This post is an attempt to sketch out a different way that the base book classes of AD&D 2e, an edition of the game I never directly experienced, could have been developed in another edition.

Obviously, now we have the benefit of three additional editions of official D&D and numerous offshoots and hacks widely available, so this isn't to say, "this is what 3e/4e/5e should have been" as much as, "this is another direction that could be explored," now that we've taken some probing steps in various directions.

So: classes in 2e AD&D were derived from the four types:

Warrior	Wizard	Priest	Rogue
Fighter	Mage	Cleric	Thief
Ranger	Illusionist	Druid	Bard
Paladin

Let me single out a feature that i rather like: only the four core classes are always available to players. From the DM's chair, I find this very appealing; it's a much lighter demand of a setting that it have fighters, mages, clerics (though clerics present some problems) and thieves than that it also have barbarians, bards, druids, monks, paladins, rangers and sorcerers (to say nothing of warlocks) as well. Bards, druids and monk are particularly egregious in terms of the amount of baggage that their inclusion brings. Although 4e and 5e took the step of distinguishing common and uncommon "races," they do not do the same for classes (which, for my money, do a lot more heavy lifting in terms of providing implied setting).

Another interesting thing about this grid is the idea that we could make the rows meaningful as well as the columns. for example, the Ranger and Druid do seem to have something in common, as do the Bard and Illusionist, suggesting:

Warrior	Wizard	Priest	Rogue
Fighter	Mage	Cleric	Thief
Ranger		Druid		Wilderness
	Illusionist		Bard	Trickery
Paladin

...hey, this looks a lot like:

Defender	Controller	Leader	Striker
Fighter		Warlord	Rogue, Ranger	Martial
	Wizard		Warlock	Arcane
Paladin		Cleric		Divine

I'll freely admit that this is a part of 4e's design that i genuinely do like. I think you could potentially communicate a lot of setting using a matrix like this, especially if your sources of power corresponded to diagetic factions. even the gaps in the table (though later books, of course, fill them) serve a purpose. It says something about what these sources of power are about that there would be no martial controller, arcane defender or divine striker, for example.

However, this tableau is of basically no use for restricting available classes, which was one of the things that the 2e one does so well. Furthermore, little enough is directly shared between classes of the same source of power that they feel, to me, a lot more like palette swaps on the same game math than genuinely distinct types of character. This is exacerbated by the insistence on filling in gaps in the source/class matrix

Returning to our spread of classes in 2e AD&D, let's use a different axis to split things. Instead of source of power, let's use (3 position) alignment:

Warrior	Wizard	Priest	Rogue
Ranger, Paladin		Cleric		Lawful
Fighter	Mage	Druid	Bard, Thief	Neutral
*Berserk			*Assassin	Chaotic

Italicized classes are ones that we'd expect DM veto power on. I'm adding in a couple of thematic Chaotic classes, nothing to see here. there's a couple of things that i don't love about this. First, as in 4e there's no clear way to use this table to restrict available classes; the neutral classes don't correspond to the core classes (druids in particular probably should not be the core priest class). Second, i don't like the idea of the core classes being restricted to neutral alignment. i'd prefer something like this:

My proposal is to distinguish the alignment of druids and bards from 'neutrality' (probably replacing that with a better term). I'm merging paladins into rangers (as we don't necessarily need two distinct Lawful classes about defending the innocent), and making clerics no longer a core class but instead a Lawful-only specialty.

Warrior	Wizard	Priest	Rogue
Fighter	Mage		Thief	any
Ranger		Cleric		Lawful
		Druid	Bard	Old Believer
Berserk			Assassin	Chaotic

This setup involves four alignments:

• Worldly - occupied with the here and now, uninterested in bigger questions or grand conflicts. most scoundrels.
  
• Lawful - follower of the nameless craft gods of the Heavens. most people, to some extent are Lawful.
  
• Old Believer - keeps the old ways in the secret names of the old gods of the Earth. back-country folk, to some extent, are Old Believers.
  
• Chaotic - traffics with the uncanny forces out of Deep Sea and Far Sky. most Chaotic characters will disguise their rites; wizards are always under great suspicion of being Chaos cultists.
  

This is better, in my book, but it can be further refined. Notice that there is no longer a core Priest class, and take the obvious step of collapsing that column with Wizard:

Warrior	Wizard	Rogue
Fighter	Mage	Burglar	any
	Druid	Bard	Old Believer
Ranger	Cleric		Lawful
Berserk		Assassin	Chaotic

This is approaching what I'd really like to see. We understand fighter, mage and thief to always be on offer. The specialty classes are all bound up with a diagetic alignment (in this case a mostly religious meaning). Any type is available to any alignment, but that doesn't mean that every alignment has a specialty in every type. Indeed, in the first draft of this post I had a Necromancer Chaotic wizard specialty rather than Berserk. While that could work, it seemed better to me to place all wizards under the suspicion of being Chaos magicians by associating wizardry and Chaos.

Available talents ("nonweapon proficiencies" need rebranded) would be chosen by combining the Warrior, Wizard or Rogue list with the appropriate alignment list. Other distinctions (say, what a cleric can do that a lawful mage cannot) would be as noted in the specialty class.

If one wished to customize the array of classes offered to a given setting, identifying alignments and their associated specialties seems like a natural way to do this; for example, someone could remove the Old Faith and add in something home-brewed.

In my dream vision of this, the core classes each get a spread to themselves. Each aligned pair of specialty classes could then be presented in a single spread, one on each facing page. Nine classes in twelve pages.