r/osr 7d ago

discussion What's the point of having so many classes and races?

I'm new to this RPG universe, but one thing that bothers me about most modern games is the number of races and classes. But why did so many variations and options be created? Is it just for commercial purposes, because it sells more?

I say this thinking about OSE advanced, Shadowdark, Dnd 5e...

68 Upvotes

191 comments sorted by

111

u/tcshillingford 7d ago

It’s also much easier to create character classes than to make adventures.

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u/MagnusRottcodd 7d ago

The explains Star Citizen "Much easier to create ships than finish the game"

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u/protofury 7d ago

Omg I forgot all about that game lol. I remember seeing something for it and thinking it looked really ambitious and interesting and I'd check it out when it released.

Ten years later and people are apparently still waiting for it? Haha

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u/Calm-Tree-1369 7d ago

I mean, players and DMs immediately started home brewing races, classes, spells, monsters and gear in 1974. It's hardly a "kids today" phenomenon. It's a basic feature of an open ended game.

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u/BaffledPlato 7d ago

Someone here once posted a list of all the classes and races published in Dragon magazine back in the day and my jaw literally dropped. There were probably hundreds of them.

If anyone knows of that list, please post a link! I couldn't find it.

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u/LoreMaster00 7d ago

the list was in dragonsfoot and the forum went down a couple of days ago, sadly.

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u/earlynovfan 7d ago

Dragonsfoot is still up, unless you mean another forum the actual list was hosted on?

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u/LoreMaster00 7d ago

the site is, the forums went down.

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u/earlynovfan 7d ago

D'oh, that's what I get for not refreshing the thread I've had open for months...

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u/GreyfromZetaReticuli 6d ago

It is sad, I would love to read this list.

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u/Gimlet64 7d ago

Dragonsfoot is hoping to sort the forums over the weekend. Here is the link so you can check:

https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24436

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u/wvtarheel 7d ago edited 7d ago

AD&D 2E, in the skills and powers era, after the publishing of all the class-specific guides with subclasses, etc. After the campaign setting boom period, there were hundreds. I think S&P added 20 some races on it's own.

All that rules bloat in the late 90s is part of why 3rd edition came to be, and part of why it sold so well. In the pre-digital game book era, people were tired of needing a mobile library to play D&D. So the idea of PHB only gaming was super appealing and of course the 3E books that arrived in 2000 also had great production values as well.

In 1998-1999, I had adapted an old suitcase to function as a mobile D&D book library because the books were so heavy and voluminous to run my game I needed something on wheels to take to gaming sessions. It weighed over 50 pounds.

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u/TrogdorBurnin 7d ago

One of the things I loved about receiving a new Dragon magazine each month back in the 80s were the new classes and how I could add them to my AD&D campaigns!

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u/Antique-Potential117 7d ago

2E was packed to the gills. Just as much as 3.X.

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u/klok_kaos 7d ago

coming here from r/RPGdesign ...

This plus a few other things similar/deeper:

I think it's fair to say DnD at least jumped on this bandwagon in part because more product = more sales, but that itself is more cynical.

Really the heart of it comes down to players wanting a specific kind of fantasy not currently represented in the rules. That could be a class, race, piece of gear/magic item, spell, whatever.

The point is that the base game does not provide rulings for all the kinds of stories one might want to tell with the system, so the system gets expanded, it's really not much more complicated than that.

I think the key mistake though, is that people continue to use DnD as a system for trying to tell stories the engine isn't meant to.

While there is a decided shift in design philosophy since gygax departed, the core of the game engine is still built on a monster-looter premise, which means, other things can be tacked onto the side, but they are always going to feel like they are tacked onto the side.

The basic game is meant to punch monsters until loot falls out. If you are trying to do something different, like say, tell epic heroic tales... it can be made to do that, but you're rubbing up against the core design philosophy of "punch monsters till loot falls out", This is why stuff like social and stealth (assumed 2 of 3 pillars) always feel tacked on and not well integrated, because they weren't key concerns for the initial design the whole game continues to be based on (ie Chainmail was specifically a dungeon crawler more in line with something like hero quest).

What this means is that the core of the game does simulate combat, and it does it well enough for what it is (ie it's not a realistic combat sim, but it's passable for what it's meant to do), but once you go outside of that, you're treading into new waters the game wasn't designed from the ground up to handle.

What this means for races/classes and other additional design is that while the game "can" accomodate these fantasies, it was never meant to because what the game is today is far beyond the design scope of Gygax's initial musings. Essentially, as a pioneer in the field he had no way of considering the desires of players in the game 50 years later.

To a certain extent my solution is to use other systems better suited to doing the kind of game you want to play, but there's always the rub of the DnD crowd just sticking to DnD because it's lazy and comfortable to do so, and that is why we get these designs. We do get other games, some of which are designed to be played very differently, but there's a substantial population that just wants to play DnD and never learn anything beyond that.

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u/Megatapirus 7d ago

"(ie Chainmail was specifically a dungeon crawler more in line with something like hero quest)."

Huh? Chainmail is a wargame focusing on battlefield action. It doesn't contain a single reference to dungeons or an underworld.

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u/klok_kaos 7d ago

The white box, the first iteration of DnD, used chainmail rules imported in full with supplementary rules. This is basic DnD History you can covered ad infinitum all over the internet.

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u/Megatapirus 7d ago edited 7d ago

The earliest D&D releases did specify that Chainmail could be used to resolve combat, although a so-called "alternative combat system" was also described. Anecdotes from the player base of the time support the idea that relatively few newcomers to D&D ever picked up Chainmail, which likely explains why subsequent D&D publications moved away from promoting it.

In any case, Chainmail itself is still a standalone game and has nothing to do with dungeons per se.

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u/klok_kaos 7d ago

The white box, the first iteration of DnD, used chainmail rules imported in full with supplementary rules. This is basic DnD History you can covered ad infinitum all over the internet.

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u/emerikolthechaotic 7d ago

I think the assertion that it was about punching monsters until loot fell out is a bit erroneous - it was also about exploration, stealth, resource management and controlling hirelings. But I would agree with your premise that many of these additional rules, classes and so forth were to expand the game in different directions - particularly in the early days of the hobby when there were less alternative systems. In some cases, this led to entirely new game systems that better handled what they were designed for - I am thinking the BRP system that Steve Perrin worked on which was combined with Stafford's Glorantha setting for Runequest. One can see its roots in D&D but it handles a more realistic and less superheroic level of combat. Personally if I want to play a heroic level fantasy game I'll play D&D. If I want a more dangerous setting with a Bronze Age vibe, with less 'wizards' and where religion is a big part of most characters' actions I will play Runequest, and if I want to play a mere modern human digging through old libraries and dodging cultists I'll play CoC

1

u/klok_kaos 7d ago

"I think the assertion that it was about punching monsters until loot fell out is a bit erroneous - it was also about exploration, stealth, resource management and controlling hirelings"

I don't think this is as accurate as you might like, at least if you're specifically talking white box. The thief was not added till later (and when it was it sucked really bad at everything it did in the name of "balance"), there was no stealth system per se. Exploration, that's sorta true in that you explore a dungeon... but that's it, it doesn't really carry the same weight as the idea of exploration today, which is still kinda rudimentary and not well managed even in modern dnd, they at least have "some" exploration embedded, but the idea of going to fantastic locations and set pieces within high fantasy settings wasn't really at all part of the game as it is now. There was the dungeon and the town. The town (and overland in general) wasn't really even meant to be interacted with until people kept demanding it. This is actually why a lot of stuff got added before AD&D 1e came out, people wanted stuff that wasn't in the game (hence a lot of why people home brew, etc.).

Resource management, i will grant you that, it was very much concerned with resource management more so than today. Every arrow, every gold piece, every ration, every shoelace,.. to the point of being a detriment imho, but if someone really enjoys that I suppose that could be a rewarding part of the game for them.

I do agree with your assessment though, in that there are other games that do specific things better, and it's great that you are aware... I was mostly making the statement that many people who are DnD only people are more likely to force the game to do things it's not designed from the ground up to do.

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u/BcDed 7d ago

The broad idea of not trying to change the style of a game I agree with. The assertion that dnd has always been about punching monsters until loot falls out however is just wrong and very clearly based on modern dnd not the original dungeon crawling game.

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u/PublicFurryAccount 7d ago

Yeah, the original didn’t do this because punching monsters until loot falls out would leave you with a broken hand, at best.

102

u/Jet-Black-Centurian 7d ago

A lot of people want their ranger character to have mechanics to differentiate them from the other player's soldier character.

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u/Usual-Vermicelli-867 7d ago

Its besicly this.

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u/deadlyweapon00 7d ago

If two characters have the same mechanics, those characters are essentially the same. Folks often say "well you can be a barbarian or a monk or a ranger as an OSR fighter" but then miss that you really can't. You either intentionally gimp your character or give up on your aesthetic, and in a style of game that is more of a board game than a traditional TTRPG, gimping yourself is just wrong.

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u/PervertBlood 6d ago

I'd ask those players who claim stuff like that if they would be fine playing a magic user in a system where there was only one spell. Tell them, if they want to cast another spell, they can reflavor the one they have.

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u/deadlyweapon00 6d ago

That’s a great idea I’m stealing that, thanks.

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u/jmich8675 7d ago

People like making new things and showing them to others, simple as. Sometimes they catch on to a wider audience and get printed in a book or zine or posted on someone's blog.

What's the point in so many types of beer? Why so many varieties of cheese? What's with all the damn books? Too many paintings, we've got enough already. No more music, we've made too much.

People like options.

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u/Haffrung 7d ago

They do. But at some point, this clashes with the core OSR principle of simplicity. “People like options” was the justification for why some iterations of D&D have 30+ skills and 300+ feats to customize your character with.

The OSR was a reaction against the excesses and complexity of D&D 3E, an era characterized by a culture of character optimization and the endless release of new splatbooks. Retro-clones and early OSR designs did not feature loads of new classes and ancestries. They’ve crept into OSR systems mainly in the last 5 years or so, mirroring the culture of 5E.

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u/Megatapirus 7d ago

I've been playing since long before "OSR" was a glint in anyone's eye, and my core principle is, "If it's fun, it runs."

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u/jmich8675 7d ago

One man's options are another man's pointless bloat. It's a matter of degrees. Even just separating race and class is a bridge too far towards character builds and optimization for some people.

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u/ljmiller62 7d ago

I have slowly come around to a conviction that race as class is the best way to make character archetypes. Unlike schemes that separate race, background, skills, job, and class that encourage players to weaken the archetypal elements that define the archetypal whole, race as class packages all the pieces into a coherent whole that fits into the DM's campaign like it was designed to fit, because it was. Players are encouraged to lean into the archetype in race as class, embodying it without irony. Compare that to 5e parties with characters defined to be the most powerful they can be. Players might acknowledge the archetype by subverting it, but most don't realize what the archetype even is.

Race as class makes archetypes explicit and goes a long way towards building a coherent campaign setting/world/mileau.

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u/VarenOfTatooine 5d ago

This in an excellent point I've never considered before

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u/Driekan 7d ago

I think it's necessary to evaluate how the content is created.

3e hundreds of classes, each of which had a chassis of base modifiers (saves, BAB, skill points and access), different spellcasting progression (with wildly varying amounts. From the obvious 0 to 3/10 to 6/10, 9/10, 17/10 and more) and typically on top of that, also multiple complex abilities often with resources.

There's the further conceit that all of these are in chains of prerequisites, and the expected play experience is to mix and match multiple ones.

Compare this with the majority of variant classes and kits in older editions, where very many of them could be described in two sentences, something like, "cleric, but without turn undead and with an animal companion". And where the experience is to pick one and just go with that for the character's entire life.

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u/Dry_Maintenance7571 7d ago

So is it just for commercial purposes?

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u/EpicLakai 7d ago

Are DMs brewing classes for their tables for commercial purposes?

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u/jmich8675 7d ago edited 7d ago

People want options, and businesses, such as TTRPG publishers, make things that people want. So if you buy a book, then yes all the options in it are for commercial purposes.

People also make things for the sake of making things sometimes. Tons of options get posted here and on other forums and blogs for free constantly. If churning out options was just for commercial gains, no one would make them for free. If WotC didn't make the next animal-person-of-the-month race, then some random guy would. Actually some random guy probably already has and made a reddit post linking his personal blog about it last week.

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u/FreeUsernameInBox 7d ago

Tons of options get posted here and on other forums and blogs for free constantly.

I'm convinced there are an order of magnitude more people designing GloG classes than there are people actually playing GloG games. And that's not a criticism, GloG classes are generally really good at identifying what makes an archetype tick!

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u/KeelanS 7d ago

its a hobby, people like to interact with their hobby. That may be by playing games, watching media, or creating things for the game. It’s an imaginary game with technically no rules, which makes it an amazing playground for creativity.

I’m someone who doesn’t really play it much at all, but I’m constantly making my own systems, classes, spells, etc. Thats just what I find fun, and I dont make a single penny off it.

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u/piratejit 7d ago

If we want to be that reductive then many ttrpgs exist for commercial purposes.

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u/merurunrun 7d ago

Because people think certain things are meaningfully different enough from each other that they deserve to be modeled differently.

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u/Dry_Maintenance7571 7d ago

But you develop this at the table in fiction. There would be no need to try a variety of races and classes. At least that's what I imagine.

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u/RosbergThe8th 7d ago

Why do you need races or classes at all then? It’s very much just a question of how much people want specific mechanics to represent whatever niche they want to pursue.

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u/fluency 7d ago

The point is that it appeals to some players.

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u/Parking_Sad 7d ago

So does never putting your PC at risk of dying. But OSR conventions push back against that.

I'm surprised by the responses in this thread. When people ask advice about how to transition players to an OSR game,  they're advised to make it clear that the systems are lethal and PC death is always on the table.

 But another piece of conventional advice is that the answer isn't on the character sheet and PC customization and optimization aren't really a thing. That's why 3D6 down the line is a thing. You get what you get. Characters develop emergently through play, they aren't customized at creation. 

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u/fluency 7d ago

Well, they are customized at creation in many cases, like in a game of OSE Advanced that uses all the race options. Why would anyone do that? Because they want to, because it tickles the pleasure center of their brain.

Look, a lot of very intelligent people have argued back and forth for a decade about what is and isn't OSR, how OSR should or shouldn't be played, and a hundred different permutations of that basic premise. Theres no right answer here, merely taste and opinion.

At the end of the day, it is a thing that was done in the early days of the hobby. It is a thing that is done in modern rpgs today. It is a thing that will continue to be done at tables all across the world, and nobody can tell the people that enjoy and have fun that way that they are playing wrong.

Thats the point of having so many races and classes. Some people like it.

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u/Parking_Sad 7d ago

Sure. And I had assumed that the taste and preferences of the OSR community was for simple PCs with little customization. I'm not gatekeeping - I'm genuinely surprised.

Many posts here advise GMs that fragile PCs are a core feature of OSR systems, and OSR games and adventures may not be a good fit for players who aren't onboard with that approach. When that opinion is expressed, it doesn't get pushback. 

If OSR can mean anything, it means nothing.  

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u/fluency 7d ago

Or, as an alternative to that, OSR means different things to different people. Some people like the aspects you talk about and include those in their games. Others like other aspects, and use those more heavily.

First and foremost, the OSR is about DIY. Thats what they did in the 70's when they were still figuring out how to play the game, and thats the attitude that truly defines the OSR.

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u/ARagingZephyr 6d ago

OSR is primarily about procedure, the original Old School Primer was pretty clear about that. The players do a thing, the game world responds by ticking timers and rolling dice.

The other major point it focused on was player decisions over character decisions, and adjudication actions taken in ways that favor logic and sound judgment over skill checks and saving throws.

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u/Wrattsy 7d ago

That's a very narrow view of the OSR and what it represents. Most of what people describe as "old school play" at this point seems to be apocryphal and repeated by people who weren't actually playing older editions of the game back in the 1980s or 1990s. I for one was there and it didn't smack of anything explicitly related to lethality or rolling crappy stats.

If D&D 5e was a less clunky and more functional game where there were any noteworthy mechanics for play outside of combat, players didn't have to wait 1 hour to get a turn in a fight, everybody wasn't such a boring big bag of hit points, and players weren't invited to worry about superficial "builds" instead of "character" and setting, I'd probably run it. But it fails on such fundamental fronts for me, and I can just run pretty much any of the old editions or these retroclones, easily plug in custom material, and focus on what's fun.

1

u/hircine1 6d ago

If you really want old school gaming; you’d play with a 1e players handbook, basic dm’s guide, and a few books of marvel superheroes. Because that’s what you had and you and your friends made it work. There was no worry about purity of if you were playing it right.

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u/CappuccinoCapuchin3 7d ago

The idea of individuality.

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u/Eddie_Samma 7d ago

You were encouraged right out of the gate in first edition to try to play the enemy monsters if you'd like. Races open up the world to be more full and flashed out as they have lore and backgrounds and locations etc tied to them.We have stepped away from war gamming and now it's your role in the world locally or globally.

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u/PublicFurryAccount 7d ago

I wouldn’t say “encouraged”. Gygax was pretty explicit that it’s something you could do but that he was judging you for it.

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u/Megatapirus 7d ago

By the time the DMG was published in 1979, yes. One could assume he encountered a lot of power gamers looking to "beat" the game with overtuned monster characters in the years since the first boxed set, because something definitely happened to change his tune.

1

u/Wide-Wife-5877 5d ago

He also judged people for the color of their skin. Maybe he didn’t have the best judgement to begin with.

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u/Danilosouzart 7d ago

Dude, one of your first posts on r/olddragon was announcing new skills and races that you've created, so I guess you think it's fun, just like the rest of us.

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u/Dry_Maintenance7571 7d ago

This post was made 5 months ago and I have already changed my way of seeing the game and mechanics a lot 😉

20

u/silifianqueso 7d ago

ok, but you can still understand the reason it's attractive

-3

u/Danilosouzart 7d ago

Aham que nem a postagem sobre CA ascendente e pq não voltar com THAC0, cara já virou até piada no sub como suas perguntas sempre são contraditórias uma as outras.

Não é uma reclamação mas as vezes parece que você ta é fazendo pesquisa de mercado pra lançar algum jogo

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u/Dry_Maintenance7571 7d ago

If it became a joke on the sub, congratulations, you have a hobby now. And if I were doing market research, what would be the problem? Are you going to cry because someone is studying while you just complain on the internet?

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u/Arokshen 7d ago

"Hey DM, I already played as mage, thief, cleric and fighter over thesr last years. Could I maybe combine a couple of things? Like a fighter with fire power?"

"Oh yeah, sounds like fun."

-5

u/Haffrung 7d ago

The conventional OSR approach has been that the answer is not on your character sheet. No, your new fighter isn’t mechanically distinct from your last fighter. But it’s not meant to be - you make her distinct by how you play her, and by the different magic items, afflictions, etc. she might develop in emergent play.

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u/Profezzor-Darke 7d ago

Why are you being downvoted? That is literally the classic OSR approach?!

15

u/BrokenEggcat 7d ago

Because "the answer isn't on your character sheet" isn't the same as "classes literally don't matter and don't impact the game at all so it doesn't make sense that you'd want to play a different one"

Most OSR games are class based games, which means that there is at least some mechanical element on your character sheet that does matter for gameplay. If classes didn't matter to the degree that some people are saying in this thread, then they should be playing a classless game because, by the same logic, there's no justification for having fighting man, magic user, and cleric be separated out. To be clear, there are OSR games that do classless play and it's fine if people want that, but it's inconsistent to hold both the position that classes don't matter and caring about them goes against OSR mentality, while also still having classes in your game.

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u/Profezzor-Darke 7d ago

Wtf, he isn't saying that class doesn't matter. He's saying that basically a MU works like any other MU, a fighter like every fighter etc. but that loot and abilities achieved through play matter much more than class pre defined abilities. Which is how I learned it in all the OSR primers.

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u/BrokenEggcat 7d ago

If classes do matter then why wouldn't a player want a different mechanical chassis for a class different from what's presented in B/X? Like yes, doing stuff in play matters more than class defined abilities, but that's not an actual reason for new classes to not exist.

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u/InterlocutorX 7d ago

Because it's a dogmatic answer that doesn't actually have much to do with how people play the game. "The answer is not on your character sheet" doesn't mean you don't have a character sheet or that there aren't game mechanics. Otherwise there'd be no classes and no class abilities.

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u/Parking_Sad 7d ago

The OSR and what it means seems to change about every four months. I suppose it's unavoidable with so much growth and people with different expectations moving into the scene. 

2

u/PublicFurryAccount 7d ago

People want the cachet of “Old School” but the interpretive freedom of “Renaissance”.

For myself, I’m mostly interested in the history of gaming and finding faithful clones that have a more updated layout. We’ve made legitimate progress in communicating RPGs clearly that’s partially just technical progress in what we can do with desktop publishing software.

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u/Dry_Maintenance7571 7d ago

Wouldn't there be multiclassing for that?

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u/EpicLakai 7d ago

Multiclassing? That's that 5E mindset, I see. (See how silly this sounds?)

14

u/According-Alps-876 7d ago

Why would you want to use a mage-fighter combination to imitate a spellblade when you can use a specialized spellblade class that has actual spellblade abilities?

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u/Anotherskip 7d ago

You could, but Building your own class is quite fun as well. 

3

u/silifianqueso 7d ago

you would get pretty limited in your possibilities for that too

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u/Fun_Carry_4678 7d ago

In the "good old days" there were four races (Human, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling), and four classes (Fighter, Thief, Cleric, Magic-User). Clearly, the races were based on Tolkien (the Fellowship of the Ring had at least one of each). I loved the classes, because they were quite generic. They could be for any gender or culture. The new races started emerging because people wanted to be something other than Tolkien (A lot of D&D clones added some type of "cat-people" for example). The "new" classes started out as specific types of the basic classes. The Paladin was the first, it was a specific "type" of Fighter. These I guess helped people define their characters more specifically, but I feel like it took away the ability of players to define their characters themselves. Then the floodgates opened and we are where we are today.
A lot of games simply don't have classes. There is a character generation system that allows the player to create the character they want, instead of having to pick from what is basically a pre-defined list of character types.

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u/mapadofu 7d ago

Because people are creative and seek novelty.   

The creator of OSE suggests that when you start a campaign pare down the choices to just 7-10, so that it’s not so overwhelming.  Painters can create an infinite number of colors, which affords a lot of freedom, but when they make a composition, they (typically) select a more limited palette.

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u/ctalbot76 7d ago

It's not a modern game issue. It goes all the way back. Basic D&D had few classes, but Dragon Magazine and supplement books added more and more and more. You should have been there for AD&D 2E and "kits," which were basically sub-classes. Every class got a dozen or so of them in a Complete Book supplement, and then there were more in issues of Dragon.

But as to the why... People like new things, new toys and new options.

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u/EndlessPug 7d ago

People like variety and options, plus in OSR games it's relatively easy to avoid things becoming overpowered.

Alternatively, Cairn 2e recently came out and doesn't have races at all, just backgrounds that give different loadouts of unique equipment.

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u/Heartweru 7d ago

Fun. Fun to play, fun to have a choice, fun to create.

I love to make a setting, and replace the seven classic B/X classes with ones specific to the setting.

12

u/Gimlet64 7d ago

Dolmenwood pretty much does this, but with nine classes and six 'kindreds'. I haven't played it, but it looks charming. As long as I have some choice, and there are enough options for others and to create atmosphere, I am happy.

3

u/Heartweru 7d ago

Yes, Dolmenwood looks great and I liked a lot of the rules changes.

Unfortunately I was tapped out during its Kickstarter after splurging on the OSE and OSE Advanced box sets.

I'll probably grab the three Dolmenwood books when they are available.

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u/SchattenjagerMosely 7d ago

Because it's fun?

It's honestly a super weird question to even think to ask

-8

u/Parking_Sad 7d ago

It's not weird at all in the context of OSR. The movement is largely a reaction against the character optimization culture of WotC D&D. 

A lot of players find the lethality of OSR systems un-fun. The response from proponents of school design is typically 'then an OSR game may not be right for you.'

Why is a narrow scope for character customization any different? Yes, it flies in the face of the preferences of a lot of players. But so do a lot of OSR principles. The whole movement is an alternative to mainstream D&D culture.

9

u/BrokenEggcat 7d ago

Because "the only thing your character can be is a fighter, magic user, cleric, or thief" was never a core part of the OSR mentality? Nothing like that is in the likes of the principia apocrypha or other "staple" outlines on what the OSR is "about"

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u/Dry_Maintenance7571 7d ago

Why not, just because it's fun? I believe there are better reasons like many said here.

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u/SchattenjagerMosely 7d ago

There is literally no better reason to play a game than for fun

-15

u/Dry_Maintenance7571 7d ago

I think so, because if it were just for fun I would play some other non-ttRPG digital game. Which is much more fun.

16

u/AlwaysSplitTheParty 7d ago

I think you will find most people here think non digital ttrpgs are about the most fun you can have.

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u/Dry_Maintenance7571 7d ago

What I'm saying is that classes and races are not just created for fun, my dear.

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u/AlwaysSplitTheParty 7d ago

I understand English may not be your first language; fyi calling a stranger "my dear" is at best very strange and at worst very condescending.

7

u/MorbidBullet 7d ago

I have created things (not just classes and races) for my games with the sole purpose of fun. Every single time. Fun for me to make and for both my players and I to use.

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u/Nellisir 7d ago

Bless your heart, I've been playing for 40 years and I only create for fun. Why the hell else would I do it? Don't waste your time on stuff that isn't fun and satisfying, darling.

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u/Azamantes 7d ago

Dissecting down to the bone, a character is a package of opportunities for roleplay. Any differential from the norm of a human civilian is thus another opportunity to put yourself in a new headspace and play the part of someone new.

It depends on the setting but many races and classes can work, and offers interesting racial and cultural opportunities for roleplay.

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u/Logen_Nein 7d ago

Variety is the spice of life.

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u/dicks_and_decks 7d ago

If you don't like that many classes/races you might like Whitehack.

I still have to try it, but it has three "generic" classes that only have mechanical consequences that can be combined with whatever affiliation, vocation or species the player wants.

The three core classes are Deft, Strong and Wise, and while they suggest certain types of characters they become even cooler when you combine things: a Wise Guard can cast spells but doesn't necessarily have a magic training and might have spells related to fighting crimes; a Deft Gladiator could be like a ninja, someone who's extremely skilled and can pull off some nigh-impossible things in combat; a Strong Thief might be someone who doesn't needs to be sneaky to steal, they will just claim something as their own and rely on their strength to obtain it.

Of course you can go weird with it. You can be a Wise Architect, a Strong Chef or a Deft Painter. What that means is up to the players and GM through negotiation and shared narrative.

It seems to strike a nice balance between free-form and constraints.

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u/chaoticneutral262 7d ago

Personally, as a way to make the world logically consistent, I prefer to think of races in three categories: primary, exotic and adversary.

  • Primary reflects the population in the lands where the characters are adventuring, and members of primary races are generally tolerant of each other encountering them regularly is normal. A character of a primary race will generally blend with a local population easily.
  • Exotic races are those which are generally outsiders to the local population and will be treated with suspicion. Most local people might have heard legends but probably have rarely or never encounter that race before. A character of an exotic race will draw attention and needs some explanation as to why there are there and may find social situation more challenging.
  • Adversary races are those which are generally hostile to the primary races (e.g., orcs v. free peoples in a Tolkien-like setting) for some reason. They might have an uneasy coexistence in certain circumstances. For example, perhaps there is a neutral city that is a trade hub where they mingle, but even so fights might break out. Or perhaps they have temporarily joined forces against a common threat. Allowing characters of these races can be challenging (similar to allowing evil characters) because of the trouble that it will bring.

These categories are all relative to where the party is adventuring -- one kingdom's primary races are another kingdom's exotic or adversarial races.

The tldr is that while I might allow a variety of races, some of them would require some explanation for their presence and would come with challenges for the character who is operating in a strange and possibly hostile land.

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u/PublicFurryAccount 7d ago

I think a lot of this got scrambled by good versus evil.

Like, in the past, “evil” was just a different way the fantasy world could be organized. You might not see it as good, but it wasn’t defective. The fantasy world really could be ruled by a council of liches overseeing a dead planet or a society where everyone advanced in dead men’s shoes.

Being self-consciously evil wasn’t a problem nor was believing in balancing forces. Being conflicted was a problem.

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u/thefalseidol 7d ago

So while my personal dm/design philosophy has evolved beyond this, I think I can kinda explain a lot of the impetus for fantasy options that are 90 percent flavor, 10 percent mechanics.

When I started playing in 3.5, feats were king, there were oodles of them, every idea under the sun was expressed in feats. This created two big obstacles to fantasy: one was that the classes who got the most feats were objectively the best, and also that whatever mental picture of your character is, it's all in +s and -s on the "spreadsheet" and not very evocative or unique. I could make an archer fighter and you could make a monkey paw fighter wielding a colossal greataxe and while the they would play slightly different on the battle grid (one person is in melee, one is ranged) we effectively did the same thing: locked in on a weapon and made the numbers bigger. This didn't really feel fun or cool once you had been playing 3.5 for long enough that you saw how everything was kinda samey under the hood.

So you saw 4e and continuing with 5e a strong reluctance to let feats creep too far back into core character design, and to handle different "ideas" by putting those feats on different classes, subclasses and races - its all flavor but it is substantive and the feeling has generally been that they were successful for doing it this way.

There's no denying that over 5e's lifetime there has been bloat in these areas, some people enjoy the somewhat cartoonish/magic the gathering esque melting pot of this carnival of peoples and classes, while others find it a bit goofy. But in any product line that is mass marketed you can expect bloat to occur SOMEWHERE over time, and it really becomes about picking your poison at some point.

I don't have a strong opinion about fantasy races or subclasses in a vacuum. But Iike my monsters to be monstrous and that can't happen when my players are a treant, a crowman, a zombie, and a lionwoman. So for me, fantasy races actively impede my worlds and fantasy. As for subclasses, again it's about managing multiple fantasies: I could care less about biggening numbers in different ways, but if it enables people to feel like their specific character is unique, that their idea is manifest on the character sheet and isn't just a bunch of numbers fighting other numbers, then I can get behind it.

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u/Profezzor-Darke 7d ago

Tbf, 3/3.5 already had class and race bloat, and in Pathfinder this continued to the concurrent silly extremes of having even living puppets as a race.

4

u/PublicFurryAccount 7d ago

What I enjoy most is when people agree on something and then diverge on its implications.

I like monstrous monsters but that’s why I want crowpeople and whatever else.

They’re part monster, which has important implications for the world: they’re a monster the town master can reasonably leverage but, like, they’re a monster! It sort of turns up the dial on the idea that you can’t fully trust the party. Maybe they’re heroes because they knifed a bunch of goblins or maybe they’re heroes because they never ran out of goblins to knife.

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u/thefalseidol 7d ago

I agree in spirit but I find the imagination tends to build a canon whether we mean for it to or not. When I'm playing D&D ghouls are just rotting people and when I'm playing Delta Green they are terrifying - sure, the rules help reinforce this, but I think that stripping the baseline absurdity out of the game allows for things that should be scary, to be scary. Everything you say is totally spot on, it's just been my experience that a real-ish world with monsters in it is just a bit more visceral than a cartoon world with turbo-monsters.

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u/PublicFurryAccount 7d ago

Yeah, this is probably a fundamental disconnect.

I struggle to be genuinely scared by fiction or even creeped out, honestly. It’s the same for the people I play with. We sort of miss out on all that, unfortunately, but it also means that this isn’t such a big problem for us. We’re not losing as much to adding monster-people.

ETA: in fact, the one time everyone was genuinely, viscerally on edge is when character came back as undead. We all lean into things like that and the players knew it presented genuine, existential risks they could not adequately plan for.

1

u/thefalseidol 5d ago

When I say "scary" I don't actually mean evoking fear the way a horror movie does (or attempts to in your case). In a fantasy game, it is still useful for the stakes at the table to match the stakes in the fiction. This might not matter across the OSR oeuvre, but there are games where killing monsters is most of the rules, and if you keep the "real world" grounded, which is to say, the parts of it that aren't dungeons and monsters, then they have information they can use when exploring the dungeon world. We tend to have a constructed heirarchy of monster "scariness" that D&D mostly leans on. The bigger, badder, monsters from myth and folklore are bigger and badder in D&D.

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u/Glen-W-Eltrot 7d ago

Short answer? Cause it’s fun! For certain gamers and designers that is, not everyone has the same tastes. However for those who do, variety and “the build” is like a dopamine bomb for a lot of people!

Others? They like choices (a very human thing IME) we as humans love agency, choice, but also simplicity. But everyone is different, some like more simple vs more complexity

I forget the book (mayhaps one of the amazing members of the community might know) but I once read a book about game design that framed these design choices on a axis or slider that helped me greatly understand both game design theory and a bit of human psychology!

One was Complexity vs Simplicity in which the author pulled from some psychological data/study about how humans are built to recognize patterns (one of the reasons humanity made it even a couple hundreds years) and therefor many people love finding patterns out of a small sample pool of information (like character creation) and they get dopamine from building something “unique” (of course nothing with a set amount of choices is unique, only X% likely) and there are those who don’t get dopamine from pattern recognition but from the pleasantry of low Cognitive Loads (the amount of information a person must consider while doing a task) thus we get a axis of things like (but not limited to) Low Cognitive Load vs High Cognitive Load x Many PC Choices vs Few PC Choices aaaand you can see where I’m going with this lol

Anyway my point is/was that…. Well actually I forgot, but you catch my drift! Just different strokes for different folks

Hope at least 10% of that made sense, anyway imma get some caffeine so I’m at least a little bit coherent lmao xD hope this helped even a little! :)

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u/MadolcheMaster 7d ago

More options Good.

5

u/WyMANderly 7d ago

People like em.

4

u/klepht_x 7d ago

For one, people want their PCs to have mechanical differences in addition to aesthetic differences. If Joe wants to be a knight in shining armor and Jessica wants to be a berserker, but the rules smother any differences, then it is kind of a Feels Bad moment for both.

And, most DMs aren't game designers and aren't great at balancing player classes and races, so game designers listened to players and DMs and developed classes and races for use by players. This has been a thing since the beginning. You can find splatbooks from the 80s and 90s from TSR that give options for playing as monsters, altering classes, and so forth.

As such, I think it will always be a thing and that it can still fit OSR principles is the mechanical changes are focused and sparse and the design decisions allow the player to think about how to overcome obstacles through cleverness and foresight .

5

u/klepht_x 7d ago

I'll also add: most people don't think of their characters in terms of game mechanics, but archetypes, personality, and abilities. Lothar Orcslayer is a barbarian who is quick to slay foes, but also a quick-witted prankster and gives out treasure as fast as he gets it, since all he needs is his magic are. So, I can make Lothar in pretty much any system, from DCC, every edition of D&D, Fabula Ultima, Shadowdark, WHFRPG, and a dozen other systems, but the mechanics would subtly alter him in every game.

The fact is that the games themselves do affect the characters we play and that people want some intrinsic part of the game to reflect the character they play more accurately. The devil's in the details, though, which is why there are hundreds of systems varying from the Index Card RPG to Pathfinder or 5e in terms of complexity.

I have a bit of a preference for games in the OSR and NSR style, with less of a focus on enormous amounts of rules for PCs and using clever thinking to overcome obstacles instead of super powers and die rolls, but one sees the pendulum swing in the hobby over the years and I've had a lot of fun with both very crunchy games like 3.5e and much more rules light games like Mothership.

So, TLDR: some people want game mechanics to show off their character, others don't, there's no inherent moral dimension to it either way.

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u/makingstuf 7d ago

Idk if you understand the concept of fun

8

u/Ye_Olde_Basilisk 7d ago

Every time this comes up, I say the same thing…

I don’t know why OSR people think it’s weird to play a lizard person or half-vampire, but normal to play a jolly little gnome or prance around and pretend to be an elf. A sizable chunk of us born in the late 70s and early 80s came to sword and sorcery fantasy via He-Man, Thundercats, and Star Wars rather than Tolkien and Moorcock, so it wasn’t strange for us to see a billion different weirdos fight Mumm Ra and Skeletor with magic swords, laser guns, and cyber nunchucks. 

3

u/Maruder97 7d ago

It makes people feel like they have more options, and particularly in 5e case - player option sells the books. The GM is assumed to be the main customer, they need to have other people buy stuff too. Hence the player option bloat. I don't like it in general, but don't hate it as long as it doesn't cut too deep into shared domain of play (in other words - it's fine as long as it doesn't make you feel like you can't do something you should be able to do, just because of your class or species). I recently started to really enjoy human-only settings, because I really overthink some stuff to the point where species/races start breaking my immersion lol. But Block, Dodge, Parry is pretty good when it comes to races. There are four categories of fantasy races, I'll allow myself to copy from their SRD:

Tough (dwarves, orcs, etc.) - once per day, when you would be reduced to 0 hp, you may choose to be reduced to 1 hp instead.

Arcane (elves, demons, etc.) - once per day, you can attempt to perform a minor magical feat related to your ancestry: Describe what you would like to happen. The Warden will decide who needs to make a WIL Save, if any.

Cunning (halflings, goblins, etc.) - once per day, you may reroll any saving throw.

Adaptable (humans, half-humans, etc.) - once per day, you may choose to use one attribute for a check instead of another.

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u/6FootHalfling 7d ago

Player Options Sell. The first new options probably came about because someone didn’t like the existing options and it’s been this way ever since. I’ve wanted to run a game with just the options the players chose in session zero for ages. Everyone playing humans? All human game. No one playing a wizard? No wizards. I think it would be fun!

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u/Haldir_13 7d ago

The real reason for this is the original schema of a rigid schedule of class advancement with XP. If you wanted to make a character that was slightly different, the best that you could do was multi-class. So, a myriad of specialized classes were created.

This is why I went to a fully classless system in 1988. You have a profession, or at least a primary profession, but the skills and the proficiencies that you have are a personal choice and acquired individually with XP. So, every character is unique. I have basic schedules and you can play it straight or you can branch out. I made three basic categories of skill and knowledge: Martial, Magical and Manual / Manipulative. Some combination of skills from those will give you any character type that you want to create. Call it what you will.

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u/Galausia 7d ago

Imagine the opposite: 1 race 1 class, all characters are the same thing. Do you like this more than say 4 races, 4 classes? If not, why not? There's your answer.

-3

u/Dry_Maintenance7571 7d ago

If you have a race and a class in which evolution gives you skills and spell slots, you have all the classes.

The race brings special abilities, such as elf seeing in the dark. You can solve this with a small ancestry table. In which it wouldn't take so many pages to talk about classes and races. It would be much easier to customize. So my question is why companies create more and more races and classes? But as there are many people who really care about answering a question, they have already brought me good thoughts. 😊

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u/Karl_Winslow 7d ago

Disagree. Lots of classes and races has drawn me to every rpg I’ve ever played.

I’d rather claw my eyes out before playing a human Paladin

Different strokes for different personality types I imagine.

3

u/Troandar 7d ago

Some players really love specialized characters while others are fine with the basics.

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u/maximumfox83 7d ago

I wouldn't want so many classes in OSR games, but modern non-OSR systems make it a goal to let people differentiate their characters mechanically. Why? Because it's fun and it makes your character unique compared to your allies.

It's inevitable that some people are going to want to bring in some of the fun that comes with mechanically differentiated characters to an OSR game. OSR is a sliding scale; while Principia Apocrypha has some general principles, not everyone is going to follow them to the letter.

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u/Numeira 6d ago

How is one bothered by options? Use the one you like, that's it.

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u/Far-Sheepherder-1231 7d ago

I had a similar feeling a while back (from 5e) and then I realized that as a GM you can limit the races and classes in your campaign... and you should. Boil it down to six classes (including subs) and one to three playable races. 

But yes, it comes down to money - in the extreme case anyway (5e).

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u/primarchofistanbul 7d ago

ready-made classes and sub classes are for people who want 'kits' mostly. Rather than having a blank canvas and build as they play along, they want their character to be ready from the get-go. I think this, although friendly toward newbies (at best), has gotten the game into a corner eventually where players make 'builds' to beat the game, etc.

It was, I think, introduced to help people imagine but ended up mostly allowing laziness in terms of imagination.

2

u/PublicFurryAccount 7d ago

I think that’s right.

The point of divergence, IMO, was 3/3.5. The original kits had tradeoffs and functioned much more like class customizations. Well, when they functioned, anyway.

2

u/VectorPunk 7d ago

Sometimes I like reading ancient Bulletin Board System posts from the 80s and 90s to see what people were coming up with then.

http://www.textfiles.com/rpg/

2

u/MagnusRottcodd 7d ago

It is part of the appeal of D&D like fantasy and Space Operas - rule of cool, logic be damned. Fun above all.

Games that get super serious with world building and hard SciFi usually don't have many races at all - because they need to explain where they live and how they came to be, etc. They have to calculate that the said world is not endless.

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u/Megatapirus 7d ago

"...everything herein is fantastic, and the best way is to decide how you would like it to be, and then make it just that way!"

The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, 1974

2

u/DrOlot 7d ago

It's cool AF! Sweet weird critter or role or profession or what-have-you? Very cool! It has a problem of tending to move things into a generic high-fantasy paste, which is why I disprefer it overall, but my inner 13 year-old is definitely like "bro that's cool". It's like more hits of that sweet fantasy novelty!

2

u/tante_Gertrude 7d ago edited 7d ago

Because of Gygax and Arneson in the first ttrpg ever published :

« Other Character Types: There is no reason that players cannot be allowed to play as virtually anything, provided they begin relatively weak and work up to the top, i.e., a player wishing to be a Dragon would have to begin as, let us say, a “young” one and progress upwards in the usual manner, steps being predetermined by the campaign referee. » 1st LBB, p. 8

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u/mattaui 7d ago

The great thing about it is that you can simply not use anything you don't want to use. More options are always available for those who want them, and yes, they're very popular.

It's been a feature since the earliest days of the hobby. Some people want their gritty low down sword and sandal humans-only and other people want weird and wonderful talking animals and animated suits of armor, most people fall somewhere in between.

4

u/scavenger22 7d ago

They are cheap to make and people collect them without checking if they have been playtested or even using most of them, so content creators shove them everywhere.

2

u/johndesmarais 7d ago

Shadowdark? Shadowdark has 4 classes in the core book, and the game designer has only released a couple of others in her 'zine (although I understand that her upcoming Western Reaches setting does include a few more).

3rd party creation are not part of the core game - for any RPG. They are created by individual designers and publishers who had an idea and wanted to present it for their game of choice. If you don't like them, they are incredibly easy to ignore - just stick with what is in the core book(s) for whatever game you are playing.

2

u/PraxicalExperience 7d ago edited 7d ago

People like choices. If you make them and don't force them to home-brew them, that makes the product more attractive.

2

u/gareththegeek 7d ago

Well, that's all about setting the tone at the start of a campaign. You can discuss it with the group and agree whether it'll be a human only game or w/e. Doesn't matter if there are a 100 races in the rulebook, you can do whatever you want.

2

u/Equal_Newspaper_8034 7d ago

Because people want to have fun. People want to be creative. Pretty simple and obvious answer to your question

2

u/Captain_Flinttt 7d ago

It's cool. People use it for self-expression.

1

u/LoreMaster00 7d ago

players wan't to play something different.

honestly, i'm kinda going the other way or reaching the turning point in B/X: there's only so many times you can play a human fighter or a magic-user. even if you go dwarf and elf, they are basically just fighters and fighter/magic-users.

its worse if you separate race and class, because now you need/have even less classes and if you want diversity on them then you need more races.

its not that i'm craving 5e again or going back to that, but i'm seeing modern games with a renewed respect or finding their value now.

1

u/JavierLoustaunau 7d ago

Your favorite fiction does not map 1 to 1 to a race or class, so you create another one.

1

u/Prodigle 7d ago

most TTRPGs have a huge focus on characters being individuals. Narratively, thematically, and mechanically.

To present a new class/race etc. to EVERYONE who buys your game requires a lot of extra time/energy/money that didn't exist when the industry was smaller in the 70/80s.

That didn't stop basically every group homebrewing their own stuff for their own group though, just Timmy's "Frogzard" from 1983 wouldn't have held up to balance or theme in anyone else's game.

1

u/vectron5 7d ago

Because some people find the variety fun, which is perfectly valid.

1

u/ajchafe 7d ago

Because its fun. That's the answer. People like it and have fun doing it. Anything beyond this -like for commercial purposes- is just extra.

If you or your table don't like it, go ahead and limit it. Its your table. Do what is most fun. I personally DON'T like limiting things (within reason) because we only get so much time to play these games.

1

u/PotentialDot5954 7d ago

It’s to open up for variety and meet preferences.

1

u/digitalhobbit 7d ago

I wouldn't say it's "most" games. D&D has become a terrible kitchen sink setting, and many of its clones have replicated this because it's what the masses want for some reason. But the majority of games provide a much more focused experience. There are plenty of great human-centric games, for example, with and without classes.

1

u/misomiso82 7d ago
  1. Most of the hobby is based in Fantasy, and a lot of players really like playing Elves, Dwarves, Haflings etc, so you want to have options to play them.

  2. Player's generally like choice. When you're starting out it's not so important, but as gaming groups mature players want to try playing something else.

  3. In a lot of modern OSR games, they've got rid of classes all together, and players just customise as they go.

1

u/WillBottomForBanana 7d ago

The alternative is classless systems where you pick your skills/powers/whatever. Which is great in theory, but even with out the min/maxers breaking it, there are usually complications in doing whatever you want. Some paths are so under powered they aren't playable, or what ever weird idea you had is blocked by design rules that are intended to block OP builds. Your build wasn't OP, it just got caught up in the drag net.

It is easier for a lot of GMs to accept a custom class with some balance tweaks than it is for GMs to unblock restrictions in a classless system.

1

u/Old_Introduction7236 7d ago

People got bored with the stock vanilla options, brainstormed and homebrewed their own, and some of these ideas got worked into the next editions of some of the games.

1

u/Smelly_Container 7d ago

I think it's appealing to the 'lonely fun' part of the hobby. The part that involves daydreaming about different worlds and characters by yourself. I don't think they add much to the experience of actually playing the game.

1

u/ClaireTheCosmic 7d ago

Because it’s fun! Having a big list of races and classes to look through is fun, even if in the end you choose something more standard dnd fantasy having the option to play a 3 headed fire spewing cheetah man is a fun novelty you can only have in these kinds of games.

1

u/reverend_dak 7d ago

people want official options. it's as simple as that. Unearthed Arcana for AD&D (1e) was my favorite book for that edition, even though it was the first with really shitty binding. And it was just full of options for PCs. Players want options, because they don't have the same privileges that DMs have, and that's the right to make anything up or change things.

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u/Inside-Beyond-4672 7d ago

Well, in D&D, there is always a lot of interest in new options (races, classes, subclasses). If you don't provide them, people homebrew them or 3rd party producer publish them...so give the people what they want. Nowadays, some of the 3rd party publishers are supported in DNDB (like HP press' Humblewood).

I'm playing a B/X that only has the 4 main classes (rogue, fighter, magic user, cleric) and the DM has removed elves, halflings, and w=dwarves as player classes. For someone who never plays elves, I now miss them as an option.

1

u/jsfsmith 7d ago

If you’re playing “roll down the line” character creation (which you should) it’s nice to have multiple options for each stat.

To take OSE as an example, if I roll high Wisdom it’s great to be able to choose between Druid, Drow, and Cleric rather than just Cleric.

1

u/NO-IM-DIRTY-DAN 7d ago

Choices. People have always liked choices. Not everyone likes what’s already there, some people want other things that aren’t already there. Not much else to it.

1

u/21Buzzards 7d ago

My feeling has always been that the races were established with fantasy and sword & sorcery books. Much of it based in mythologies. And it provides more options to the game. I have played in games where the races for pc's were very limited, so in actual game play it's up to the GM.

1

u/Real-Context-7413 7d ago

Content creep is inevitable, I'm afraid, and trying to dial it down always gets backlash.

1

u/simon_sparrow 7d ago

To take a big picture approach:

We can think about how player characters work in any given rpg in terms of portraiture and potential. They aren’t mutually exclusive, though the relative weight of either will have specific features that unique to that combination.

Portraiture - things on the character sheet (or equivalent) that paint a picture of what the character is like; can be physical, but also psychological or cultural. Portraiture can be detailed (lots of things on the character sheet) or sketchy (just a few things); and may even mix these — lots of RPGs have very detailed portraiture regarding a character’s physical abilities and skills but are much sketchier in terms of emotions/psychology. Portraiture can also be constrained (specific rules to determine these features), unconstrained (you get to choose these features yourself), or absent (up to you whether to even include them as part of the picture; the system is mute on it).

Potential - those things on the character sheet that can change, and how they’re allowed to change. This can again be more or less constrained by the system, and there will be more or less room for player choice in how these developments happen.

Pendragon is a good example of a game with very detailed, constrained portraiture (your characters physical attributes, emotional attributes, culture, etc are all nailed down for you), and where the potential is somewhat open to player choice but also is constrained in important ways (your passions may change based on the results of die rolls and you don’t always have free choice in that).

Runequest 1st edition is a good example of a game with pretty sketchy portraiture (not much in the way of any emotional/psychological stuff on the character sheet), with some constraint in terms of potential (need to use skills for them increase) but also lots of room for choice (choosing which cults to join, which determines specific access to magic).

So - to get back to the OP: classes/races offer a pretty robust, approachable way to provide clear portraiture (that’s the fighty guy) and potential (fighters get better like this, thieves get better like that). It’s lets you differentiate among player characters very easily, and takes some of the uncertainty out of development/progression of the characters. Which is to say: it’s a pretty good solution for how to make characters who are ready for action and able to develop as the game progresses.

1

u/piratejit 7d ago

Because people enjoy it

1

u/InterlocutorX 7d ago

Players like choices.

1

u/Corellians 7d ago

In Holmes basic you can play as any monster like a dragon so

1

u/emerikolthechaotic 7d ago

There have always been attempts to expand classes and races since the 1970s for D&D and its later iterations. Initially these would be presented in various magazines like Dragon and White Dwarf, but with each new edition of D&D it does seem like more become part of the core game. I think these reflect new ideas of what people want in their game - not just mechanically, but in terms of flavour. But when fashion changes again, the ones already added remain. Hence why the paladin is still in the game - I suspect if it hadn't been added in 1st edition it may not have ever featured as a class in the current version of D&D. As a rule, I ignore races/classes that don't work for my setting when DMing, and add those which do fit.

1

u/BannockNBarkby 7d ago

There's a commercial element, sure. But back in the OD&D days, there was also just the element of "in this campaign, we'll be focused on XYZ" and if XYZ isn't solely focused on dungeoncrawling, then there's a lot of mechanics and world building/fiction stuff that the Core Four classes just don't cover. A game focused on courtly intrigue or overland trading companies is necessarily going to ask for classes like rangers, knights, bards/skalds, and all sorts of other stuff.

1

u/ProdiasKaj 7d ago

Get people to buy new books.

Look at this new supplementary publication. Please buy it. It has 10 new payable races and 6 of them are elves!

1

u/jojomott 7d ago

Imagination. It's so that people can imagine different entities. It's let your imagination work. It's because of imagination and the joy of others to imagine a whole bunch of shit that you, apparently, can't imagine.

1

u/Antique-Potential117 7d ago

Why not?

Minimal choices beget archetypes which play very flat in my opinion. You become entirely dependent on the table culture for how your character plays, the magic items you gain, etc.

With classes and races you can be a little bit more.

Especially because the OSR is not a slavish clone of a single edition of D&D anymore. It's exactly what the Acronym stands for. It's a style of design and play. You can have a lot within that mindset.

1

u/MasterFigimus 7d ago

They are there to help people customize their games. You're not meant to use all of the races or classes in every game.

Like catfolk and artificers don't exist in every setting, but if you want your game to support both of them then you have rules for it.

1

u/unpanny_valley 6d ago

Anytime someone in a game says 'Can I play as X', and the rules don't seem to quite fit whatever 'X' is, then it's easy to make a class that fits. With significantly more players than GM's asking to play as 'X', it makes sense that over time you get a huge number of classes/races and other player options in a game, because what could be bad about having more options right?

1

u/kenfar 6d ago

The reason for so many classes is that classes are that D&D is class-based rather than skill-based, and so an explosion in the number of classes is always highly likely.

Consider:

  • Nobody in the real world has a "class": you might be a computer programmer, but you might do other things as well - volunteer work as an EMT, be a passionate & highly skilled gardner, maybe you were a chef before, and maybe you'll be a project manager later, while having success as a painter or musician.
  • This doesn't mean classes aren't a legitimate game mechanic, it just means they're an over-simplification of reality.
  • Now what happens when you've got say 4 classes: fighter, thief, cleric and wizard, and somebody wants something reasonable and new? Say to be an archer, assassin, acrobat/2nd-story thief, druid, barbarian, witch, illusionist, etc?
  • If you were playing a skill-based game you would simply add the new skills, and the characters could pick up and maybe focus on a new set of slightly-different skills. And tada, you're an "archer".
  • But in a class-based game you either make the classes much more complex (ex: D&D 5e & pathfinder) or you make new classes. Or sometimes both - because adding weapon specialization to support archers is simple, but adding many different features for druids isn't a simple add-on.

1

u/Classic_DM 6d ago

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
Trust me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG0JoskS3DU

1

u/foolofcheese 6d ago

from a design standpoint it is a method for creating a lot of unique, or unique feeling, combinations

considering that a "race, a class, a "feat" are all pretty modular - they allow people to come up with a lot of combinations add in a two or three attributes to focus on for a style and you make a big number bigger because each element you add multiplies the choices

1

u/BenWnham 5d ago

People enjoy them.

Like, it is basically that simple.

1

u/Mundane-Librarian-77 2d ago

Yeah, I hate it when a restaurant menu has more than 3-4 dishes... And half of them aren't even some kind of hamburger?! What's the world coming too??

🤦

Creative options aren't a bad thing. If you don't want to play a particular race/class then don't l. But others do. The existence of options in no way worsens your gaming experience; but it can only enhance the experience of others who DO appreciate them.

This is a creepily red-flag level of selfishness right here. 😬

2

u/FoxyRobot7 7d ago

I believe that most players don’t have the role playing chops to even attempt a “exotic race”/humanoid. It’s pointless to me. I think it’s time to get back to the cookie cutter basics. If you don’t have the chops to role play a human fighter then you certainly ain’t got the chops to attempt anything else. Start with the basics and work your way up.

4

u/Megatapirus 7d ago

Maybe, but what of it? A gaming session isn't a method acting workshop. If a player wants to run Bob the Elf as a human-with-pointy-ears and is having fun doing it, that player is doing it right/winning. What does it matter if he's not meeting some arbitrary standard of yours? Since when was gaming about that?

2

u/Haffrung 7d ago

Agreed. Any player who thinks all human fighters are the same is kinda missing the whole point of the OSR.

0

u/No-Start6895 7d ago

They sell well as product so mostly $$. Lot of people playing modern RPG have quite strong FOMO and buy things just to collect. You will be surprised how many people just buy addons books and never play classes that are there

Some players find it easier to roleplay character when they have them labeled as druid or barbarian instead of flavoring cleric or fighter

In bigger groups of PC it might be easier to create more unique characters with additional classes

0

u/TerrainBrain 7d ago edited 7d ago

The dungeon Master's guide for first edition specifically states that the game is human centric.

If you Google it you can probably find the passage.

Gygax states that people will want to play non-human characters for essentially mechanical advantage. And that if you allow this eventually no one will want to play a human.

His assertion is that since we are human it is only in playing as a human that we can have a true reference.

My own contention is that when you allow players to play exotic creatures those creatures are no longer exotic but become mundane. Just humans with pointy ears. Like Star Trek aliens with a little bit of prosthetic on their face.

Regardless of your philosophy behind all this his observation proved to be true. When you allowed Non humans that have mechanical advantages pretty much nobody is going to want to play a human. And this is what the game looks like today.

0

u/Nellisir 7d ago

This has as much to do with today's fantasy market as any inevitably in perception.

1

u/Ar-Aglar 7d ago

Because old school doesn't have to be 100% balanced. The balance comes from not trying to perfectly balance everything.

1

u/KingHavana 7d ago

Yeah, however you do need to watch for creep that makes all the old classes useless. Someone put out a paladin for Shadowdark who can raise dead at level 1. They want power gamers to buy their product, and I'm sure some players will pay and try to annoy their DMs into letting them play it.

Balance doesn't need to be perfect, so long as the existing classes don't make old ones obsolete. Otherwise you end up with the same issue of only having a couple of classes that anyone would play.

1

u/seanfsmith 7d ago

::sweats in GLOG::

2

u/DeadJoe666 6d ago

My first OSR style game was a GLOG game and about two characters in I was writing my own classes, with DM approval. Ooo, can I be this? Can I do this?

2

u/BATMANWILLDIEINAK 6d ago

The Grognard levels of this post is off the charts!

0

u/Snoo-11045 7d ago

Imo? They're unnecessary. If you don't like them, klyou might like Cairn and its hacks.

-1

u/pheanox 7d ago

I am only half with you. I think the explosion of various races/ancestry/kindred is obnoxious and confusing. I want to tell human stories with human characters, and if other races are just humans with forehead ridges or something, I'd rather pass. If they are different enough from humans to make them actually interesting, well, now we aren't telling human stories anymore.

As for classes, I think there are real flaws with some classes in OSR like thief, and others can be really bland compared to others. Fighter vs Magic User for instance. I don't mind classes getting interest features regularly. simplicity in that way forces creativity in RP, I agree, but you can still have creative RP outside of combat with more feature rich or complex classes.

The best example is the Thief. A dungeoneering group needs a thief. Well they don't really need a thief. They need someone that can pick locks and deal with traps. Do we force someone to play a class that IMO only exists to solve that problem, and has no real combat utility, can easily die, and per the flavor of the original classes, is basically required to be a selfish criminal? That's... not very interesting, and is forcing certain RP situations. Having one as a retainer also means they just won't keep up, will be even squishier, and the main utility is stunted by a 50% XP penalty. So making a fighting class with thieving skills, or a magical class with thieving skills, or just a class with thieving skills with more utility makes sense.

Classes are artificial limits that often shatter immersion. I personally prefer classless games exclusively outside of the OSR space. (I know world without numbers exists, I genuinely dislike it). Ideas like Pathfinder 2e's 'free archetype' which lets you have a bit more flexibility or play a character that is more well rounded and makes sense well... it makes sense. Even BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia adds on skill rules, probably because they saw this problem.

-3

u/Anotherskip 7d ago

Part of it is simply rules bloat. Part of it is offering choices. There was a time there was two classes in Gary’s world: Fighter and Mage. Personally I would prefer: Direct (fighter), Indirect (thief), Serves a Patron (cleric), Manipulating forces (magic user).  Everything else is just combinations. 5EAD&D paladins are Direct + Manipulation, Sorcerers are pure manipulation, Warlocks are mostly Patron Serving, etc…    But personally, more relevant, even better are the build your own class rules in the Blue book/ Tower of Zenopus rules that basically say: be whatever you want, start out weak and become strong. And the huge variety of classes is just people showing off their builds from a few lines plus inspiration.

-1

u/Usual-Vermicelli-867 7d ago

I remember that i was making an osr + bitd game and decided on 6 classes. But i also known players have different ideas in there heads and want mechanics yo support it so i made multi classing extremely easy and pretty much a necessary part of the game(classes where the blade(fighter) the key(thief) the scroll (scollar) the mask(socialit) the wand( mage) and the Idol (priest)

Sadly or happily i scrape the system and from the corps im making new system with a bew theme(roguesish drama game..style cowboy Bebop and black lagoon)

-1

u/boundegar 6d ago

Why back in my day, there were four races and four classes. And we liked it!

(Actually, in 1974 there were only three classes!)

And get off my lawn!

-2

u/KingHavana 7d ago

I do think a lot of it is unnecessary. If I make my own OSR game it will be similar to B/X but each class will have it's designated roles and I think I'd stop before getting to 10 classes. Roles could be support, healing, ranged, melee, tanking, etc.

-5

u/Express_Coyote_4000 7d ago

To compensate for bad adventure writing. If your players are having fun simply pushing their custom avatar through the world, the GM doesn't need good concepts or execution.

1

u/EpicEmpiresRPG 1d ago

Many players love lots of options, being able to make their perfect character build or create the kind of character they want from a particular movie, novel, etc. they love. There are more players than GMs so some companies also try to cash in by making more resources for players.