No class!

When I was a kid, character classes irked me. I got into RPGs through Runequest, which entertained no such notions. From the outside, D&D character classes looked absurd.

For one thing, they didn't reflect fantasy literature at all well. Wizards can't use swords? What about Gandalf? Sorcerers can't wear armour? What about Elric? Or Jagreen Lern?  Dwarves can't use magic? Well, what about just about every dwarf in just about all of Norse and Germanic folklore and myth? Clerics can't used edged weapons? All of them? Of umpteen different religions?And hang on - they can't use arrows, because those are piercing weapons, but they can use warhammers? How does that make any sense?

Puncture wound incoming!

It doesn't, of course. And the proliferation of character classes in AD&D - rangers and druids and assassins and what-have-you - seemed to acknowledge this. But it also made the problem worse - creating lots of sharp edges where there should be blurry lines.

One of the many admirable things about Christian Mehrstram's Whitehack is that it pares this proliferation right back to three classes: the strong, the deft and the wise. Moreover, the definitions are so elastic that you can have a wise warrior or a deft wizard (the "miracles" of the former might be masterstrokes of strategy, while the stealth and guile of the latter could be explained by magic). There are some "legacy" aspects that I'm less keen on: the deft and the wise suffer penalties when using two-handed weapons and armour, for example.

But why not strip it right back and make the game entirely classless? As I gear up to run a megadungeon campaign (once the Six Nations is out of the way!), I'm tempted to abandon character classes altogether. Instead, I plan on giving each character a couple of initial traits from the menus available to the three Whitehack classes. So, a character might take a spell and a sneak attack. Or an "attuned weapon" and the pushback melee ability. Given the miracle-by-negotiation spell system, that allows limitless options already.

An option might be to allow a character three traits if two are equipment-based. So, you might have your ring of invisibility (which drains one hit point per round while worn), your father's magic sword (+1 to AV) and a two-dice-and-take-the-best advantage when climbing. But if you lose the sword or the ring (or are low on hit points), all you've got is your nimbleness.