The OSR needs a new approach to classes and this is it (maybe???)

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. -Original Dungeons & Dragons, 1974, emphasis mine

I have just had an exciting thought and I want to try to explain it without getting too in-my-head about editing it into a coherent essay that will convince everyone of my genius, so bear with me.

In cooperative, multiplayer game design, it is common wisdom that differentiating roles and assigning them to different players is a good way to increase player engagement and sense of teamwork. Everyone has a role to play, no one feels simply along for the ride or that they have nothing to do. Everyone feels like they have a unique reason to be in the game. That’s the ideal, anyway.

Character cards in Forbidden Island (image from a hasty Google search that led me to criticalboardgamer.blogspot.com)

Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition is (ostensibly) a three-pillar game, but it rests almost all of its mechanics on one pillar (combat) while leaving players and DMs on their own to figure out the other two (exploration and role-playing).

One way it does that is by differentiating character classes almost entirely by what different classes are able to do in combat. Are you a front-line tank, or do you strike from a distance? Or, do you slip in and out of melee with ease? Do you control the space of the battlefield with area-of-effect attacks, or do you manipulate the states of individual combatants through buffs and debuffs? This is the content of a fifth-edition class.

OSR games, on the other hand, are more interested in the exploration pillar: not always in the large-scale sense of exploring a hex map, but in the small-scale sense of exploring a dungeon and what you can do within it given a certain set of tools. Exploration procedures involving time-tracking, light and random encounters are emphasized, while combat procedures and violence are increasingly stripped away.

However, where the focus on combat has been removed, so have character classes. Many of the most original games on offer from the OSR—Into the Odd, Maze Rats, Knave—are classless. Electric Bastionland is filled with over a hundred Failed Careers that are not essentially different in the types of problems they are able to solve: one character might start with a chainsaw, but any other character could take or borrow the chainsaw and use it just as effectively.

There are some Failed Careers with non-item-based abilities, like this one, but they mostly function as just another small tool in the toolbox. You are still assumed to be an adult human with at least average mental and physical capabilities.

This is understandable. When classes are so bound up with combat in the dominant RPGs, it makes sense that a new wave of games trying to move away from combat would begin by discarding classes. But, if we wanted to reintroduce significant character and role differentiation into these games based on exploration and lateral thinking, where should we begin? Well, I think we could start by differentiating between how different classes solve basic challenges like dungeon puzzles and NPC interaction.

Here’s the hypothesis: By moving away from the idea that every player character has to be an at-least average, able-bodied adult human, we can dramatically alter the ways different players approach problems and reintroduce the sense that every player at the table has something different to contribute, and all without introducing lists of over-written special abilities or reintroducing a focus on combat.

In a way, we are working with the unwritten character abilities that nearly every PC has always been assumed to have: the abilities to walk, run, and jump, to grab and to carry, to see, hear, and smell.

So, here are 1d8 ideas for a new kind of character class that should make each PC’s approach to every problem different. (The obvious problem right away is tone: it would take more work to make a set of crazy non-human characters feel like they belong in a party, not to mention more work to make them all feel interesting and useful to play. But I wanted to present some ideas to get across what I’m talking about.)

1. Adult Human. The default, Fighter-type class.
2. Young Human (inspired by that False Machine post). You don’t have the strength, dexterity, or hand size to wield most weapons. You can fit through small spaces and few will consider you a threat.
3. Talking Bat. You can fly, but you don’t have hands. You can echolocate in the dark. You probably can’t carry very much and your ability to fight is limited, outside of perhaps aerial bombardment outdoors.
4. Astromech Droid (or a copyright-free equivalent). Again, you don’t have hands. Why does every PC need to have hands? You are filled with all kinds of weird tools for tinkering with stuff.
5. Just a Bear. Have claws. Climb things, smell things good. Most can’t understand bear-speak.
6. Ghost. You can’t touch most stuff, but most stuff can’t touch you. You can, however, possess creatures. (Or, maybe there are rules for when you can touch stuff and when you can’t. I think Urban Shadows has rules for this.)
7. Dragon. You’re way too powerful, but you rarely fit indoors, and every NPC probably hates or fears you in most settings.
8. Jake the Dog / Slime. You can change into any shape you can think of, but your flesh is squishy and non-threatening.

I guess this is a weird first post, huh? This is just an idea I will be either be playing around with in my chimerical OSR-WIP or abandoning as soon as the initial excitement wears off and I realize that taking away my players’ hands is actually really stupid.