Classes&Cogitations, Part 0

"I killed the devil, I took his soul

I took his kingdom, I took his throne

I raised his army of the dead

Looked around before I said: more zombies, more zombies!"

 

Ameliah&Nef - The Zombie Stare (officially adopted TSW fan music)

 

 

My run through Baldur's Gate 3 proceeds apace - which is to say pace by pace with frequent backtracking and not very runny at all. Nevertheless dropping Mooners' Trousers or whatever gave me a rise to Level 10 and my spell list has gradualy been including more attrition-mitigating summons like dryads and... zombies.

 

Now what's wrong with that picture? Oh, right, I'm a druid. In older D&D adaptations the druidic party line was hating on undead for disrupting the circle of hakuna matata and whatnot. Regardless of whether that's necessarily the correct druidic roleplaying angle, it was one more quirk that made them stand apart as a class, gave them some personality. Now, along with being robbed of their animal companions, summons being downplayed, everyone using crossbows, etc., the Spore subclass' zombies are just one more bit of forced homogeneity making druids feel like shittier clerics who need a shave.

It's not just stupid but gratuitously stupid. You could've implemented corpse-based Spore Druid summons without making them humanoid, just raising a fungal mass from a corpse, an inchoate, slithering pile of rot. Same practical effect but fully in keeping with the circle of life, death and microbes and remaining thematically distinctive. In fact you even had the easiest possible reskinnable 3D model for it in the form of jellies! If you're gonna do it, why do it the stupid way?*

Though really by now it's one more drop in the bucket. By the time I got into computer adaptations of third edition, Dungeons and Dragons' class system was already a hopeless mess, and the problem has only compounded over the past twenty years with redundant prestige classes and re-redundant core classes and overpowered free-cast spells and fighters and rogues getting more and more magical and keeping familiars in your pocket and so on and on and on. Don't get me started on losing the alignments.

But let's admit that was inevitable. The original classes were based on rock/paper/scissors medieval wargaming and broadly enough defined as to cover an entire game with only three or four playable categories. Expansion mandated redefining the original fighter/wizard/thief/cleric themselves more narrowly, but fans' refusal to give up the old nomenclature while constantly demanding new gimmicks has yielded nothing but pointless bloat, simplistic token divergence and meaningless overlap.

So (though I'm sure the subject has been re-hashed on endless RPG forums) I'm starting my own** little series on the D&D-inspired RPG class system, and keeping it going... until the winds of Pandemonium waft my attention elsewhere, I suppose.

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* Mass appeal. *Siiigh* yes, I am aware that zombie movies are rather popular.

** Pointless commentary bloat, token idea divergence and overlap, yes, yes, I know. Wer-wolfes are immune to irony though, so bite me.