>>6135103>>6135427>>6136042>not in employment...? (continued)Maybe there needs to be some WASTREL DILETTANTE class (Stars Without Number does actually have a dilettante starting option lol) you know some swords and sorcery rpgs do have a Wastrel lifepath lol, but I don't think the "careers classes professions" approach is the means to characterise it.
So the way dnd type games often do it is they have the Class career as the central gameplay combat thing, and then you can choose some lore adornment / embellishment ie roll on a table if you want some wastrel background life origin but there are no real mechanical rules for it. But shouldn't it be the other way around? For a start, the majority of people are not carrying weapons lol or combat gear (even in a highly militarised setting, think the tooth-tail ratio thing, the ratio of logistics supply noncombat support to people pulling the trigger etc) so shouldn't there be some means of parameterising THE VAST MAJORITY OF ORDINARY PEOPLE in your game lol who you interact with as opposed to focusing just on the weird ADVENTURERS who are completely unhinged mental violent combat mutilation assassination torture thievery specialists? Again, the dnd contrivance is to bifurcate the world into ADVENTURERS and MONSTERS who exist to be killed, but then this bestiary bifurcation departs more and more from reality whilst still maintaining the veneer of verisimilitude (look! I have a career! And all these skills! I am really just a librarian! But also, I have all these magic weapons)
I don't know what the solution to this is, dnd is very successful lol so maybe it is just what people want, but just something about this rpg "careers convention" feels increasingly odd to me. I do think some pbta games recognise it (eg the "bonds" thing I ridiculed earlier lol is sometimes used to create social assets or social resources, Blades In The Dark, Heart, Spire etc all do this, you can draw on these in rolls to create an advantage as opposed to all interactions just being draw sword to slay monster or roll charisma check etc. But I am not too keen on how pbta lifelessly formalises all those into boardgame style "moves" etc). I think the elusive goal would be some rpg pattern that can parameterise or mechanically adjudicate the "average story character interaction" in a manner outside of combat (combat is pretty well covered lol) because after all, that is generally what all fiction is about
