Refluffing should not be a way of life

Hieronymous Rex · Post by **Hieronymous Rex** » Thu Sep 22, 2011 4:42 pm

I found this on Giant In The Playground. concerning the OP's faux-enlightened stance on those poor peasants who actually believe that character options should mean anything.

The poster equivocates this with "needing a specialized class to play a concept", and later posters seem to believe that picking a place within defined conceptual space (e.g. a Rogue could be a military scout, a second story man, or a cop who fight's dirty) is refluffing instead of, I don't know, playing by the book.

Refluffing is a hotfix. It is inferior to a properly made class/monster/what have you. I understand that if you want to play a Fighter in 3.x. and don't want to dip into homebrew, you should use a Bo9S class, but that's a weakness of the system: you shouldn't have to use another class in order to play a concept that already has a class put to it.

I recall a thread where someone (Kaelik?) mentioned refluffing a Ranger as a Soulknife. I ask whoever that was to say if they were entirely satisfied with this fix, or would have preferred the actual Soulknife class to fulfill it stated purpose.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Thu Sep 22, 2011 4:49 pm

Well, yes, it'd be nice if a class worked right out of the box, but refluffing is the quickest way to get something approved by most DMs. You point to something that is already published and say you want to flavor it like something else, and your DM will likely accept it over some homebrew you create to patch the problem.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Thu Sep 22, 2011 4:51 pm

I like how when people can't remember who did something, it's usually attributed to me.

But it's not me this time. My specialty is making specific classes for specific concepts. Yes, you totally can refluff things, but if I thought it was ideal, I would not have made a single one of my classes, because all of them could just be "A Wizard, who only casts certain kinds of spells, but fluff it as they can't cast any other kind."

Hieronymous Rex · Post by **Hieronymous Rex** » Thu Sep 22, 2011 5:02 pm

RobbyPants wrote:Well, yes, it'd be nice if a class worked right out of the box, but refluffing is the quickest way to get something approved by most DMs. You point to something that is already published and say you want to flavor it like something else, and your DM will likely accept it over some homebrew you create to patch the problem.

I'm not arguing against refluffing per se, just against the beliefs that "refluffing is a panacea" and "expecting someone of a class to fall within the description of that class is a mental deficiency".

Kaelik wrote:I like how when people can't remember who did something, it's usually attributed to me.

Perhaps it's the hard "k" sounds in your name?

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Thu Sep 22, 2011 5:22 pm

Hieronymous Rex wrote:
RobbyPants wrote:Well, yes, it'd be nice if a class worked right out of the box, but refluffing is the quickest way to get something approved by most DMs. You point to something that is already published and say you want to flavor it like something else, and your DM will likely accept it over some homebrew you create to patch the problem.
I'm not arguing against refluffing per se, just against the beliefs that "refluffing is a panacea" and "expecting someone of a class to fall within the description of that class is a mental deficiency".

I don't think it's a panacea either. I think it's just likely the most pragmatic option any given player will have with any given DM.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu Sep 22, 2011 5:27 pm

I'm not quite sure what you're getting at, but here's my thoughts:

If there's a class that's supposed to fill a specific niche and it fails miserably, that's a bad thing.
On the other hand, if I want my character to have a certain occupation, I shouldn't be forced to take a character class just because the class's name matches the occupation in question. E.g. I should be able to have a PC who's a pirate without having to take the Pirate character class.
In D&D, using the Rogue class for a scout, criminal or police officer is just fine; it barely counts as refluffing, if at all.
A certain amount of refluffing is harmless or even healthy. For instance, it would be a bad thing to stat out every single known mammal on earth on the off-chance that a druid would want to take one as an animal companion; if a druid wants a bull as a companion (say), it's perfectly fine to use the stats of a bison instead.

Hieronymous Rex wrote:I found this on Giant In The Playground. concerning the OP's faux-enlightened stance on those poor peasants who actually believe that character options should mean anything.

The poster equivocates this with "needing a specialized class to play a concept", and later posters seem to believe that picking a place within defined conceptual space (e.g. a Rogue could be a military scout, a second story man, or a cop who fight's dirty) is refluffing instead of, I don't know, playing by the book.

Refluffing is a hotfix. It is inferior to a properly made class/monster/what have you. I understand that if you want to play a Fighter in 3.x. and don't want to dip into homebrew, you should use a Bo9S class, but that's a weakness of the system: you shouldn't have to use another class in order to play a concept that already has a class put to it.

I recall a thread where someone (Kaelik?) mentioned refluffing a Ranger as a Soulknife. I ask whoever that was to say if they were entirely satisfied with this fix, or would have preferred the actual Soulknife class to fulfill it stated purpose.

Seerow · Post by **Seerow** » Thu Sep 22, 2011 5:29 pm

You have a strange definition of a way of life.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Thu Sep 22, 2011 5:43 pm

You know when I first saw the title I thought someone was complaining about how old my Knights of Columbus chapeau is.

Refluffing that feather should not be a way of life ... but I digress.

I would argue that sometimes a little refluffing is a good thing. All degree of refluffing hurts the character to some extent because the character is being pushed in a direction that is not aligned with the direction the class was designed but if this it not by a significant amount I generally don't mind it as much.

(If I were a perfect min/maxer, I would have never bought the Prius with the moon roof ... that takes at least 3-5 MPG away from the car because of the extra weight. But when a practically pwn every car on the road on the MPG scale it's a minor penalty at best.)

The problem is when you refluff to extreemes. Prior to 4E (and I've never bothered to verify this in 4E so it's probably true here as well) you could not really separate the class "fighter" from "heavy armor." If you wanted a lightly armored guy who fights, trying to refluff fighter was only going to get you a severely handicapped character. That didn't stop many people from trying, and then complaining.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Thu Sep 22, 2011 9:29 pm

who the fuck plays a swashbuckler

K · Post by K » Thu Sep 22, 2011 9:48 pm

I don't really understand the problem of refluffing, but the problem does exist.

I mean, I once made a Rogue for someone that focuses on riding a griffon, maxed STR, heavy armor, and charged for massive damage that added in sneak damage most of the time, and this guy flipped out and couldn't wrap his head around the fact that it wasn't a Fighter. The fact that it was better than a Fighter and had social skills and stealth and was pretty awesome overall was just not convincing.

In the same vein, you just can't convince people to play refluffed elves when they want to play cat-people, despite the fact that the mechanical bits would be exactly the same.

Seerow · Post by **Seerow** » Thu Sep 22, 2011 9:55 pm

Psychic Robot wrote:who the fuck plays a swashbuckler

People who think intelligence to damage is worth giving up 3 levels that could be gaining things like spell levels?

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 12:42 am

Well, I just refluffed Cleric into Warlock to try and take it easy on my friend because he prefers core and bitched about my other out there stuff. It'll probably still use some of the conceptual stuff from others (scroll of Summon Monster=One Use Pokeball, Human raised in a culture with no taboos=All Vasharans are).

We'll see how it works out. But yes, refluffing is *usually* the easiest way to get a MC to agree to your character

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 2:32 am

a lot of people derive their roleplaying experience solely through what's written on their character sheet. Mechanics are very, very important to them as it is the only way to express role playing concepts.

if it says 'Rogue', he is a sneaking wiener, even if mechanically he is a heavily armored lancer.

Bihlbo · Post by **Bihlbo** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 3:49 am

If you're talking specifically about D&D, then I think it's a matter of momentum. After all, didn't the concept of a prestige class come about from a desire to more rigidly define a character's fluffy stuff, then apply mechanics to that? The class system assumes that you are playing what your class is and is thought to be. The mechanics are there to support it, not the other way around (never mind that it rarely works that way).

I think this was one of the only good things about my brief experience with d20 modern - a Smart Hero could be anything you want him to be, including a bodybuilder. Trying to convince people that the wizard class is there to make your character a dragon is as hard as convincing people that the druid class is there to make you a specialized master of magic combat. "But it's not supposed to be!" is what you normally get, and IMO it's because of the way D&D classes are presented and described, as much as anything else.

Edit:
I wonder how you could describe a class in such a way as to make the user start off with their concept of the class being a collection of attributes that can be painted with anything they want. The class description for paladins tells you what it's good at, what a paladin is like, and what you should expect from a paladin. Is it enough just to not give any information like this at all? Will people then read a class entry for a divine-based-fighter-caster-hybrid class and take those mechanics to mean they could actually describe the character as a cloistered scribe who spends most of his time brewing cider and thinking of new, dangerous spells?

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 12:05 pm

Prak_Anima wrote:We'll see how it works out. But yes, refluffing is *usually* the easiest way to get a MC to agree to your character

The only problem I've personally run into is DMs who have the concept of their home-brew world so rigid that they don't want to see anyone use a concept in a way that they don't think fits into their world.

Also, DMs who insist that certain PrCs or even base classes must be part of some guild and that you must have trained their to be a member. He seriously had Hexblades and Warlocks in one corner of the world, Paladins in another, and wizard schools had monopolies on certain types of spells. I can see the flavor being cute for a book, but it's a bit too rigid for my style of playing.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 1:03 pm

Bihlbo wrote:If you're talking specifically about D&D, then I think it's a matter of momentum. After all, didn't the concept of a prestige class come about from a desire to more rigidly define a character's fluffy stuff, then apply mechanics to that?

The idea of a prestige class started with the 1E bard class, which (as far as I can tell) came about from the desire to have a totally bad-ass high-level character that ignores the normal dual-classing/multi-classing rules.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 2:57 pm

Psychic Robot wrote:who the fuck plays a swashbuckler

I did ... once ...
To add insult to injury he was a halfling ...
With a huge nose ...

I suppose that character did come up a little "short."

Dog Quixote · Post by **Dog Quixote** » Sat Sep 24, 2011 5:48 am

I'm dubious about refluffling, especially after playing 4E.

If I want to play a necromancer, and there is no necromancer class, people will say just refluff a shaman. But what happens when a necromancer class is released but it is inferior to a shaman mechanically? Should I be forced to play the new class? Should I ignore the new class and just refluff the shaman anyway (am I really losing anything?)

What about if I just take to existing classes, the Battlemind and the Fighter. The Battlemind is supposed to fill the psychic warrior niche but is nowhere near as effective as the fighter. Why not just play a figher and call it psychic (some fighter powers, such as Come and Get It, actually make more sense this way.)

This is especially the case with Paragon paths where you're just gimping yourself if you take a weak paragon path that supposedly fills the niche you want (which usually provides no real mechanical flavour anyway) rather than just refluffing one of the more effective paragon paths.

I remember having similiar issues with Prestige Classes when playing 3E. The prestige class that would fit the concept I want was often obviously weaker than one that was close enough - altough the problem was never as great.

Refluffing tends to level the field, especially when the real mechanical differences between classes isn't all that distinct in the first place. It makes fluff extraneous (hence we can call it fluff.)

I think it's a weakness, rather than a strength. If you really want an effects based system then you shouldn't proliferate a huge list of mechanical options that do more or less the same thing.

Saxony · Post by **Saxony** » Sat Sep 24, 2011 7:45 am

Hieronymous Rex wrote:stuff

So you'd like published ability packs divorced from published role packs.

IE: Barbarian is in the "character types and role playing" section and Rage is in "character abilities" and can be combined if one wishes, but they don't come together by default.

Eh. I'd go for it, I guess. I don't really like all the baggage that comes with a specific ability I want to optimize, so I'm expected to role play a nature priest when I want to use that one spell.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Sep 24, 2011 8:26 am

Don Quixote wrote:I think it's a weakness, rather than a strength. If you really want an effects based system then you shouldn't proliferate a huge list of mechanical options that do more or less the same thing.

Refluffing is basically incompatible with gaming at a very important level. If you have an effects based system, you combine effects with fluff, so there's no refluffing. If you have a fluff driven system, then the fluff is by definition integral to what the abilities do.

So to put it into superhero terms: in Champions you can't "refluff" a fire bolt into a lightning bolt, because the power is just "energy blast" and you put whatever energy type you want to on it when creating it. The power is "add fluff on chargen" so there is no refluffing. In Aberrant, you can't "refluff" a fire bolt into a lightning bolt, because fire bolt and lightning bolt are different abilities and it is an integral part of the game that they function differently and do different things and have different costs.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Sep 24, 2011 9:36 am

and yet your wrote a post at one time about making a fighter by writing sorcerer on your character sheet.

Ideal, but not reality?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Sep 24, 2011 10:33 am

Prak_Anima wrote:and yet your wrote a post at one time about making a fighter by writing sorcerer on your character sheet.

Ideal, but not reality?

The primary purpose of that was to demonstrate that the Fighter Class did not do its job. Which it does not. In reality, when people want to play a Fighter, they actually want the word "Fighter" to appear on their character sheet. which means that any build that involves fighting in the fighter's chosen style better than the fighter class doesn't get played but does make people sad.

The 3e thing of open multiclassing worked really well for exactly one thing: organic play where players take whatever class "feels right" on the next level. As soon as planning for PrCs or making higher level builds came into it, the entire thing lost people. When you tell people that you want to play someone who spent some time as a samurai before becoming a ranger and then became a horizon walker for a bit and now is doing flame knight training they flip out. They don't want to hear that from you. Any backstory that is more than a few sentences will be skimmed. But of course, having players have large numbers of disparate abilities because of the adventures they have had is still awesome - it's just that it's only palatable to people who have actually sat through and watched the series unfold. Pre-planned 3e builds were like jumping into Season 6 of Supernatural without having watched any of the rest.

Bottom line: D&D can't decide whether it's an effects-driven or fluff-driven system. And that is why people want to refluff things. Because there is stuff in there that is unpackaged with fluff and stuff in there that is prepackaged with fluff and there's no rhyme or reason to it and the things that are prepackaged with fluff aren't predefined into coherent systems.

Let's consider shooting Fire at people and the Energy substitution feat. Some abilities just do raw damage with no attached fluff or effects. They have a damage amount and a number of targets, and other than that they are pretty interchangeable. There's no reason for it to be "Fireball", it could just as easily be "Ball Lightning" or even "Damage Ball (Fill in Damage Type)". On the flip side, you have fire attacks that actually cause people to catch on fire. Like Alchemist Fire and spell and creature abilities that mimic that. Being "on fire" is a condition, where among other things you take fire damage. And it would not make any sense for a cold or acid attack to set you on fire. There isn't an "on cold" or "on acid" condition, and if there was, it wouldn't do the same thing that "on fire" does.

These things often occur within the same class. Let's consider the Fire Mage. It is not thematically important that Fire Burst is flames. It could be a burst of cold or a burst of negative energy or some shit and it would basically work the same way. Ignite, however, is fundamentally a fire ability and putting the Sonic descriptor on it wouldn't make any sense at all. And get this: there is no tag on any of that to tell you which one is which. D&D doesn't even acknowledge refluffing or fluff-adding or fluff-driven abilities as distinct categories.

-Username17

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Sep 24, 2011 10:37 am

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Sep 24, 2011 11:27 am

Fair enough.

Yeah, the majority of cleric works really well for warlock. You get your cool magic from another source, you have to commune to refresh it, and if you want the real Warlocks 24 hour mojo, you pick up Divine Metamagic Persist and Extra Turning. The turning/rebuking is just straight "I drip evil from my every pore because mommy fucked an archfiend, so undead bend over and take it." or something along those lines.

Domains are a little bit odd, but still work as "I'm infused with these two kinds of magic, and they give me a little something extra."

Either there should be a generic "My power comes from a greater power" class for clerics, druids, warlocks, etc., or there needs to be an actually good separate class for every "My power comes from getting down on my knees, opening my mouth and.... singing the praises of a higher power." concept.

Hieronymous Rex · Post by **Hieronymous Rex** » Sat Sep 24, 2011 3:39 pm

Saxony wrote:So you'd like published ability packs divorced from published role packs...

This is a rather weak solution. The gist of my post was "Refluffing is a temporary fix at best, and don't get irritated with people who don't want to do it".

Prak_Anima wrote:Either there should be a generic "My power comes from a greater power" class for clerics, druids, warlocks, etc., or there needs to be an actually good separate class for every "My power comes from getting down on my knees, opening my mouth and.... singing the praises of a higher power." concept.

3e erred in divorcing the Druid from the Cleric (creating the noxious option of being a Nature Cleric when Druids exist). In previous editions, Druid was a subclass of Cleric, like an ACF, as was the Illusionist. For some reason, 3e designers let Illusionist be an option for Wizards (along with the other school specialists), but made the Druid a separate class which "draws from the power of nature" for... no reason whatsoever.

I can see the Warlock as an option for a Cleric; "Instead of a god, you draw your power from an archfiend", and throw in some feats (Reserve, maybe?) for at-will spells.

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