Talk:Class

How canon are classes?

There's been some discussion over the years about where classes fall on the real-world/in-world spectrum, and I wanted to establish a place for that discussion to take place.

It's long been my position (and one shared by other members of Paizo's creative team) that most classes are known entities to the inhabitants of the world. They know that a wizard is an arcane spellcaster who gains power through study and has to prepare spells rather than cast them innately. They know that a sorcerer gains their magical power from their bloodline and doesn't need to prepare or study spells. They know that a paladin or champion is a divine warrior with specific abilities. The same with druids, clerics, witches, bards, and so forth. Where it gets weird is for martial classes, where there's little in-world distinction between a fighter, a ranger, and a rogue, who may have similar abilities based on their builds. While those words all have in-world meaning the same as they do in our world, the lack of clearly defined spellcasting or supernatural abilities makes drawing the lines hard.

So where does the wiki draw the line? Do we assume that people in-world know that someone who claims to be a ranger likely has the ability to hunt prey, has strong connections to their environment, and likely has an animal companion? That a rogue is highly skilled and can exploit weaknesses in combat against unaware or overwhelmed opponents? That a monk utilizes stances to optimize their unarmed attacks or those with highly specialized weapons? I assume they would, and that there's nothing inherently "real-world" about these classes. People in world are certainly not aware of the existence of feats or proficiency bonuses or saving throws, but they would still be able to categorize people in the same way we can define real people as artists or athletes or scholars or civil servants.

The conceptual line between class and profession really starts to blur the closer you look at it, but I don't think a character can't be referred to both as an investigator and a city watch captain, or a fighter and a soldier either in-world or on the wiki.— Yoda8myhead (talk) 21:19, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

Prior to 2E, I strongly believed that classes were explicitly not canon subjects, and treating them as such clearly broke PathfinderWiki:No crunch in both spirit and text.

1E characters were granted class levels for mechanical reasons unrelated to their canon role. Some older 1E PCs might have been better modeled with levels in a class that wasn't released until later in the game's development, such as the significant number of PCs who were "investigators" or "hunters" published before the investigator and hunter classes existed.

Conversely, some 1E PCs belong to an organization that has a eponymous prestige class, but Paizo's designers could not have, or chose not to, assign prestige class levels to them. There are members of the Red Mantis who don't have levels in Red Mantis assassin, Pathfinders chroniclers who don't have levels in Pathfinder chronicler, etc.

Since the only thing distinguishing a character with levels in the Red Mantis assassin PrC from an assassin who works for the Red Mantis but only has rogue levels is crunch, describing those differences in a plausible in-universe manner was pointless. The class of a person who hunted animals for a living was irrelevant—it didn't matter if they had warrior levels, or ranger levels, or fighter levels, or hunter class levels. The concerns were purely crunch and the only relevance was to their infoboxes and categorization.

2E has clearly changed this, especially the mid-2E trend of sourcebooks being written from an in-universe point of view, with canon characters referring to mechanics in their voice and by name (including classes, archetypes, ancestries and heritages, and other character options). Mechanics and canon content are effectively inextricable. Paladins are referred to from in-universe contexts, wizard class features are part of entry-level in-universe textbooks, etc.

Also unlike 1E, 2E defines each NPC with bespoke mechanics. The mechanics of classes and archetypes are now almost exclusively PC options, unlike in 1E, where the same mechanics were applied to both PCs and NPCs. A 2E NPC can be described as being a "paladin" or an "investigator" or a "vindicator", but without being bound to the same mechanics and restrictions as a PC. There is no point in drawing any line with regard to 2E class or archetype mechanics in NPCs because the mechanics simply do not apply to them. -Oznogon (talk) 23:55, 6 April 2025 (UTC)