How I learned to stop worrying and love race-as-class (sort of)

The predominant design philosophy of B/X is simplicity in play

If I had to define my relationship to race-as-class on Facebook, I’d have to select “It’s complicated.”

In 1982, when I first read Tom Moldvay’s edition of the Dungeon & Dragons Basic Rulebook, race-as-class didn’t even register as it’s own unique concept. With no previous experience of published D&D rules, I had nothing with which to make a comparison. I just assumed what I read in Moldvay’s rules was the way D&D was done. After all, Basic allowed me to create a warrior, a wizard, a thief, a dwarf, an elf, or a halfling—all the major choices from The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings—so I didn’t see a problem.

Only when a friend lent me their copy of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, and I saw an example of race and class being handled separately, did I realize there was an alternative. Immediately, I swung from being oblivious to race-as-class, to considering it the major failing of Basic/Expert D&D. Why should every elf be a combination fighter/magic-user? Don’t dwarves have clerics? What if I want to play one of those? I held this position for decades, and cheered when I discovered Chris Gonnerman had “fixed” this flaw in Basic Fantasy.

Since then, I’ve swung back to a more balanced position. In theory, I still prefer to keep race and class separate. Pragmatically, however, I understand Moldvay’s approach supports his core design philosophy—keeping the game simple for those actually playing it.

One of the elements I love most about B/X is the ability to create a new character in 10 minutes or less. This sets it apart from most other major RPGs, including any other version of D&D I’ve played or run. It would be disingenuous to claim B/X’s fast character generation owes nothing to race-as-class. Every human class has a single progression track. Other than spells, there are no special attributes (like skills or feats) to choose, no future development track to design, no complicated choices to make. Demi-human classes include a number of special abilities absent from human classes, and therefore threaten to complicate an otherwise simple and fast system. Race-as-class solves this problem in two ways—by limiting each non-human race to a single class (representing the common archetype of that race in fantasy fiction), and by specifying for each race a fixed set of special abilities that support its associated archetype. As a result, all dwarven adventurers are sturdy warriors with an in-depth knowledge of living and working underground, elves are arcane warriors with heightened senses, and halflings are tougher than they look, with an uncanny ability to disappear in the undergrowth. In this way, B/X trades customization for the ability to create a character in a few minutes—and start playing.

Still, even with this significant advantage, it bothers me that a player who really wants to create a dwarven cleric or a halfling thief simply…can’t. Sure, I can create these combinations as a new class—but where do I start? How do I balance such a class against the existing seven—ensuring it’s neither too powerful, nor too weak.

Enter Erin Smale’s (of The Welsh Piper) 2020 release B/X Options: Class Builder, the supplement that finally resolved my conflicted feelings about race-as-class.

Class Builder (CB) explains the patterns Smale has found in the seven B/X classes, and presents a simple worksheet for creating your own classes using the same method. Each class is balanced in the same way—for each special ability of a certain type, the designer adds a corresponding number of required experience points to advance in level. That’s really all there is to it. Most of the book is examples developed using this straight-forward process.

The examples include both variants of existing classes, “with the same base XP and level progression” as their parent class (CB, p.13), and sub-classes, which generally provide more abilities in exchange for requiring more experience points to advance in level. Want to play a nature cleric (druid; CB, p.15), a war cleric (p. 15), or a “shaman” (p.18)? Inclined to adventure as a deep dwarf (CB, p.22), a “spelunker” (p.23), or an “elder” (dwarven cleric; p.24)? Think someone playing a halfling should be able to be a “burglar” (halfling thief; CB, p.44)? You can find these and many other modified classes in Class Builder.

Some anti- or pro-”race-as-class” partisans might object that all these additional classes undermine the simplicity of B/X—but this is the brilliance of the Class Builder approach. First, if you are using classes directly out of the book, there is no more complexity than any of the seven that come with the game. Each class represents a single, pre-determined development track, with no choices to make beyond spell selection. Even if you choose to create your own classes, however, this won’t slow down the game in play. Granted, designing the class takes time, as you choose the special abilities and plug them into the worksheet. Once this is done, however, creating a character using the new class is just as easy as creating a character using a pre-existing class.

Essentially, the direction this book takes is the opposite of the direction new versions of Dungeons & Dragons have gone over the past 20+ years. Wizards of the Coast has (unsurprisingly for the maker of Magic: The Gathering) created three editions of D&D focused on specialized “character builds” optimized for combat, which relying on a high degree of system mastery to excel. Class Builder, on the other hand, focuses on creating specialized classes, useable by anyone (expert or not), each balanced against the others in the same way the original seven classes are balanced against one another. In effect, the classes of B/X serve the same purpose as character builds in more recent versions of the game—they define a unique set of abilities, tied to a unique development track. The difference is, once someone has created a new class in this way, any player can use it to create a character in about 10 minutes. The bespoke character build method of more recent editions often takes much longer to implement.

While Class Builder may not have caused me to truly love race-as-class, it resolves all the major problems in such a way they become non-issues—while at the same time preserving the simplicity at the core of B/X. Class Builder is the missing piece that gives my favorite version of the game the flexibility of other editions, without taking a significant amount of time away from play. And after all, more than anything else, aren’t we here to play?