Non-competitive classes

Balance. I'm not a huge fan.

It's been sort of narking me recently that all D&D classes seem to be for is making characters as good as each other. They aren't there to make a character into an interesting or nuanced person as much as they are to make the character relevant in combat. Classes make characters excel at something, make it so that they have a niche and their skills are combat-useful.

Case in Point

When a wizard runs out of spells things get very undignified

Take wizards for example- a staple of D&D, practically the sine qua non of fantasy games. There's always a wizard in there somewhere. In D&D, wizards rely on their spells to be effective, and this is partly where the problem lies. I fully anticipate that this might sound like an absolutely ridiculous statement but I make it because in D&D, mechanically speaking, other than cast spells wizards are good for nothing. When they run out they're basically a peasant with a stick and a large vocabulary.

In order for there to be some kind of balance within the game, class wise, fighters should be balanced with wizards when it comes to efficacy within combat. Combat is the crucible in which all the classes are tried and tested for that thing called balance. But I don't like that. When aiming for a fantasy that is somewhat interesting, balance is something to be avoided like the plague. A person who has trained every day of their life with a sword should be able to come up against someone who has never swung anything sharper than a spoon in all their days and instead spent their waking hours engrossed in books, and completely wipe the floor with them.

The idea is that all classes should be roughly equatable in combat for the sake of balance, right? Alright, maybe not quite... I suppose it's more that each has a kind of niche within the fight- each has a combat role, be it healing, defense, damage, stealth, or what have you. But my point is that none of the classes are objectively not useful when it comes to combat.

I do understand this. D&D is a team-focused game that relies upon people working together, especially in combat. But I would find it odd that someone would devote their lives to reading and delving into the secrets of the universe just so that they could pop a spell at some goblins or bandits or whatever. Yet a wizard in combat is regarded as a somewhat poor show if they haven't memorised a fireball or two and can't keep up with the fighter in terms of damage output.

The key term here is efficacy. The default model is efficacy measured on a numeric scale. But what I'm aiming for is wizards, in fact all spellcasters, that are less powerful in terms of immediate effect. In my opinion, what these classes do within a story is function as the catalyst for inserting magic, for making the adventure magical in the first place.

What makes a wizard an interesting class to me is the concept of their power possibly being measured on a narrative scale. One that is relevant to the storytelling within a game. Their ability to know things and to go places that other's wouldn't otherwise is the interesting part. Their power to apprehend forces beyond the scope of the untrained, their capacity to pull snippets of forbidden lore from dark parts of the universe and follow the trail of occult evidence back to its source. To really delve into the unknown and mysterious facets of the world.

The adventure only truly begins when things take a step away from what is normal. A spellcaster's ability to see elements of the magical in the mundane is what I'm trying to get at here. Having magic and wizards and whatnot lends an element of unexpected and spontaneous significance to what is otherwise commonplace. It makes people re-examine the normal, because what is going on under the surface could be something entirely and staggeringly not normal.

I'm going to work on a list that involves non-competitive classes. Ones that can't even be compared to each other numerically because their domains are so utterly different. It would almost make it so that players in the same group were manipulating the game via vastly different mechanics that only their characters could influence, each representative of how the character perceives the world. At this point nothing is off the table, except that you can take your lightning bolts and your magic missiles and put them ... put them somewhere else. I've got a bunch of other stuff to think about. Hummm...