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While toying with the idea of a mutants and mazes game set on a Metamorphosis Alpha type ship, it came to me that a simple way to avoid the "only thieves can thieve, only fighters can fight" mentality I might just adjust the classes to be the actual social classes of a feudal society. So the Fighter class would be replaced with the guardian class and characters of that class at least have military training, and the Thief is replaced with the Peasant, a member of the underclass who uses his professional skills as a tradesman to strike out adventuring, Clerics Magic-users etc., will be replaced with members of the upper class and priestly orders that exploit psychic mutations and left over machines in a Thundarr the Barbarian like parody of magic. Just wondering if anyone has tried this before.

It depends on your players buying into the environment.

Like getting them to understand that in Reign men don't ride horses normally, only side-saddle, because there's a myth that it causes sterility among men... therefore only women are effective cavalry in that setting. Same thing in Oriental Adventures where it is considered a horribly dishonorable thing to take goods from the dead, so you DON'T take the +4 katana off the dead body. Some players scream bloody murder about these societal restrictions instead of role playing along.

Haven't tried it, but it does sound interesting. Mechanically, you might be best off by just having one advancement table and allowing PCs to 'spend' XP to buy different benefits. You want a level of thieving? Go ahead. But you won't have all those extra HP. Want to be better at hitting things? OK, but you aren't going to delve into the secrets of the universe.

Getting the players to buy into it will be a different problem. Again, it's not one I have ever experienced. Maybe it's just the people I have played with over the years, but we were very rarely hack 'n' slashers.

Well I wasn't implying to take on too many social restrictions, just the concept that a class has an implied role in society. Basically I don't like the thief or rogue, but I want there to be mundane (magic free) classes other than Fighter, and I can't think of too many ways to vary the classes other than possessing sorcery or not. But I could just do that and have a semi-two-class game like Carcosa, or I could run a strait Mutant Future game and simply create Sorcerers as one of MFs race-classes.

Have to agree on the lack of mundane classes. It's one of the reasons why I prefer T&T7 over the other versions - the Citizen class. Not very good at combat, but useful at other things!