Playbooks vs Classes
Okay, so a few days ago, I saw this post on Blue Sky from John Rogers, one which I've already responded to but I felt like expanding on here.
For context, he was talking about the potential of WotC bringing D&D into 21st century gaming design and particularly about the ability to pick up and get to playing quickly, so this particular tweet was a little bit of a tangent from the rest of the thread.
As I said, I responded to this already with about four or five responses, but I've been thinking and decided I should expand on my points a bit. So I'm doing that here.
Aren't they the Same thing, really?
This was my thought when I came to the concept of playbooks by taking a look at Monster of the Week. I was skeptical because I had started to come to the idea that games that focused around templates weren't for me. I liked templates, they made games like Fate, Hero System, and other such systems easier. In these systems, character creation is wide, wide open and having templates of example builds is very helpful, but they are not imposed and there's no reason to stick to them.
Until Monster of the Week, my main experience with template-based games was D&D where the templates were very rigid. Hence my initial skepticism. It didn't take me long to realize there was a lot of differences, and I'll get to those in more detail later.
On the surface, playbooks and classes are essentially different words for the same thing. They each represent a type of character and the abilities associated with them. However, it is the design philosophies behind each structure that makes the difference.
Story vs Abilities
This is the main difference in design philosophy between a playbook as found in PbtA or FitD games. In D&D-style classes are built around a concept of what skills and abilities a character has by comparison, playbooks are built around a particular story arc. The amount by which this difference is visible varies from class to class and playbook to playbook, but the basics are there.
For example, Warlock and Paladin each have fairly strong stories associated with them and the Monster of the Week playbooks of the Hard Case and the Spell-slinger are both focused more heavily on specific skill sets than a lot of other playbooks. But still while these four examples lean closer to the gap, they are still on other sides of the gap.
The paladin and warlock classes have strong stories but their class features don't tell that story. The mechanics are very much focused on what the paladins and warlocks can do and this creates a situation where the associated abilities could easily be used to tell a story other than the one implied by a paladin's or warlock's associated narrative. For example, the mechanics of a warlock could be used to represent a slow transformative mutation rather than a person who made a pact with something.
There's no mechanics in either class that really give the flavor of either a person who swore an oath or a person who made a pact. Traditionally, a lot of people imply that powers can be lost when the pact or oath is broken, but that's a GM call and likely to shift from table to table. Jeremy Crawford has even noted that Warlocks are not required to be on good terms and that the power they have is a done deal.
Paladins breaking oaths has far more support for resulting in consequences via the Oathbreaker paladin, but even that is not particularly given hard mechanics.
But again, there's nothing preventing a person from writing a story about how they acquired paladin-like powers by a means other than swearing an oath. Because the mechanics are divorced from the story.
By contrast, the Hard Case and Spell-slinger are among the most "what the character does" focused playbooks I've encountered and yet still they devote a substantial portion of their mechanical shape to supporting the story of a person who is good in a fight or a person who wields magic as a weapon. For example "Not my Fault" helps the Spell-slinger better survive the consequences of their own spellcasting mistakes. And the central Fire mechanic of the Hard Case builds up when they face adversity, giving a mechanic that asks them to make choices about when to release their tempers.
In addition, each of these playbooks has a Luck special like all the other playbooks in the game (specifically Monster of the Week, which is the PbtA I'm most familiar with) where something will happen when they spend their Luck. In the case of the Hard Case, sometime soon after they spend Luck they will encounter a person they once fought in the past, perhaps as an enemy or perhaps seeking help. For the the Spell-slinger, soon after they spend Luck, they'll face interference from the "council of wizards" or whatever equivalent your campaign has (given the Spell-slinger in my last series was a fae, this was the faerie courts).
Ironically, while the paladin and warlock are two of the most story-centric classes in D&D, it is here that the gulf between story and mechanics is mostly easily seen. For example, from the default perspective of D&D lore, the idea of gaining powers from a strange magical accident or event is limited to just being a sorcerer origin story. But there's no reason that the same magical incident might not also give someone paladin or barbarian like abilities. Or warlock style casting instead of sorcerer casting. The existing lore says "no" but there is no mechanical reason supporting the lore.
It becomes glaringly obvious that classes are a bundle of abilities that could be applied to multiple story explanations except for the default assumptions of what exactly is the paladin class. There's also the fact that you can easily play someone with the paladin class without actually having or being a paladin in-game. And you can play someone who has the paladin title in-game but uses a completely different class to represent the powers they gained from their particular oath. The oath is pure roleplay and buy-in with little to no mechanics. Same with the Patron of the Warlock... what's to stop someone from playing a Monk as if their abilities are the result of a deal they made with a devil? Only tradition and assumption. Mechanically there's no reason.
This is predominantly why I felt like D&D classes were restrictive. I've had arguments from 2nd edition onward about reframing one class's features into telling stories more associated with other classes. Partially due to coming from effects-based games like Hero System where mechanics are completely bare and you're expected to add your own story. The D&D community and D&D rulebooks assume and insist that X mechanics have to match Y story and that's that. There will be people that say "okay, just homebrew it" but that tends to be a bit hollow. If I wanted to play with Wizard stats and say their spellcasting comes via an oath they made, it is very unlikely that a GM will treat my wizard spells as divinely granted abilities that can be taken away when I misbehave... because that's not how wizards work.
It's just such a blatant dissonance in my perspective.
On the other hand, we have PbtA and FitD where even the most ability-focused playbook is still teeming with mechanics that enforce a particular story. If I want to play someone who has magical abilities... I can do that with pretty much every playbook. If I want to tell the story of someone struggling with their powers, that's the Spooky. If I want to tell the story of someone holding tight to a lost humanity, that's the Monstrous. If I want to tell the story of someone in over their head who wants to help, that's the Mundane. If I want a tale of revenge, that's the Wronged. If I want to tell the tale of someone tempted by power, that's the Hex. When I play the Chosen, that person could be a front-line fighter, a back-rank support, or a charismatic leader.
I can choose the playbook for the story I want and describe how the abilities I want them to have fit the moves given. For example, if I want to play Edie from Wednesday, I'm not playing her as The Monstrous, because her story is about trying to have a normal teenager life which is interrupted by danger. Her story is not about controlling her werewolf nature. She's The Mundane, very clearly, despite not being human.
As a caveat, there are PbtA games where the design philosophy of the playbooks is a lot closer to the design philosophy of D&D classes. Dungeon World is one such game that tries to use PbtA to function as a sort of streamlined D&D game. However, I've never felt that PbtA serves that goal very well, and playing in that way doesn't really let PbtA sing. Perhaps the most recent edition is better.
Further, a lot of Feats and Class Features are designed to fit a requirement which means some of them are very uninteresting and fit in a narrative gap to match the desired idea of "person who fights" or "person who casts spells". A lot of these requisite style abilities are folded into "if it makes sense you need to do it, then you can do it". Weapon and armor proficiencies largely in this category. A fighter needs to know how to use weapons, and D&D says that proficiency needs to be noted on a character sheet. Where as Monster of the Week just says "a soldier is assumed to know how to use weapons and we don't need mechanics for that."
By comparison, the design philosophy for playbook moves is that they should all be somehow exciting. In some cases, this will be largely mechanical, such as giving a +1 to a main rating, but most of the time it is designed to make the narrative and story more interesting.
Transitory vs Fixed
This is another big difference between playbooks and classes.
In D&D when you choose your class, that is with you until the end of your character's career. It is immutable and unchangeable. You'll always have it. This is very much because classes represent skills and acquired powers that there's little to no way to lose permanently outside GM-fiat. And if you lose your class's features (such as if you're playing with a GM who has decided warlocks need to play nice with their patrons to keep their powers) then you can't go back and change those levels later unless the GM homebrews in some sort of retraining mechanic.
By comparison, a playbook is designed to be eventually left behind. Different versions of PbtA have handled this in different ways. In some cases you basically re-create your character entirely fresh as if they're a new character entirely, maybe with one or two left-over moves from the old playbook. In Monster of the Week, you go down the list of features and such and decide whether or not they are still true.
For example, if The Monstrous werewolf were to change over to being The Expert, unless they went through a whole story of seeking a cure there's no reason they can't stay a werewolf and keep their claws and Shapeshifting move. Likewise, the Professional doesn't necessarily stop being an agent if they become the Wronged. They might still keep their "Deal with the Agency" move and the Agency itself. But now when these characters spend Luck, the story that will get pressed will be one of the Expert investigating mysteries or the Wronged seeking revenge.
For that matter, playbooks are designed to stretch into the flavors of other playbooks with the ability to borrow moves from other playbooks being built into their advancement track. A Mundane might get bitten by a vampire and choose to take up "Mental Domination" as a new move but still stay a Mundane. A Flake might make a deal with Dionysis and gain the "Angel Wings" move. The Divine might start forming friends and connections among mortals and take "The Naked City" move. This lets them add nuance to their central story, the one pressed forward whenever they spend Luck and may even represent foreshadowing a future playbook change.
By contrast, multiclassing has traditionally been one of the more difficult to get right concepts for D&D and similar games. Fourth edition D&D and Pathfinder 2e handle this concept the best of this style of game I've seen, given how they use Feats to do it. But they still don't really do it as well as PbtA does. The balancing of one ability to another doesn't work well and skills are largely static unless you deliberately improve them.
This goes back to the first section of this rant where I focused on how playbooks focus on story while classes focus on ability. Stories change, abilities often don't.
Also, advancement in PbtA is largely horizontal. You can improve your ratings or take moves that improve specific rolls, but mostly you get more options, new story options, or give a more detailed version of a basic move. By comparison, D&D and similar games have largely vertical advancement. Which means you notice it a bit more when your warlock powers are strangely frozen because you haven't taken a new level in a good long while. D&D focuses on making what you can do stronger, while PbtA focuses on adding nuance.
Summary
Are D&D classes an inferior design to playbooks? That's largely going to be a thing that varies from player to player. There's a lot of people that will heavily appreciate the very well defined abilities of classes versus the flexible and narrative skills and abilities of playbooks. Of course, it's clear that the rigidity of D&D classes is something my brain rebels against and makes it harder for me to suspend disbelief.
It's important to remember not every game is going to fit every player. And that's perfectly fine. There's a tendency to assume that when someone likes something you don't then either you're wrong or they are. The truth is that you can both be right and just you enjoy different things.
I consider D&D a messy and far from perfect system, but that doesn't mean people who enjoy it are wrong for doing so. Heck, I enjoy D&D myself. I just enjoy Monster of the Week more.
