Random DnD Class Generator

What a class actually is

You already know what the classes are. Barbarian, bard, cleric, druid, fighter, monk, paladin, ranger, rogue, sorcerer, warlock, wizard, and the artificer who arrived later and still gets argued about.

What you may not have thought about is that this list is not a fact about fantasy. It is a fact about a specific group of men in Wisconsin and Minnesota in the early 1970s, and about the problems they had at their own tables. Not one of these classes was derived from first principles. Every one of them is a decision, and one of them was an emergency repair.

Rolling for a class

1. Press Generate and it gives you a class. That is the honest way to use it, and the one that will teach you something.
2. Ask for two or three if you want to choose rather than obey.
3. Type into Contains to filter, though with a list this short you will mostly just be reading it.
4. Copy to keep the result.

Where this list comes from

The twelve core fifth-edition classes, from Barbarian through Wizard, plus Artificer, a later supplemental class that many tables allow but some treat separately. Checked by hand, and the tool draws from them in your browser.

In the beginning there were three

When Dungeons & Dragons was published in 1974, you could be one of three things.

A fighting man. A magic-user. Or a cleric.

That is the entire list. No thief, no ranger, no bard. The magic-user came almost directly out of Chainmail, the miniatures wargame that preceded the whole thing, where wizards existed as a sort of walking artillery piece who threw fireballs at formations of troops. The fighting man was every wargamer's default, a man with a sword.

Everything else arrived later and piecemeal, in supplements. The thief and the paladin came in the first one. The monk and the assassin in the next. The druid after that. None of it was planned. Each class turned up because somebody wanted to do something the existing rules did not cover.

Which leaves the cleric, sitting in that original three, looking like it has always belonged there. It has the strangest origin of all of them.

The cleric was invented to kill one player's vampire

The story comes from Mike Mornard, who was in the room, and it is corroborated by Dave Arneson himself.

Arneson ran a campaign called Blackmoor. Some players were on the side of good and some had chosen to be villains, which was normal and fine. One of the villains, a player named David Fant, decided he wanted to play a vampire.

This was the early 1970s, so the vampire everybody had in mind was Christopher Lee in the Hammer films. Not folklore. A tall man in a cloak. The character was named Sir Fang, and Fant played him extremely well, and Sir Fang kept getting stronger, and after a while there was nothing anybody at the table could do to touch him. He controlled the rats. He had an undead legion. The game was tipping over.

So they built a counter. If the villain was Christopher Lee, the answer was Peter Cushing, and the answer was a vampire hunter. As they sketched out what the character could do, somebody mentioned that healing would be useful, and curing disease, and it grew. They called it a priest first, and then a cleric. Mike Carr was the first person to play one, and he played a bishop.

Two more details finish it. Arneson gave the class the ability to brandish a holy symbol and make undead flee, which is Turn Undead, and which exists solely because of Sir Fang. And the old rule that clerics could not use edged weapons came from Gygax reading about Archbishop Turpin, the fighting churchman of the Song of Roland, who carried a mace because he did not want to shed blood. That was a misreading of medieval canon law, and it shaped a class for forty years.

So the cleric, alone among the original three, has no ancestor in fantasy literature. There is no Gandalf for the cleric, no Conan. It is the one class the game invented entirely for itself, as a rules patch, to stop one player from winning.

Why classes exist at all

Plenty of games do not have classes. You buy your skills, you assemble the character you want, and nobody tells you that swinging a sword and reading a spellbook are separate careers.

The class does two jobs, and it is worth knowing both before you decide whether you like them.

The first is protecting a niche. If every character can pick locks, the rogue has no reason to exist and the player who chose to be a rogue has no moment that belongs to them. A class carves out a piece of the fiction and says this is yours. Everybody at the table gets a scene.

The second is reducing choice, which sounds like an insult and is not. Handing a new player a blank sheet and telling them to build whatever they want is a good way to watch them build nothing. A class is a strong opening move. Here is a bundle of abilities that fit together and cohere into a person. Play that for a while, and you will find out what you actually want.

The cost is real. Classes make some fantasies impossible or awkward, and they encourage the belief that a person is one thing. The endless supply of subclasses and multiclassing rules is the game apologising for its own architecture.

Playing a class you would never have chosen

Most players are one of two people. They play the fighter every time, or they play the wizard every time, and they have a story about why that is a considered preference rather than a rut.

A random class breaks that, and the interesting part is not the class. It is the moment of resistance. Notice what you feel when it hands you a bard and you wanted to be a barbarian. That feeling is worth examining, because it is usually about how you want to be seen at the table rather than about the character sheet.

A few things worth knowing when the draw goes against you. The cleric is not a healbot; it is the only class whose power comes from a personality with opinions about your behaviour. The bard is not comic relief; it is one of the most mechanically capable classes in the game and always has been. The fighter is not boring; it is the class with the least between you and the decision, which is why experienced players return to it.

Play the one you drew for three sessions. Three sessions is about the point where you stop playing a class description and start playing a person.

Questions people ask

Which classes are the original ones?

Fighting man, magic-user and cleric, from 1974. Everything else is a later addition, including the thief, which most people would swear was there from the beginning.

Is there a strongest class?

At high levels, full spellcasters do more than anybody else, and that has been true in nearly every edition. At the levels most games actually reach, the answer is whichever class the player understands well. A well played fighter beats a poorly played wizard at every table that has ever existed.

What should a first time player pick?

Something with a small number of decisions per turn, so you can spend your attention on the room rather than the sheet. Fighter, barbarian and rogue are kind. A wizard with a full spell list on session one is a lot of homework.

Why is the artificer treated differently?

Because it arrived last, does not appear in the core book, and asks the setting a question the other classes do not: how much technology exists in this world. That is a worldbuilding decision, so some tables simply say no.

References

1. Critical Hits (2010). The Fighting-Man, Magic-User, Cleric, and Thief, including Mike Mornard's first-hand account of the cleric's creation. https://critical-hits.com/blog/2010/01/14/the-fighting-man-magic-user-cleric-and-thief/
2. Havard's Blackmoor Blog (2011). Bishop Carr, First D&D Cleric, on Sir Fang and the Blackmoor campaign. http://blackmoormystara.blogspot.com/2011/01/bishop-carr-first-d-cleric.html