Badge of Credentials

Jonathin

House RP has so many different facets. You can't just lump it all into one of three categories regarding class RP. How House RP affects another facet of someone's RP is up to that House member.

Tanaar

The assertion that a House should be the first or primary source of someone's community and RP atmosphere is completely non-universal. That is true for some people, maybe even most people. For others, their chief sense of community might be their Order, their city government, or even a clan.

For me, guild/House has -never- been my core RP, it's always been city or Order.

Averi

@Nim we do have a combat path! so there is a bit of overlap. 

I like how this thread has totally turned into talking about my house. 

Aerek

Oscar Wilde did say that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Synbios

Good thing *Shallam was destroyed then. New Houses, yay!

Tael

Jumping in here without reading everything:
The initial implementation of autoclass was not a problem for just one or two houses. Nearly all but the most strongly-aligned houses lost a lot of common culture. People really, really underestimated how much a common class was doing for guild unity and identity and also underestimated the logistical concerns of creating training and requirements for multiple classes. Common classes do a lot more for an organisation than making class-based RP easier.

Those problems also compounded existing issues for small guilds that didn't end up adding a ton of classes - guilds that were surviving primarily on the basis of the classes they could grant. This hurt the culture of those places too.

And it wasn't just guild/house identity, it also hurt some class identity. What autoclass did to occultists was downright criminal. They had done a pretty decent job at maintaining the whole secrecy RP thing and the guild-class relationship coupled with the difficult, academic requirements of the guild meant that occultists were essentially all secret scholars of some sort, which worked well with the class. Many of the knight classes had similar situations and we've yet to see a really great replacement (some of the failed knight clans in cities without dedicated knight houses speak to this).

In general, it lead to a sort of Great Blandening. And that was across much of the game, not just one or two houses. And for those of us who were around through the whole thing, it's pretty clear that much of what was lost has not been regained, although the newer restrictions seem to have lead to some very significant improvements.

If you had something like this where people could be added despite class restrictions, you create immense logistical issues far beyond the thematic issues. How do you treat these people? Are they just special snowflakes? Do they get their own individual attention for progression? Can they hold leadership? Should the Serpentlords let a druid become HL or is the person stuck in a sort of perpetually degenerate position in the house?

On a more individual level, opening up house membership to other classes increases player choice at the expense of the actual meaning of that choice. Personally, I thought maximal meaning (the old guild system) was the best option - simply dealing with the problem-guilds directly rather than systemically. But now that the cat's out of the proverbial bag and the metagame is in some sense balanced around cities having access to a larger variety of classes, I think the present system is a nice compromise. I wouldn't want to see any more of the meaning behind the choice eroded nor would I want to deal with the logistical or thematic problems proposals like this bring up.

This reminds me of the problem that discussions of Shallam all used to boil down to: people wanted to have everything their own way - they wanted to play in a city thematically identical to Cyrene while being a citizen of Shallam. On an individual level, that's ideal. But it's ultimately a fairly selfish thing.

Achaea is not, and should not be Burger King.