In Chorus, the player characters are divvied up into 8 playbooks/classes.
I go with “playbook” instead of “classes” here because to me, it evokes that there’s a particular kind of PERSON each character is supposed to be as opposed to this being a “class” of being. A playbook is about how a certain character plays; even though that certain character can look or act however, the things that affect the character will be specific and their mechanical interactions are meant to embody playing that character as opposed to any old person inhabiting any old class. You aren’t a human whose job is being a bard, you’re The Hero in this story and that means you inspire people; you aren’t a dragonborn sorcerer, you’re The Diminished Power. These mean things that “fighter” or “cleric” can’t because they’re about an archetype as a person just as much as about the associated mechanics.
This isn’t to say you have to play The Killer a certain way, just that the mechanics are built such that you’re playing someone whose skill at focused violence is honed to a razor’s edge as opposed to someone who’s pretty good at stealing and also happens to have a backstab mechanic and chose to specialize in assassinations. You can play The Hero as an abrasive asshole, but if you don’t use the fact that The Hero (maybe change to "The Local Hero"; loses something but gains something else) is the best at protecting the other members of the party, you won’t be having a lot of fun.
The line between classes and playbooks is thin and porous, but it’s there and I know where I’m planting my flag.
And besides, I like the idea with the playbooks as framed by Lumpley Games' Apocalypse World (and associated hacks under the Powered by the Apocalypse umbrella) that you can just print out all the playbooks and lay them out on the table and offer people a choice to just pick them up and flip through the stuff because pretty much everything is just THERE.
And since previous Design Principles rambles have helped me get a better handle on what I’m doing here, I’m gonna take the next few Design Principles entries to lay out some of the 8 playbooks included in Chorus and try to highlight what they bring to things, mostly because laying it out in this kind of way has been incredibly helpful for me.
However, before we get going, let’s get the metadesign goals laid out:
Deceptively simple goals, as ever. But with this sort of thing, it’s hard to know how it’s going to manifest in reality.