Where have all the fighters gone?

[To the tune of Paula Cole "Where have all the cowboys gone?"]

I was a little surprised at the end of my last Swords and Wizardry campaign to find that, among the surviving characters, there were no fighters. I don't think this was because of the survivability of fighters (or fighting-men and -women, or what have you), since the other classes had the same rate of attrition or greater. Rather, I think it speaks to a player preference. However, speaking diplomatically, I think it's a preference that runs slightly against the grain of old-school play. Put slightly more bluntly, I think it's a little misguided, and I would like to try and correct it.

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Frankly, there's a sort of perception that the fighter is the boring class of the available options. This is kind of understandable. Mechanically speaking, swinging a sword in old school D&D is kind of flat; you roll a d20, and if you're a fighter you get a slightly better chance than everyone else to hit (and not even that until around third level). As a fighter, you have more hitpoints, but even this may not be true at first level; the M-U and the thief may well have more hp than you starting out just due to lucky dice rolls. The specific advantages the fighter does have at first level have the dual problem of being both grounded in mechanics and statistics rather than fiction, and thus not appearing very interesting, and also of not appearing to be very, well, advantageous.

As Dan "Delta" Collins points out, the so-called "sweep attack" rule in OD&D gives fighters a significant boost that makes them a more attractive prospect, and thus is a regrettable omission from later editions in the old-school D&D canon. I agree, but experience shows a problem. As my fighter players have pointed out, by the time you get to the level where sweep attacking starts to be useful, the monsters you encounter routinely have more than one HD, often even with standard "group fighting" monsters (in my campaign, this was the Fire Newts, from the Fiend Folio, on the deeper dungeon levels, which have 2HD apiece). Thus unless your party is up for finding some men at arms or goblins to bully, the fighter is stymied yet again. (I'm thinking I might rewrite the rule for future games so that fighters get another attack on a successful hit, up to their level number, regardless of enemy HD, just to curb this problem a little.) And again, you have to weigh this "You are slightly more fighty, sometimes" against the interesting spells the magic-user or cleric has access to, even at lower levels. To be frank, I think a few of my players chose clerics as a more interesting fighter option, trading the slightly smaller hit dice for the ability to do magic, even if it's not the most interesting magic in the game.

So what's the interesting misunderstanding this is all based on? Well, I think it comes down to an idea that, in choosing a class for your character at character creation, you are not only choosing their starting point, but also, to a large degree, their destiny. And this, I think, is at odds with old-school play. Certainly, your choice of class will determine the broad shape of your character's progression. But a big part of the point of (old-school) D&D is to discover what happens to your character over the course of your adventures. (This discovery is a big part of the draw for the GM as well - I note this lest anyone think I'm arguing here that players should submit to the GM's designs for their character's journey. The GM should have almost as little idea as anyone else what experiences are in store for the characters.)

This recasts fighters as a blank canvas. In fact, the fighter ability that is most overlooked is arguably the most important, and also the one that makes fighter characters most distinctive: Fighters, alone out of all the classes, can use any magical weapons or armour.  Magical weapons and armour in old school D&D are often far more interesting than the old +1 magic sword. As I've said before, I always tell my players to think of level 1 like their superhero origin story - you don't know what your character's distinctive "thing" is going to be yet, because it will end up being something you discover on your expeditions, likely involving a magical artefact. A Helm of Telepathy or a Trident of Fish Command (a personal favourite) will give a fighter that finds them a distinctive identity that they earn through adventure and daring. This goes especially for magic swords, which traditionally have a suite of quite powerful abilities, and are explicitly restricted to fighters only (and their associated subclasses).

"He's still Sharpe"

This effectively gets spellcasting for the fighter in via the back door; a fighter with a magic sword that casts Charm Person, for instance, has one of the more powerful first-level abilities a magic-user can have access to, on top of their other benefits. It's somewhat ambiguous whether fighters can make use of magical rings in OD&D, but I can't find an explicit prohibition, and this would add another aspect of versatility. Certainly there's enough variety in the magical abilities conferred by arms and armour - not just to make them more "fighty", but to give other spell-like abilities - to give fighters some of that diegetic interest that the spellcasting classes get from spell lists, especially if the GM lets their creativity run on in the vein of the original authors. The fortunate fighter of a certain level could well end up able to cast as many different "spells" per day as the M-U or cleric.

In this way, the class your character starts out as will shape their trajectory to a certain degree, but really what it does is provide a temporary sketch of an archetype for them to eventually move beyond. From mid to high levels, at least if you're really leaning into this aspect of the old-school spirit, character class starts to matter less and less, as it gets supplanted gradually by the unique, unforeseen quirks the character picks up during their adventures. With this in mind, one could perhaps do the fighter class a decent PR favour by renaming it the "Adventurer". It's not that they're more limited than the other classes; on the contrary, they're a generalist, where the other classes take on some limitations as a tradeoff for a particular specialism.

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I think this is something Knave and Into the Odd, as the canonical classless OSR games, understand. Knave's approach to spells and, especially, Into the Odd's approach to magic items ("Arcana") bring out the aspect of player-characters as generalist adventurers, deriving their distinctive abilities from the fruits of their risk-taking. As Knave points out, all old-school player-characters are effectively different flavours of what would today be called the rogue class. A magic-user, for example, standardly leaves their formal magical training unfinished before embarking on their first adventure - if they want to learn more spells, they have to scavenge them, just as the rest of the characters will be scavenging magical artefacts. In the logic of Knave, spells are therefore functionally just another sort of magical artefact.

I tend to think of Searchers of the Unknown as the great undiscovered gem of the OSR. It represents the logical conclusion of this minimalist, classless thought process - or at least it should. SotU ditches attribute scores as unnecessary in old-school D&D, adopting the view that if you can run NPCs with just HD, Hp, armour class and movement rate, along with a description, then this is enough for player-characters as well. However, to my mind many/most versions of SotU (there are a lot of different versions and hacks) miss the significance of this leap. A big part of that significance is that most NPCs in old-school D&D don't have classes. Most of what the attributes were doing in the first place was providing prime requisites for classes, and other class-specific bonuses. Thus SotU has the potential to tap into the free-kriegsspiel roots of D&D by having a character's description bear the weight of fleshing out that character's identity, competences etc., all while allowing for more freeform character archetypes - except that most versions of SotU attempt to re-engineer classes in some form (e.g.: by tying certain abilities to the player's choice of what type of armour to take).

I understand wanting to give players the option to have access to magic, for example, or to be extra sneaky, and the need to balance this out. But this, to me, misses the point: If we're treating player-characters on a par with NPCs (in the relevant sense), then lets do that. If a player wants their character to be a Fafhrd or a Conan, then have them write about their rippling thews and outlandish manners in the all-important character description. The point of SotU is that this is enough to capture the essence of old school D&D. In classic D&D, a given character's actual class eventually fades somewhat into the background. With this in mind, when old-school D&D is played to the hilt as the sort of free-wheeling, evolving game of discovery that it can be, character classes appear almost like training wheels. A class gets a character started, but they eventually evolve beyond their class into their own distinct, well, character.

This is what I find fascinating about the classless OSR rulesets: They tap into the fact that many of the great heroes of sword and sorcery fiction - particularly Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, but also arguably Conan, Elric, Solomon Kane and others - don't neatly fit what we might think of as a class archetype. And this goes even for those who have classes built around them: Conan is never caught without his mail shirt, and the Gray Mouser (largely the basis for the thief class) not only fights much more adeptly than the average D&D thief, being one of the two best swordsmen in the world, but also has more magical knowledge, originally training as a wizard's apprentice. All of these heroes, when statted up for AD&D, were multi-classed (some were multi-multi-classed) to try and accurately reflect their abilities. One wonders if, rather than bending the class roles to suit the characters, they might not have been better portrayed simply by an NPC statblock and some notes for the GM regarding their particular specialisms and special abilities. That wouldn't have made for as fun a book, but it's definitely the route I would take as a GM if I decided to include one of these characters in my campaign.

In keeping with all this, I would slightly modify the logic of Knave; player characters aren't all rogues, at least not exactly. Rather, player characters are all variations on what you find on the "Men" subtable in the OD&D encounters section (with allowances for the occasional humanoid). They're bandits, buccaneers, berzerkers, cultists, merchant adventurers. Any GM worth their salt can make these NPCs all feel highly distinctive, regardless of the fact that they all have HD1(D8), AC12, Mv 9" and so on. Despite our propensity to think of numbered statistics as determining the essence of a character (player character or NPC), it's not the numbers that determine the character, but the diegetic facts - what's true about them in the world.

Within that framework, the fighter-as-adventurer without any particular mechanical specialisation doesn't have to be boring. Like any old-school character, their main interest comes with the diegetic stuff rather than the numbers on their sheet - both their starting facts, like their personality and background, but also the adventuring career that unfolds during play. Fighters are basically set up to be receptive to those character-building influences that end up making them feel distinctive. The blank-canvas fighter has the potential to be just as interesting (or more, because of the lack of limitations mentioned above) as your M-U, cleric or thief.

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I was going to write an addendum regarding the state of the fighter in D&D 5e, but I don't think that discussion really needs to be had here. If nothing else, I'm so, so tired of critiquing the design decisions of 5e (and, where the design decisions go right, the ways they are mis-applied by the play culture surrounding it). Suffice it to say, modern D&D's answer to the chimerical "The fighter class has no specialism" problem seems largely to have been to try to create specialisms for it, where this means giving the fighter magical powers of one sort or another (Echo knight! Rune knight! Arcane archer! Psi-warrior!).

There is an amusing little contradiction here: I sometimes bemoan the fact that there are usually no characters in a 5e adventuring party who don't have magical superpowers. But at the same time, I'm always advocating for characters in old-school games to develop their own personality at the table, largely through finding magical artefacts that confer magical powers. All I can say is: It matters where you get it from. The "everything made to order" ethos of 5e just doesn't provide the same experience as the contingency or luck of finding a caracter-defining artefact amid a sprawling dungeon complex. I can imagine regaling someone with a tale about my character who found the mythical Cloak of the Shade in the Halls of Deluvian Dread, and can now create a shadow-double of themselves. I can't imagine telling the story of how I bravely and adventurously chose the Echo Knight subclass. Or rather, I definitely can - I've been told that story before - it's just not a very interesting story.

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So there. If I could sum this article up, it would be as an injunction - Players: Play fighters! They're not so boring as you think. Or rather, they may start out boring (although only slightly more so than, say, the thief), but they, more than other classes, are deliberately primed for that spontaneous character development that makes classic D&D such a draw for the imagination. In this respect, they may secretly be the most versatile of classes - not The Fighter, but The Adventurer.