What does class-as-setting really mean?
I recently had a thought, not an original one.
What if everything we can know about a setting is contained entirely in the text of its classes?
No cheating, no writing a bunch of flavor text for your classes now that you know they have to be doing all the worldbuilding. I don't think this is a good idea at all but I can't stop thinking about it.
Let's look at the Fighter from Goblin Guts -1.0.
What do we know about this setting?
1. Fighters exist
A fighter fights, we can get that from the construction of the word. We know people exist because the ability Impress makes reference to "people who don't like you." Fighters are people, presumably, because we don't think about "fighting" being something that non-people engage in. People are capable of disliking fighters. Are people capable of liking fighters? The phrasing "people who don't like you" suggests there are also people who do, but it's ambiguous.
Fighters fight challenging foes, and they fight people, and they fight creatures. Nothing suggests these are three separate things.
Fighters can be farmers, or soldiers, or sailors. I'm particularly interested in the farmer and sailor skills, because that means...
2. There is land and water
If it weren't for those two starting skill options, we would be forced to assume that there is no physical space except perhaps for some sort of pugiliferous aether which exists as a medium in which fighters engage in combat. But farmers must farm, and a farm requires land. Sailors must sail, you can't sail except in a body of water. So suddenly we're looking at geography. What kind of water? You can sail on a river or lake as well as the sea, so there's no way of knowing.
3. The following objects exist: chainmail, swords, bows, arrows, shields, daggers.
Some of these objects are classified as weapons. I would say swords, bows, and daggers. But I could see the argument that arrows also count.
Shields can be sundered.
Chainmail in particular is a thing which takes a lot of labor to produce. Nothing else on this list requires metal but chainmail tells us not only is there metal but that metalworking is quite advanced.
4. Death exists
You can die by being killed with a weapon, as per the Notches ability. However, not all combat results in death. Death counts as "undeserved or disproportionate harm," because as per impress anyone who dislikes you whom you defeat in combat will make a new reaction roll with +4 unless you caused them "undeserved or disproportionate harm," and dead people presumably can't make reaction rolls. (Perhaps I presume too much. I like the idea of someone making a reaction roll once you kill them. So maybe murder is not necessarily undeserved or disproportionate.)
5. Killing gains you power, particularly if you only use one weapon type
I don't know how much there is to analyze here, it's just Notches.
I think I've pretty much wrung this class dry of setting. Everything left is questions, like "why do people tend to dislike fighters?" "Why do farmers and sailors become fighters?" "What happens after death?" "Is there any kind of social order beyond just who likes or dislikes you?" which I suppose if we're really committed to class-as-setting must be answered during gameplay.
But wait, let's see what happens when we add another class...
I scrolled up the blogroll until I found a classic ABCD glog class and landed on Every Orc by Gorinch. Okay.
Well, thankfully the class text itself makes no mention of a multiverse, I think this one world I'm trying to build is quite enough.
The first thing I'm drawn to is the starting skill list. These things are quite useful for building setting, hey!
"Foreigner" implies that there are multiple cultures, and "war" implies that fighting is actually somewhat formalized. "Weight lifting" adds a new entry to the list of objects that exist.
The equipment list also adds axes (a new type of weapon), leather (no confirmed animals so it probably comes from people), and stew (and the pots that contain it). All three of these have Orcish variants.
The full list of possible Orcs... oh boy. That's a lot.
Do Orcs exist? What is an Orc? Well, if we're looking to this class for guidance, Orc is either a very broad category describing a diverse set of creatures, or it's one kind of shapeshifting creature that can take any of those specific forms (as per class abilities A B and D). Depends whether you think every Orc is an Every Orc. Wait, what am I saying? "Every Orc is Every Orc." That's the identity function, if I don't take it as an axiom what's the point. Okay, so an Orc is a kind of shapeshifting creature that takes any and all of these forms depending on whatever suits it best in the moment. One (several) of those forms is soldier, which is also something the Fighter can be. But I'm really struck by the fact that an Orc is simultaneously a fascist and also several different kinds of manifestations of racist and fascist anxieties. Suddenly for all of this stuff to exist, the Fighter- world we're constructing has to look a lot more like our own, including a place called Athens.
Or does it? These things are all from other worlds, and the Orc we have here simply reflects those worlds. All these complicated things intrude into our Fighter-world, channeled by the Orc, but not necessarily existing on their own somewhere out there in Fighter-world. Every Orc actually becomes very self-contained as a class if we do take the multiverse paratext as class text, so maybe I was wrong to discount it.
Okay, yes, let's say that the forms an Orc takes are glimpses into other realities. Just because I'm getting sleepy and I want to be able to post this without having to painstakingly go through every item on that list and consider how it fits into Fighter-world.
I don't really know how to close out this post. I'm just going to call it here and then hit publish and go to sleep.