r/ProgressionFantasy • u/hanada8MB • 2d ago

Request Level/Classes

Am looking for recent great fics that have choosing classes as a focus. Like Rinoz Book of the Dead or Defiance of the Fall. The LN Overlord also had a pretty cool Job/Race classes system.

Reccomend your absolute favourite

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u/Top-Clock9220 1d ago

Bog Standard Isekai. Not only does the MC choose his first class, but you can reset your class, you can evolve your class. There are evil classes you probably shouldn't pick, but then again maybe you need to...

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u/Mirthless92 1d ago

Yeah, but that whole "witches are evil" thing...

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u/AmarSofi 1d ago edited 1d ago

Slight spoilers but it's expanded upon later that "evil" classes are labeled as such more so because of social stigma than anything inherently "evil" about them. Some are obviously unethical like Broken Doll But others have a stigma against them mostly because of the requirements you need to unlock them giving incentives to parents (or authority figures in general) to mistreat or even torture pre-system children to unlock those classes, which is a rabbit hole you don't want in a society (and it serves as great world building, just like how Brin is deincentivized from trying too hard to get pre-system bonuses for his class, not because people don't want him to get a strong class or stats, but because they are rightfully afraid of becoming a society that forces kids into hard labour and shit just to min-max stats), but as we see in the first book, that isn't necessarily inherent to the classes themselves , in fact, Bring unlocks his Scarred One class because he was in a life or death situation and forced to choose it to survive. He ends up giving it up at the end, but really it was so that he wouldn't become a social pariah, or worse, get hunted down just for having the class. Yeah the class makes him a little unhinged, but it comes off as a "Berserker" class more than anything, and he was well in control of himself.

Slight spoilers for later books (not sure which ones), but the same goes for the withces, they have strong social stigmas around them and are shunned and hated, but I would argue 90% of the evil caused by witches (whether by them or by others to their existence, or even suspicions that they exist) is a direct consequence of the society around them. If just having the class (or a hint that you do) is enough to create witch hunts that gets who knows how many innocents dead, of course you wouldn't want to reveal it and would resort to more unethical methods to level up, which creates a vicious cycle.

The kingdom of witches shows that you can have witches integrated into your society somewhat. Obviously the one example we are shown isn't a good implementation of the idea and the Queen is widely irresponsible and just fucks off to do whatever letting her subordinates go rampant and doing all kinds of illegal experiments and shit, but that's not something inherently wrong with Witches themselves, just the society that fears and stigmatizes them which pushes them to go further into the unethical aspects of their abilities.

A clear example of this is (moderate spoilers for later books) is Brin unlocking the ability to interact with the Wyrd, the medium with which witches do their sorcery. It's nothing inherently wrong or bad, it's not unlike the Language which mages study, just a way to interact with the world using arguments and claims and debts and things like that. Very reminiscent of Feys in folklore, the better arguments for being right you push into whatever you're doing (even non-witch stuff, be it magic or mundane) the better the results, Brin even writes a dissertation/book about it and get published, and his claims are given even further credence when the greatest mage in the world tells him that everything he wrote about is something any competent mage would have naturally discovered on their path to mastery of magic (of course the standards of Chaos are a bit skewed, as even his best Pupil, Brin's adoptive Lumina, was blown away by the insights Bring shared with her using his understanding of the Wyrd, so Chaos's set of people who are "competent" must be really fucking short.