Choosing a background provides you with important story cues about your characterвЂ™s identity. Your rogue might have gotten by as a guild thief or commanded audiences as a jester. Your wizard could have been a sage or an artisan. Your fighter might have been a courageous knight or a grizzled soldier. Your characterвЂ™s background reveals where you came from, how you became an adventurer, and your place in the world. The D&D 5e PlayerвЂ™s Handbook describes them as follows: Your character is going to interact with the world based on their lives beforeДЄdventuring. With the world?вЂќ It then refines that thought by asking the player to choose a Background.Д«ackgrounds represent a fundamental understanding of how In AD&D 2e because D&D 5e uses the Class to ask, вЂњHow do I want to deal Now the Class a player chooses serves the same function that the Group once served It creates a situation where the mechanics of play may differДЇrom class to class but the way a character is played is the same.Дungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition (D&D 5e) isДЄttempting to teach a new generation of players to ask the same questionsДЄD&D 2e had us asking by getting us to think about the game in a new way. Now a player went straight to their class without that first Where beforehand you would ask вЂњHowДo I want to deal with the world,вЂќ and then refine that thought by choosing Thinking about building their characters. Players thought about the game because they were taught a different way of Player would answer that question and in doing so it changed how they wouldДungeons & Dragons Third Edition (D&D 3e) wouldДispense with the groupings, as would all subsequent editions, and instead have You want to do that? Each class represented a fundamental change in how a You chose Warrior then you were looking to get your hands dirty but how did First you chose your general attitude in the game. This system of organization, the AD&D 2e game taught players a certain way Play, while the classes gave you the theme of your characterвЂ™s life. The group gave you an idea of what you were going to Rangers were the woodsmen, living their lives in the wilds and existing on the very fringes of the civilized world. Paladins were the exemplars of knightly virtues noted for their bold and pure natures. They were your every man of the Warrior group. Fighters were your champions, sword masters, soldiers, and brawlers. They included fighters, paladins, and rangers with each class the player was provided with a specialized theme for how their class dealt with the world, and how it would think about combat. Warriors are focused on combat with the enemy through direct, primarily physical, means. LetвЂ™s look at the Warrior group for a better understanding These groups then divided up the various classes according to their Represented your general occupation within the game): priest, rogue, warrior, or So as a player you would first decide on your group (which When you first look at it, it all seems a odd. AD&D 2e changed this by creating a group, and then requiring players to choose their class from that grouping. For example, you could play a Cleric or a specialized version of the cleric called the Druid. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons First Edition (AD&D 1e) had classes and sub-classes, but these were streamlined choices. Note that the standard mage is not available, as there is no magic ( cough weave cough) energy to be used.One of the big changes that Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Second Edition (AD&D 2e) made was changing the way that we thought about classes. We already know that Wizard is a group of character classes, so Defiler and Preserver are the individual wizard-type classes available in that setting. On the Revised campaign boxed set, 'The age of Heroes' book page 8 we have a table of the classes, again under their group heading: So the specialist wizards are their own class. So until page 44, every blue heading is either a group or a distinct character class. The entry for the groups is in a larger font than the entry for the individual classes, and all of those are in blue. If you take a closer look at the classes chapter, the very text heading styles also point at this. It is also enforced in the page 44, under 'Multi-Class Combinations'. Then you have the specialist wizards, each one being their own class. Of which Mage is your generic all-around wizard. So, disagreeing with what Nvoigt wrote in his answer, Wizard is a group of classes. Therefore, the classes are filed under 4 great groups: 'The complete character class descriptions (.) are organized according to groups.'

Adnd 2e all classes