#valtharr

There are several benefits to having character classes – or something like them – in your game. The following list is by no means complete, but I think it hits most of the high points:

1. They clearly establish the player character archetypes the game expects to see in play. Such archetypes are beneficial from a worldbuilding standpoint (i.e., these are some of the sorts of people you’ll encounter in this setting), a functional standpoint (i.e., these are the things the game’s rules assume a group of player characters will be able to do), and a guiding standpoint (i.e., these are the sorts of things that player characters do). The last one is arguably the most important: many tabletop RPGs suffer from failing to provide any direction with respect to what player characters actually do. With a well-constructed set of character classes, you can simply point to any given class and say “this”.

2. The use of classes or class-like templates makes creating and modifying characters faster, easier, and more reliable. “Faster” and “easier” are obvious, since literally any set of options that’s smaller than “all of them” naturally would be, but “more reliable” is often overlooked. Given an RPG of any non-trivial complexity, it’s fairly easy for a novice player to accidentally create a character who isn’t good at anything, or who’s good at a completely different set of things than they intended them to be good at. Assuming your character classes are competently designed, they come with a guarantee that any given character will be able to contribute within that class’s defined game-mechanical niche. (But don’t undervalue “faster” and “easier”, either; not everybody who’s experienced enough to deal with the nuts and bolts of character construction actually wants to. Sometimes you just want to hit things with your sword!)

3. As an extension of points 1 and 2, a well-designed set of character classes confers strong niche protection. Rather than having to sit everybody down and have a whole discussion to make sure that nobody’s character concept too strongly overlaps with anybody else’s, and that no roles that are vital to the group’s identity and/or the game’s premise are being overlooked, you can just say “everybody pick a different character class” and things will generally work themselves out. Among other things, this means that systems with character classes are typically a better fit for groups who prefer to create characters independently, or groups with erratic or rotating participation where the attending players – and thus, the cast of characters – may vary considerably from session to session.

4. In systems with high mechanical complexity, character classes can reduce the scope of playtesting and the likelihood of unexpected failure modes by limiting the number of combinations of traits that need to be examined. In a system with à la carte character creation, every game-mechanical trait is, in theory, equally likely to be paired with every other game-mechanical trait; even a small number of player character options can lead to a combinatorial explosion of scenarios that need to be playtested. Template-based character creation is a convenient (if not necessarily easy!) way to get a handle on that: not only does it reduce the total number of possible setups you need to test, but it gives you a way to reason about which of those setups are part of the game’s core (and should thus receive lots of attention) and which are edge cases (and can thus be treated more briefly).

5. Restrictions can be a good thing. We all know people who can write for pages and pages if given a very specific prompt, but if they’re told to just write whatever they want, they’ll stare at a blank document forever. You might well be one of those people! Character classes aren’t the only way to provide a structured creative framework during character creation, but they’re one of the better-explored ones.

Because whatever magic turned adrien into a cat worked on adrien, not chat noir. I never drew a comic covering it, and I’m not sure I will, so I may as well spill the juicy details:

some kind of magical hit landed on chat noir during an akuma fight, and knocked him back a ways - they had been fighting a little recklessly, having just used both lucky charm and catacylsm, and trying to wrap up the fight quickly so they didn’t have to recharge mid-battle. Sometimes that works and sometimes they get hit.

This particular akuma made the hit a little annoying especially with so little time to waste - the effects of the akuma were randomized. Most of them hadn’t been harmful, and just inconvenient, but over the last half an hour they’d seen people freeze in place (worrying), turn green (not too bad), melt (horrifying), float off the ground (kind of fun), and grow multiple pairs of arms (arguably useful? no, still bad) and have all their teeth fall out (also horrifying).

Ladybug, seeing chat noir knocked down and knowing they don’t have time for whatever stupid shenanigans will happen if he starts tap dancing or sneezing flames or god forbid losing his dentures, cranks it up a notch and takes a risky  dodge past the akuma’s fist to grab his necklace and break it. Chat noir is winded on the pavement while she finishes the ladybug cure and fixes things up.

He’s still winded when she comes over to get him moving, they’re down to about a minute on their timers and she is not interested in turning into a pumpkin. She gets worried when he says he’s not feeling well, and moreso when she can’t get him to stand up with 30 seconds left on the clock. She picks him up and dashes a couple streets over until she can find somewhere quiet - he detransforms before she can even put him down, and she looks before she can help herself.

She yells a little, this is a LOT to take in, but he’s still distracted by whatever is wrong with him. He doesn’t react particularly to the reveal, he just seems to be focusing on breathing, which worries ladybug. ‘Making sure he’s okay’ leapfrogs over ‘have a meltdown because i spent way more time with adrien agreste than i thought i did’ in her list of priorities, and she holds up three fingers and says “How many fingers am I holding up?”

Adrien looks at her, works his jaw a little, doesn’t answer, turns into a cat. in that order.

To answer your original question - at this point, plagg isn’t in the ring anymore. He’s hovering around, waiting for tikki, to see if she knows if this was the akuma, and if so why the miraculous cure didn’t work.

When adrien turns into a cat, his clothes don’t go with him, and the ring falls off of his shrinking hand. Ladybug picks it up, looking at it in her fingers as her costume melts off of them in a soft light. She pockets it as soon as she has pockets, and turns back to the black cat sitting next to her.

She says, “Chat noir…?” a little tentatively. She doesn’t want to say ‘adrien’ because she is Busy With This Crisis and Not Ready To Address that.

The black cat says, “Marinette?????” Which does not help her resolution to Not Address that.

She ignores the identity crisis and says “Are you okay? Chat noir. Do you - feel okay?? What happened?”

and he says, “You’re Ladybug??? Wh- Oh, wow, you are… wow…”

“Focus!” Marinette says, a little snappy because she’s stressed out, “Bigger fish, chat! How do you feel?”

Adrien says, “You look really tall. I feel okay. Kind of weird. Ooohhhhh my god.” (that last part is immediately after realizing he has paws)

She says, “You’re a cat,” and he says, “I’m a CAT” at the same time.

They run over a few quick talking points such as “why are you a cat” (they don’t know), “Do the kwamis know why you are a cat” (they don’t know), “Can you… turn back?” (He can’t, although he’s also not sure how to try), and, “Let’s not stay in the street, you should come stay with me. My parents like cats” (it’s true, they do).

Marinette picks him up (he doesn’t fight her on it, he’s understandably a little worried and could use the comfort) and takes him home. They don’t talk much on the way and marinette unfortunately thinks a LOT about how she’s carrying both chat noir AND adrien agreste. she tries not to lose her shit about it but doesnt do a great job.

and then you start from here: