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over other races only, to set your character apart in accordance with their race, but not to outdo, necessarily, other characters.

What is more important to your overall character is what they can do, and this is determined by their character class; note that career, discipline, job, position, or any other word describing the job of a character in a role-playing group may be substituted for class, but all of them mean the same thing, and class is the industry-recognized term for what your character does. Despite what it is called, all classes determine what your character does in the group, and they are generally comprised of attribute bonuses you gain for going into the class, or that you can buy as the game progresses and you earn experience, and also of the skills and talents your character may now possess as a result of their training. As well, exits into new classes/careers may be given, or if your character is meant to remain within their own class/career for their life, it will give a table of bonuses granted to your character as you proceed through the levels.

In the beginning of the role-playing craze it was decided that players would be able to advance in one character class through the life of the character, and so bonuses were developed to aid players in seeing how their characters would increase. The flaw in this was it didn't matter how many characters of that class you made, the only changes to that character would be in the attributes themselves, and the bonuses derived from the attributes; otherwise, the characters were carbon copies of their predecessors. This sort of character increase through the life of the game was acceptable at the time, and is still practiced in certain game systems such as D&D and Palladium.

However, as time progressed and new designs of role-playing games were developed, the idea of multi-classing -taking on the mantle of multiple role-playing classes- became popular, and variations in characters became more prominent, fun to play. Multi-classing gave way to problems for players and the GM (GameMaster) alike, and eventually rules were developed to allow players to multi-class without undue penalties, but with enough penalties between learning two or more different classes, making the task formidable but not impossible, to allow the GM to control the character if necessary.

Eventually, multi-classing developed into dynamic skill systems, where a player could develop their character with the skills they saw fit to possess

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