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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6260664" data-attributes="member: 22424">Why? No, seriously - why is "it time"? These ideas are nothing more than tools to do a particular job. As, as with all tools, they should both be under continuous scrutiny to see if there's a better way, but they also do not have any built-in expiration date. Saying "it's time to retire" some game mechanic just because it's old is like saying we should retire the wheel because it's positively ancient! The reason we keep the wheel around is not simply a matter of nostalgia - it's because it continues to perform a useful function. If character classes (or hit points, or XP, or the bloodied condition, or weapon powers, or...) continue to perform a useful function they should continue to be used, whether they're an hour old, a year old, forty years old, 40,000 years old, or longer.(And, conversely, if it does not serve a purpose then it absolutely should be retired, again regardless of age. What I reject is not "let's get rid of classes"; it's "let's get rid of classes because they magically became useless at 40 years of age.")Numenera has classes: Nano, Jack, and Glaive. It just calls them a different name. And "everyone else does it" is, I'm afraid, a poor argument - it's entirely possible everyone else is wrong. (Or, more likely, "everyone else" has a particular set of needs that leads to one solution, while we have a different set of needs that might lead to a different solution.)Of course, Pathfinder also uses classes (for obvious reasons, given its heritage). And what you seem to have neglected is that while there may be more games that don't use classes than that do, there are vastly more gamers who play games with classes than those that do not - D&D and Pathfinder between them represent an enormous chunk of the market.I'm happy to play a game that has classes. I'm happy to play a game that doesn't have classes. I don't really care - as you say, we don't need classes to describe a character, but for some games I do find them useful.But for D&D, classes are a sacred cow. I doubt I will ever see an edition of D&D that doesn't include classes as the default approach - and if such an edition were to be published, I rather suspect it would be the last edition.</blockquote>

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