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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Keldryn" data-source="post: 6078564" data-attributes="member: 11999">Interpretations of the paladin code in AD&D was a pretty common topic of discussion in the "Letters" and "Forum" sections of Dragon magazine.  It may have worked well in your groups, and I never experienced any significant issues firsthand, but paladins seems to have worked poorly for many other groups due to differences of interpretation in how they should be played.  From a modern perspective, with RPG design having been refined over the past 40 years, I think that it's a poor design in general.  The AD&D ranger, druid, cavalier, and barbarian classes are marred by a similar design philosophy (to varying degrees).Hasn't every version of D&D featured classes with artificially-limited choices of weapons and armor?  Singling out 4e as doing that for the purpose of creating a clear visual reference for artists and such is not only overly cynical, but I don't think it holds up to the evidence.The 4e classes don't have identical weapons and armor proficiencies to what they had in previous editions, but none of them have strayed very far.  They seem very much informed by what the classes were given in previous editions, tweaked to fit into how the classes were re-designed in the 4e paradigm of roles and power sources.Fighters lose default proficiency with plate armor, while paladins retain it.  The knight subclass of fighter (from Essentials) also starts with proficiency in plate armor.  For the PHB fighter, it's only one feat to obtain proficiency, and he will most likely meet the STR and CON requirements for the feat.Clerics aren't proficient with any armor heavier than scale, which likely serves two purposes.  Not only to differentiate from the heavily-armed and armored divine warrior (paladin), but also it seems that chain armor is the baseline for leader-role classes (the bard and warlord have the same). Rangers could wear heavy armor in 2e and were still proficient with medium armor in 3.x, but a number of their abilities wouldn't function, so they were effectively restricted to light armor anyway.  The martial strikers focus on mobility, so the armor restriction fits the concept.  Rangers had abilities that were only useful when wielding a bow or dual weapons long before 4e arrived.Rogues (thieves) have always been associated with leather armor, and in some versions weren't allowed to wear any other kind of armor.  The restriction to smaller, easily-concealed weapons is hardly without president (check out the AD&D 1e allowed weapons) and fits the flavor of the class.All of the primal classes (barbarian, druid, etc) are set up to favor light (non-metal) armor and have class abilities to prevent them from getting hosed for doing so.  This goes right back to the AD&D incarnations of the druid and barbarian.4e is also the first edition of D&D that allows virtually any character class to wear any sort of armor without it completely blocking their special abilities.  It's an expensive investment of feats (which have high STR and CON prerequisites for heavier armors), but there is no spell failure for wizards casting in armor and druids won't lose all of their spells and supernatural abilities for putting on a suit of metal armor or using a "prohibited" weapon.There is certainly a heavily-implied default playstyle to each class -- which I don't see as a bad thing, as it makes it clear to players in what situations a class will be most effective -- but there is a lot of flexibility within that playstyle.  There are also many ways to break out of that default playstyle through different builds or subclasses.I think that the good alignment restriction and giant-class creature bonus come from the LOTR-inspired ranger archetype:  not so much a woodland scout but a hardy, commando-like warrior operating on the fringes of civilization, keeping the evil creatures at bay.  Given the assumed setting implicit in Gygax's D&D, this would be human civilization (hence the racial restriction to human or half-elf and not allowing elves) and the evil creatures assaulting the borders would be giants, orcs, goblins, and the like.  They are "good" because their primary purpose is to protect civilized lands at great risk to their own lives.It's a pretty narrow archetype, but the ranger's connection with nature wasn't really much more than a side effect of operating away from cities and towns.</blockquote>

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