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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9419408" data-attributes="member: 7026617">Well, my feeling is that's been true about the majority of classes in D&D since day one; if anything it was even more true in the early days, even with spellcasters since you only had a limited degree of control over what spells you knew, and a rather lot of them were combat or combat-support focused.You can make an argument about the early thief perhaps, though even then that surprise strike was right there.You don't have to have complex class mechanics to produce this result though.  An OD&D Fighting Man really wasn't good for much except what it said on the tin, and the mechanics were downright schematic back then.  You can, of course, pull out the whole tendency in the OSR to avoid mechanics whenever they can in some cases, but at that point it almost doesn't matter what you're playing (and I still wonder if in a lot of cases people not entirely onboard that may attempt to steer solutions toward things that do have mechanics because they at least know what they can and can't do in advance there).Basically my line about classes "as they are now" wasn't in contrast with any particular past take on them so much as to cut off any discussion of theoretically non-combat focused classes that could be created (though I think that only solves half the issue).</blockquote>