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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 7146154" data-attributes="member: 6683613">We're shooting our imagination in the foot because we're actually inventing a way for the possibility space in our world to be narrower than the rules imply. Since, as you say, it doesn't take a significant amount of imagination to posit the lack of an ability, it doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to take the NPC stat blocks at face value. And yet here we are, trying to fit these NPCs into pigeonholes which the text gives no indication they were intended for.Your implication throughout this discussion seems to have been that if a PC encountered a "wizard" who didn't know the trick of Arcane Recovery, their in-character reaction would be something along the lines of "What?! That's impossible! How can you cast wizard magic without knowing that? My confidence in the metaphysical consistency of our reality is forever shattered!" This seems frankly absurd to me. It indicates a level of metagame knowledge of the rules that the characters are unlikely to possess -- and what's worse, bad metagame knowledge, since the actual rules are clearly just fine with featureless mages. The more likely response is "Huh, guess I'm just cleverer than you. Moving on." The class system is not "how the world works"; it's only how the very small subset of the population that is hardcore enough to make a living hunting dragons works.</blockquote>