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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6279684" data-attributes="member: 4937">In practice it doesn't work that way though.A spellcasting class is easily retrofitted by just adding spells.  Since spellcasting classes have lots of spell slots, you can easily configure them to any new concept you want once the spells are available.Until 3e came along, there was no way to retrofit non-spellcasting classes to expand their purview.  The impetus to create something like the Cavalier is precisely that the existing classes didn't seem to do the job because something like Fighter just wasn't configurable the way that a spellcaster was.   When 3.X came along, the tools to retrofit martial classes were there in the form of feats, but feats _seemed_ so easy to design (how could anything so short be hard?) that we got a flood of poor implementations that soured people on them.  To make matters worse, the original rules gave mundane classes far less feats and skills than it gave spellcasters spells.  And so designers continued to follow the easier path of inventing whole new classes to implement whatever fighters or rogues or whatever couldn't implement.  But in doing so, they silo'd those abilities as class abilities, available only if you multiclassed.  Yes.  Because each mundane class ends up with a narrow shard of mundane abilities it is claiming for itself.  You can share spells easily, but you can't easily share and acquire classes.  You can sort of dabble around in multiple classes with similar themes if the designer makes the mistake of front loading them, but that itself creates a mess.  Whatever ends up as a class ability, doesn't end up as a feat (or a skill), which means the fighter loses access to them.  If the fighter gains the class abilities of another class in the form of transporting those class abilities to feats, one of two things becomes clear.  Either a) the new classes are strictly superior fighters in as much as they are fighters with a greater number of bonus feats (imagine a scenario with an archer class, hoplite class, juggernaut class, axman class, cavalier class, etc) or b) the original class is now redundant because you can implement the exact some character with the exact same abilities as a fighter.  In practice, this prevent migration of class abilities into feats.  And in 3.X, in practice it meant that most new fighter replacement classes really were strictly superior fighters with a larger number of skills and bonuses feats (but a more fixed progression), further depricating the fighter (and leading to power creep, although this was in part being driven by spellcasters in the lead).Again, if you could build it as a fighter, I doubt anyone would ever think to create the alternate class.</blockquote>

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