NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 8418032" data-attributes="member: 7006">Parent classes are useless.  Because they are nothing more than holdovers from the origins of the game, but don't actually do what it seems we want them to do.What is the point of Parent classes?  Apparently to tell us one thing that "separates" different classes from each other.  But there is no rhyme nor reason on what people decide is the granularity of the separation.  I mean Parent classes could look like this:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Adventurer (1 Parent class)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Magic-user and Non-magic-user (2 Parent Classes)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">People focused on fighting, People focused on skill work, Magic-users (3 Parent classes)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">People focused on fighting, People focused on skill work, Divine magic-users, Arcane magic-users (4 Parent classes)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">People focused on fighting, People focused on skill work, Divine magic-users, Arcane magic-users, Primal Magic-users (5 Parent classes)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">People focused on fighting, People focused on skill work, Divine magic-users, Arcane magic-users, Primal Magic-users, Psionic magic-users (6 Parent classes)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">People focused on Combat Pillar, People focused on Exploration Pillar, People focused on Social Pillar, Divine magic-users, Arcane magic-users, Primal Magic-users, Psionic magic-users (7 Parent classes)</li> </ul>Where does it end?  And what's the point of these divisions?  Why do so many people insist on thinking the Divine / Arcane separation is an important one to keep, but don't think Primal or Psionic are necessary or should be baseline?  Presumably because "old D&D" made that distinction and thus it's somehow baked into the game (when in point of fact it isn't anything of the sort-- magic is magic, spellcasting is spellcasting, and there's no intrinsic reason to separate spells from each other.)And to go further... for all the people who want more "Non-magical" classes... what kind of Parent/Child separation would be there?  Right now the way we determine Parent classes for non-magical people is to only ever say "Combat-focused" and "Non-combat-focused".  So it's no wonder we never see other Parent classes (or even Child classes for that matter) because our method for categorizing them is stupidly small.  You either fight really well, or you fight less well but can have more skills.  That's it.  That's all we've come up with for the divisions between non-magical classes in all these years.  So if that's all we have... what other Parent or Child classes do we need?  Move the game into so-called Parent classes for Combat, Exploration, and Social, and maybe we could then get a third non-magical division?  Warriors, Scouts, and Communicators I guess.******Once again... I'm going to turn back and blow the horn that I say all the time... which is that the way we come up with our Classes is entirely based on STORY.  Not mechanical divisions.  The reason why we have Barbarians is because we give that class a story of what they are and why/how they do what they do.  The more distinct the story is... the more its importance as its own class becomes.  Then once the story is decided... if you want to get more granular in particular aspects of its story and create subclasses for it, fine.  But those are really just more descriptive variants, rather than important divisions.  Which means they really don't need more defining features.  Because if they were really that different in definition... they'd be their own classes and not just a variant of another one.  Which is exactly why the Ranger and the Paladin ARE NOT merely subclasses of the Fighter... because each of them have seen their story and their definition grow beyond the mere Fighter.  So trying to make the Fighter a Parent class again is useless, especially considering all Parent classes are useless as I mentioned above.</blockquote>

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