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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9685979" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Exactly.If we take the "squint and they're similar enough" stance, easily half the classes of the game simply disappear in a puff of logic--all while genuinely reducing the number of well-supported archetypes the game contains.Barbarian, Ranger, Paladin, and Rogue could all be Fighter subclasses--if you're willing to make them little more than paper-thin mechanics desperately trying to contain a vast thematic package. But you don't see people clamoring for the removal of Barbarians, for example, even though their thing LITERALLY could just be a Fighter subclass feature and would lose almost nothing! (To be clear, I'm not hating on the Barbarian as a class, I think it's good to have and I really quite like some of the new creative ideas like Path of the World Tree, but those are pretty clearly "okay, what can we invent that justifies this class?" and not "this is an obvious extension of the core theme" the way that, say, Cleric domains are.)Class reductionism nearly always suffers from some degree of special pleading, because any argument which justifies folding existing classes together almost always also justifies merging Wizard and Cleric or Rogue and Fighter, two things most ultra-reductionist fans refuse to do. It's quite rare to find folks who fully take their own arguments seriously and thus collapse things down all the way to a two- or one-class system. (Two if you decide that "casts spells" and "uses weapons" are enough to justify different classes; one if you don't; both are compatible with most arguments that claim certain classes should be merged with others.)Of course, a lot of this then actually is rooted in a completely different argument, generally one in the space of "system doesn't matter" and/or hostility to mechanical representation of thematic or conceptual elements beyond the absolute bare-minimum bare-bones elements, which is a common but not universal position taken by old-school fans. Folks who aren't so much into old-school design generally favor having at least some degree of inherent specialization in class design, so that different class fantasies truly feel distinct, rather than being smushed together into an indistinguishable grey mass.</blockquote>

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