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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9068804" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Okay. The problem is, people are not making claims of the form: Fighters are popular relative to their accessibility.Instead, people are making claims of the form: The Fighter is universally popular, therefore this specific implementation is why it is popular.Both the premise and the conclusion are suspect. The former depends on questions we can't answer, assuming that frequency of use on DDB is equivalent to being popular, which doesn't hold (after all, many of these characters are NPCs!) Hence, we don't know Fighter is universally popular, and why I've repeatedly said people make far too strident claims for the data. The only thing the data unequivocally says is that many people who use DDB create Fighters, and relatively fewer create Wizards. It does not tell us that Fighters are universally popular.Moreover, even if it DID tell us that, it would NOT follow that these mechanics are why. I've said, repeatedly, the Fighter is always popular. AFAIK, in every edition, it's been either #1 or at least top 3. Why? We know the quality is uneven--consensus is the 3e Fighter was really quite bad--yet even when it's been bad, it has remained "popular," that is, chosen and played frequently. How to explain that? Well, per Occam's razor, the Fighter's popularity is orthogonal to whether it is good or not! (Same argument applies to humans. Humans are ALWAYS popular. Yet the 3e human kinda sucks! But it was still much more popular than better alternatives.)D&D players pick based on theme. It's not that they do not at all care about mechanics, though they may not strictly be able to identify what they like mechanically or why. Instead, it's that their picks usually occur before they even look at the mechanics of something. Hence, whether it is good or bad is irrelevant to what people choose to play--unless it is so egregiously, unconscionably bad they can't excuse it. That's why I quoted the Declaration of Independence, because it so neatly summarizes this situation.</blockquote>

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