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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6762554" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Isn't that what 4e did, though? "Fighter" became specifically the defense-oriented martial character, though it could do competent damage if you built for it even before the introduction of the Slayer. They forked out all the purely-killinate-stuff to Ranger, and the leader-of-men stuff to the Warlord. People complained that it was a horrible awful sin against God and Man that someone who wanted to play a "bow Fighter" had to play a Ranger. They also had Avengers, which are pretty Rogue-like but with distinctly Divine flavor. I don't recall a Primal or Arcane equivalent, though one could argue that the Bard (or maaaaaybe Artificer) could qualify, being all skilly and tricksy (or potion-y, for the Artificer), and of course there was the Assassin. You even had the Seeker as an attempt, albeit not very successful, to add further options for archery-focused characters.I mean sure, it's entirely possible that 4e could have gone further with this stuff--but I really think it's a question of degree and not kind. Particularly given how negatively much of this was received, even by 4e fans (Runepriest is just a weird Cleric! Seeker is just a poorly-made Controller Ranger! Assassin should be a Rogue thing!), and how much people bellyache about requests for stuff like an actual Warlord class in 5e. I agree with you, in that I think that making things a bit narrower and more focused would probably be good for the game, in terms of design...but I'm not sure most people want that, even if it WOULD be a better deal!Two answers. First: because you can identify an unconscious, naked member of a particular race (that is, without any ability to refer to behavior or equipment it is entirely possible to identify an individual's race/species, but almost impossible to identify their class).Second: Some people totally DO do that. Especially in 4e, lots of people talked of doing it. An example that comes to mind: a "Dwarf Noble" character, who was actually an Earthsoul Genasi. Her different stats and magical abilities were explained as a result of her noble heritage and (IIRC shamanic?) education. But she totally looked, talked, and acted like a (high-status) dwarf would.Honestly, this is one of the areas where I personally feel 4e kinda dropped the ball. They did a good job of making different weapons actually feel different--but they also made it fiddly and often an impediment to "fun" unless you treated all weapons as stat-sticks. I'm not entirely sure how to solve the problem (making axes feel distinct from swords means giving some meaning to the difference; letting someone use whatever weapon they like to fulfill their concept means reducing the meaning of the differences between them), but it does feel like an area that wasn't executed as well as it could have been.Actually, at least in 4e (and I *think* 5e as well? Correct me if I'm wrong), half-elf and half-orc are true-breeding, a distinct type of being from both 'origin races.' 4e, of course, actually gave some heft to the distinction, since both half-elves and half-orcs have unique abilities that aren't found among humans, orcs, or elves. We have no real standard of comparison for 5e orc vs. half-orc, but half-elves aren't super different from their parent races (especially Variant Human + pre-subrace Elf).As for the IRL vs. in-game thing: the terms really aren't used the same way. They may have a common origin, but they're pretty heavily divergent at this point. When "Fighter" can apply just as much to a Noble as a Street Urchin, it cannot possibly be the same kind of "class" as referred to in Marx's "class struggles." "Race" is much closer, I'll grant you that, but the assumption that cultural groups are defined along lines of genetic incompatibility (or un-hybridized states, for human/elf etc.) is not necessarily unwarranted. It requires a level of cultural adaptation to be able to process and accept, for instance, dynastic marriages between biologically incompatible parents (e.g. a dragonborn and a human, a dwarf and an elf, etc.) If the associated species also have dramatically different lifespans and physiological needs, the likelihood of tension and/or separation between the two is high. There's also the very simple "looks like us GOOD, not look like us BAD" tribalism, which has defined human social interactions practically from the dawn of time (just check out tensions between North African and Sub-Saharan African peoples, or the tensions between the various ethnic groups of East Asia,* or the hatred between the Arab and Kurdish populations of Iraq, or the current racial divisions which contribute to the horrible situation in France); differences which are both more dramatic and more fundamental than anything appearing among anatomically-modern humans could easily foster even deeper tribalist feelings. I mean, if Europeans were willing to burn people at the stake for having warts in the wrong places or something, can we really say that pseudo-medieval humanoids would never act that way toward beings that are demonstrably different from them biologically?*One of my high school teachers was a wonderful lady of Korean descent, though she was born and raised here in the States. Her husband, also a native-born American citizen, was of Chinese descent. Her (maternal, IIRC) grandmother, a native-born Korean, never quite got over the fact that her granddaughter had married a Chinese man, and had a tendency to express...uncomfortable opinions in private conversation. These sorts of lingering ethno-cultural attitudes are hardly uncommon even today. In a medieval kind of society, where average education levels are far lower and overall violence higher, it seems very plausible that such straightforward, obvious distinctions would be ready-to-hand justification for exclusion...if not worse.</blockquote>

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