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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 6785246" data-attributes="member: 7635">Thanks.To me, its less "Every paladin is a member of a holy order called 'Paladin'," as much more "belongs to a certain profession or calling that call themselves 'Paladin'." To me, it would be like "Doctor", "Teacher", "Lawyer" or "Engineer", it describes a certain set of skills only some people learn and that makes them distinct. They don't all have exactly the same skills (a doctor can be a GP, a specialist, or surgeon), they don't all belong to the same fraternal order (not all teachers belong to a universal group or union) but they all can say "I'm a doctor" or "I'm a teacher" and it conveys a real thing to others. So if we opt to play Papers & Paychecks, I could argue there very well could be a Doctor or Teacher or Lawyer class, and that class would represent something to the world in the same way a Paladin or Druid or Bard does to the D&D world. Again, we're assuming not all bursts of fire are viewed the same and there is a tangible, discernable difference between a wizard's fireball and a cleric's flame strike. Of course, this gets into realms of discussion about the nature of magic, the ability to discern a supernatural ability from a spell (such as Wild Shape from casting Polymorph) and the general knowledge or stereotypes of the world ("I heard that guy has a destructive temper, he might be one of them barbarians I hear about"). That would only be true IF the only options in the world is to be one of the twelve classes, and no version of D&D does that. Not every minstrel needs to be a bard for there to be a "Bard" concept that encompasses the bard class. The PHB in 5e starts six classes with the phrase "Not all X are Y" where X is a related concept (tribal warriors, wandering minstrels, temple servants, soldiers) are Y class (barbarians, bards, clerics, fighters). It iS fair to ask "Are all Y a part of X" (Are all barbarians tribal warriors, are all bards wandering minstrels, all all clerics temple servants, etc) and that's really this debate. Well, with some variance of course; there are subclasses, feats, racial traits, multiclassing and possibly prestige classes all mucking up the observable data, but I don't think its unreasonable to draw SOME inferred abilities and attach them to a class title; such as "All paladin's can sense unnatural good or evil beings" or "All druids can transform into animals" or "All barbarian's tap into their rage to fight recklessly". To me, that would be a fair enough generalization on par with "All doctors tend toward pacifism due to the hippocratic oath" or "all teachers tend to be scholarly" or "all lawyers are Evil" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" /> . I'm sure there are exceptions, but more often than not they prove the rule.</blockquote>

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