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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7726342" data-attributes="member: 996">Interestingly, when viewing a group of people, there's also a tendency to over-estimate the overall prevalence of the 'others' in that group.   But... but.... no, we're D&D-playing-nerds, we're a rarefied, exclusive, intellectual elite!  ;PSeriously, though, whatever the individual bias about system-mastery or Role-not-Roll or pick-your-GNS-letter or whatever, the underlying system is the same starting point in each case.   The system master, thespian, and old-schooler may have different ideas about whether a character 'should' have a 20 or what it means - but it's a +5 bonus for each of them, regardless of that bias.  They're relatively popular - moreso than you might expect from the general prejudice against all things 4e.  Perhaps, in part, because the Tiefling is way older than that, and the Dragonborn a fair stand-in for the Munchkin-beloved Half-Dragon.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> The arguably worst-designed class is also in the middle of the pack.  I think it's more likely that the popularity of the class has nothing at all to do with the quality of the design.  If quality of design were a high priority for you, you'd likely be looking hard at 13A and indie games after suffering through a few sessions of D&D.  ;P(I love D&D, honestly, but I'm not delusional about it.  It's designs have often been indifferent.  On the rare occasion it produces something functional or elegant, it's generally ruined by association with the rest of the current version of game and/or its environment.) That would be cool, but D&D has never actual gone there officially. (Ironically so, because EGG was letting his players do just that back in the primeval period - see if you can dig up the Giants in the Earth write-up of Myrlund, I think it was, a wizard re-skinned as an old-west inventor.)  Starting with AD&D the game on a more and more of rule-for-everything attitude, so there was less 'need' to have "counts as" variants, even the option of changing the cosmetic appearance of a magical spell was quantified in 2e with the spell-affecting-spell 'Sense Shifting.'  The WotC era started to stray from that, even as 3e got more detailed than ever, it /did/ explicitly put the appearance of the character & it's gear in the hands of the player, so you could go pretty far afield - I once played a cleric who's caster's shield was described as a book, for a minor instance.  You could mess around with race pretty dramatically.  You just couldn't change the underlying mechanics.  But, 4e took it too far - the player was free to re-write the 'fluff' line of his powers, and that was part of the huge push-back we got about magic no longer being magical - though, even in 4e, you couldn't actually change a spell into something non-magical, the keywords, like 'Arcane' were off-limits to casual re-skinning.  5e is in no small part a reaction to that (and many other things in 4e), and has very clear lines drawn about what's magic and what isn't and a few, somewhat important mechanics, hang on that distinction.So if you want to heal non-magically with herbs, take the skill, take the feat - the spell makes you a caster. Yep.  Magical powers that in 4e were divied up by 'Source' in 5e are back to almost all being 'spells,' and all being explicitly magical.  That means they can't be included in a character concept that isn't overtly magical, for good or ill.  The good is that magic is 'really magical' again.  The ill is that concepts that can't accommodate magical abilities build from a very limited set of blocks:  Berserker, Campion, BM, Thief & Assassin.  And, yes, every 5e class /can/ use spells in one form or another - the Totem Barbarian only in the form of a few rituals, Monks by fueling them with Ki, everyone else with actual spellcasting.  It's really more a case of a few classes - Monk, Barbarian, Fighter, Rogue having the option to not use spells in one or more sub-classes, and even fewer having the option to not use magic, at all - Barbarian, Fighter, & Rogue, only.The prevalence of hard-coded magic, particularly spells, in 5e is one of the factors that channels players to those last three classes that are only soft-coded to use magic, that is, have magic abilities available in only one sub-class.  All three of those classes, even the narrow-concept Barbarian, are in the top 4 classes in the data, and the fighter, the class the designers have lamented making 'too generic,' is firmly in the #1 spot.  Point, the Autherian cycle did get deeply religious (even if there were uncomfortable bits, like Excalibur essentially coming from a sort of genius loci), and 'King's Magic' was certainly a thing.  Those abilities don't remotely map to D&D spells, but, yeah, between Lay on Hands not technically being a spell, and burning slots exclusively to smite, a Paladin could do well.  I'll relent on him - and Galahad/Percival was certainly a major inspiration for the Paladin, anyway.  Most of the rest of the Knights of the Round Table, though, didn't go that far and D&D could only attempt to model them with fighters. I didn't do that, the system did.  The system gives Rangers and Paladins spells, and Barbarians Rage, and makes Rogues dependent on SA in combat, the system gives Paladins & Barbarians very strongly-defined, relatively narrow, conceptual space.  The system left the Fighter comparatively generic in both ability and concept.   That makes them the default.  It's far from ideal - the fighter often lacks abilities a given character /should/ have, but can't gain without accepting abilities it shouldn't - but there's no other way to parse it.   It was an herb, and had more to do with his heritage than his 'class.'  It wasn't a spell.  Healer feat would probably be a closer fit in 5e.  A custom Background, perhaps, though things he eventually did went beyond that - more like a 4e Epic Destiny, really.   But casting spells every fight to shoot people better?  Nah.  Fighter - or spell-less Ranger were that an option.One of several narrow definitions, yes, exactly.  Because the other classes are narrow definitions and 'you must cast spells' is a hard-coded part of most of those definitions.   The more so because D&D, even at it's height, has been enjoyed by only a tiny minority of people.  It's positively 'elite' in that sense.  More pistachio or roasted-garlic* than vanilla in the ice cream analogy....<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=":)" />* not as bad as you might think, if you ever go to the Gilroy Garlic Festival, give it a try.</blockquote>

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