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<blockquote data-quote="Starfox" data-source="post: 6178822" data-attributes="member: 2303">Actually, this has been a constant tension in all editions of DnD. Are classes professions/castes in the game world, or metagame constructs from which players are free to assemble characters to their liking? 1E and 2E was more the former, 3E tried to be the later but largely failed. Pathfinder has taken a step back from 3E and reintroduced classes as roles in the game world by discouraging multiclassing and introducing archetypes. 4E took it further than other editions by making classes very specific and introducing more and more classes, so that each of the original fighter/cleric/wizard/rogue classes became a role and each role then had 10-20 classes in it, orthogonally divided into origins. (4E also redefined the roles quite a bit.) The problem with this approach is that the more specific classes you introduce, the more glaring becomes the fact that there are other in-world professions you could not cover.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Starfox, post: 6178822, member: 2303"] Actually, this has been a constant tension in all editions of DnD. Are classes professions/castes in the game world, or metagame constructs from which players are free to assemble characters to their liking? 1E and 2E was more the former, 3E tried to be the later but largely failed. Pathfinder has taken a step back from 3E and reintroduced classes as roles in the game world by discouraging multiclassing and introducing archetypes. 4E took it further than other editions by making classes very specific and introducing more and more classes, so that each of the original fighter/cleric/wizard/rogue classes became a role and each role then had 10-20 classes in it, orthogonally divided into origins. (4E also redefined the roles quite a bit.) The problem with this approach is that the more specific classes you introduce, the more glaring becomes the fact that there are other in-world professions you could not cover. [/QUOTE]

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