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<blockquote data-quote="Guest 6801328" data-source="post: 7262658">I feel like I should be lying on a couch while responding to this.&nbsp; It all starts with my mother....Um...cough...no, that is, what I meant to say is...Yes, it's true that you can flavor your characters however you want.&nbsp; I could easily say, &quot;My cleric is a barbarian cleric.&quot;&nbsp; But the same could also be said for fighters.&nbsp; Why do we need a Barbarian class when we could just write the word &quot;barbarian&quot; on our Fighter character sheet?&nbsp; I think it's because it's fun to have flavorful, evocative abilities.So just as it's fun to have an actual Barbarian Fighter class, I think it would be fun to have an actual Barbarian Cleric (Shaman?&nbsp; Witch-doctor?) class.&nbsp; The way this would get solved under the current model is to do exactly that: create a new class or sub-class.&nbsp; But I think the proliferation of classes and sub-classes is an inelegant way to solve the design goal: you end up trying to design completely unique abilities when there's a ton of overlap between the concepts, and the only combinations allowed are the ones that have been explicitly designed.&nbsp; As I mentioned earlier, I'm really talking about the difference between single vs. multiple-inheritance hierarchies.&nbsp; Certainly single-inheritance has the advantage of being easier to understand, but there are lots of problems that single-inheritance doesn't solve well.&nbsp; We already know that RPGs are one of them because we have three dimensions (class, race, background).&nbsp; Essentially what I'm saying is that one of those dimensions should carry more weight, and class should carry less.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Guest 6801328, post: 7262658"] I feel like I should be lying on a couch while responding to this. It all starts with my mother.... Um...cough...no, that is, what I meant to say is... Yes, it's true that you can flavor your characters however you want. I could easily say, "My cleric is a barbarian cleric." But the same could also be said for fighters. Why do we need a Barbarian class when we could just write the word "barbarian" on our Fighter character sheet? I think it's because it's fun to have flavorful, evocative abilities. So just as it's fun to have an actual Barbarian Fighter class, I think it would be fun to have an actual Barbarian Cleric (Shaman? Witch-doctor?) class. The way this would get solved under the current model is to do exactly that: create a new class or sub-class. But I think the proliferation of classes and sub-classes is an inelegant way to solve the design goal: you end up trying to design completely unique abilities when there's a ton of overlap between the concepts, and the only combinations allowed are the ones that have been explicitly designed. As I mentioned earlier, I'm really talking about the difference between single vs. multiple-inheritance hierarchies. Certainly single-inheritance has the advantage of being easier to understand, but there are lots of problems that single-inheritance doesn't solve well. We already know that RPGs are one of them because we have three dimensions (class, race, background). Essentially what I'm saying is that one of those dimensions should carry more weight, and class should carry less. [/QUOTE]

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