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<blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9244955" data-attributes="member: 7026617">I did not.&nbsp; I may feel that way on a personal level (or at least that its more versatile) but I think you're projecting a claim I never made.&nbsp; All I've said is that the dominance of the class-based approach does not actually tell you the opposite; it might if class and non-class based CRPGs had emerged at the same time in force and the class based ones had been the survivors, but just like in the tabletop case, that's not what happened, and once something gets an early lead in a field, the only way it loses that lead is if other options are blatantly superior or some outside event produces it.This is a particularly muddy case with the thing called &quot;classes&quot;, because even more than their tabletop version, what exactly that means has mutated extensively over time; an old school Wizardry class, like their D&amp;D cohort was pretty rigid, did what it did, and two of them were unlikely to differ much barring differences in attributes.&nbsp; Contrast that with something like an XCOM2 class, which is a bucket of advancement lines where any two of them can be quite different barring their weapon sets (and even that can vary somewhat); similarly, there are FTF game &quot;classes&quot; that have considerable overlap barring one or two things (the most extreme case I ever saw being Alternity classes, where you could end up with a combat engineer built from either a Combat Spec or a Tech Op, and it might be impossible for an outside observer who did not have access to their sheet to tell which was which for quite some time.Essentially, to make it clear, my only argument is that this is a case where you cannot say anything much one way or another about how &quot;good&quot; any D&amp;D derived mechanics are from popularity, because at the point they came to dominate design, they had the field largely to themselves, and now its become the default way someone does things unless they actively decide to take another tact for some reason.&nbsp; Its not, essentially, a level playing field.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Thomas Shey, post: 9244955, member: 7026617"] I did not. I may feel that way on a personal level (or at least that its more versatile) but I think you're projecting a claim I never made. All I've said is that the dominance of the class-based approach does not actually tell you the opposite; it might if class and non-class based CRPGs had emerged at the same time in force and the class based ones had been the survivors, but just like in the tabletop case, that's not what happened, and once something gets an early lead in a field, the only way it loses that lead is if other options are blatantly superior or some outside event produces it. This is a particularly muddy case with the thing called "classes", because even more than their tabletop version, what exactly that means has mutated extensively over time; an old school Wizardry class, like their D&D cohort was pretty rigid, did what it did, and two of them were unlikely to differ much barring differences in attributes. Contrast that with something like an XCOM2 class, which is a bucket of advancement lines where any two of them can be quite different barring their weapon sets (and even that can vary somewhat); similarly, there are FTF game "classes" that have considerable overlap barring one or two things (the most extreme case I ever saw being Alternity classes, where you could end up with a combat engineer built from either a Combat Spec or a Tech Op, and it might be impossible for an outside observer who did not have access to their sheet to tell which was which for quite some time. Essentially, to make it clear, my only argument is that this is a case where you cannot say anything much one way or another about how "good" any D&D derived mechanics are from popularity, because at the point they came to dominate design, they had the field largely to themselves, and now its become the default way someone does things unless they actively decide to take another tact for some reason. Its not, essentially, a level playing field. [/QUOTE]

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