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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 3797326" data-attributes="member: 40961">Because1) Under the current game design, a character's class determines what skills he can access, and even more importantly it is the most important determinant of how many skills that class can access.  If you want to make swashbucklers have more skills per level than a mounted knight, you have to have two classes.2) Classes provide an important balancing mechanism for preventing combo from breaking the power curve.  If Power A is appropriate for level 4, and Power B is appropriate for level 5, but Powers A and B combined are broken at level 5, you have to have some way to stop a player from having both at level 5.  Classes do this automatically by giving Power A to one class, and Power B to a different one.  A new way would have to be invented to fix this problem.3) Part of archetype driven design is what characters cannot do.  If the archetype of the swashbuckler is that he's a fast talker, but you give all the same fast talking abilities to the barbarian, you've screwed up the swashbuckler archetype.4) The most general answer to the "why can't that just be a feat?" question for 3.x, and now the "why can't that just be a talent tree?" question from 4e, is that if you make something a talent tree, you're stopping the player from picking something else.  This can harm the versatility of the system more than it helps.  If the 3e ninja were transformed into a feat chain for rogues, it might work on a certain level, but then a ninja character would have a bunch of rogue abilities they didn't want, and few feats to spend to customize themselves in any other way than by becoming a ninja.  This is sort of the opposite of point 2.</blockquote>

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