Quote Originally Posted by Tyndmyr View Post
What? Why? Let us take the fighter/ranger/barbarian. Dude who fights people with weapons, gets angry, and has some tracking/natural skills. Add PrCs as desired. This is not a terribly eccentric character. Hell, it could easily describe Aragorn.
I'm going to go back to this for a second. I don't know how Aragon would be anything but a pure ranger. He is practically the template for which the ranger class was built around. And at least those classes match up in a reasonable manner, but it seems like an odd combination to take from a character, rather then player, perspective because all of the classes are still basically mundane combatants.


But as I was thinking about responding it just occurred to me how much I was attacked for a simple question. Especially since just attacked rather then answering the question I already asked. Of course I realize that my later responses probably don't seem like that but thats mostly because I, as tends to be expected when attacked, got rather defensive.

I asked how people justified making seemingly (in character) random choices in advancement with a character when the reasons for those choices are entirely based on player knowledge. Not that they can't be justified or that they are wrong, but how does someone come up with those justifications. Especially when its taking some rather odd choice now knowing that you will need it in 4 levels when you multiclass to some prestige class you haven't yet run into in-game and likely wouldn't have any in-character knowledge of.
It does tend to be a campaign specific type answer though because some classes might have a lot of representation in a world, another class, such as the scoundrel might only have a couple of them in the entire world.


As an aside, I would say that in any case where RAW and RAI is clearly different and you specifically take the RAW interpretation instead then you aren't roleplaying, you are opening acknowledging that you are part of a game system and taking advantage of that. Not necessarily a common problem, but I see it brought up periodically in optimization threads.