Quote Originally Posted by LordBlades View Post
Classes are metagame constructs gives players absolute creative freedom. Classes are in-game constructs has the tendency to kill some concepts. For me, the former is clearly superior to the latter.
For pure creative freedom (of character generation at least), the former is clearly superior.

As Talakael has pointed out, though, not everyone will approach the game this way. The fluff *is* there in each book, and while "mileage may vary" for how much everyone likes or appreciates it, some people do like it and would find their enjoyment of the game and immersion in the total game experience to be diminished by ignoring and/or changing it.

There is even an element of creative freedom opened up when one treats classes as in-game constructs, though this element is in world building and not character creation. Having classes as in-game constructs allows one to build regional variations or interesting organizations based off of different classes/ACFs/etc. being common or available only to certain segments of the game world. There's lots of examples of this sort of thing in classic fantasy literature (to say nothing of real life), so some people will get a lot of enjoyment out of participating in a world built this way.

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Just for the record, I'm not trying to advocate either position or impose anything on anyone. I'm just pointing out that a likely 'default' assumption that a heavy optimizer might use isn't a default assumption that everyone wants or cares to have, and that (as much as any "big numbers" it generates) might be a reason why heavy optimization gets more of a cold shoulder than it might otherwise expect.