Race bases classes- why?

This is something that shits me off. Flicking through an otherwise good looking system, then you see they are trying too hard to to be old school, or too hard to be different and they blend race and class and restrict certain classes to certain races.

This inevitably leaves behind even quite common archetypes like dwarf rangers for example, not only overly restricting player choice but also the DM's in fleshing out their world with a sensibly broad array of NPCs, unless of course they do uneccessary work rewriting stat blocks.

Class really is just a person's role in society, so it makes sense for certain races to not do certain things. Cultural homogenization shouldn't be a thing.
For instance, a race of people living in a mountain range in the center of a large continent shouldn't be allowed to be a pirate, or a race of desert dwellers shouldn't be allowed to be a class adept in woodsmanship.

It's a balancing act, but it also makes sense. Don't get me wrong, it does get irritating seeing the same archetypes over and over, but this is a problem with the setting, rather than the system itself. If you love a system enough, you should be able to rework the details in order to set things straight.

Im blocked

>This inevitably leaves behind even quite common archetypes like dwarf rangers
You were making a good question until you decided to b6

In short, a lot of old school systems do it because they're clones of old (in the case of race-as-class, specifically Basic) D&D, although it's trivial to work out how to calculate XP requirements and etc. if you decide to open them up to all races. The OSR in general kind of expects you to tinker with the system and build houserules upon houserules, so this isn't a major inconvenience for a lot of the demographic for retroclones.

>a race of desert dwellers shouldn't be allowed to be a class adept in woodsmanship.
What if one of them leaves and ends up living in a forest? The restriction from 'woodmsmanship' becomes arbitrary at that point.

maybe a quota system needs to be put in place to make sure minority races are getting equal class representation?

Race-as-class isn't intended to represent the entirety of the race, but the individuals who are likely to become adventurers. Restricted classes are often meant to represent that x race doesn't have the aptitude to become y class. The Doylist explanation is that it's there for simplicity, and the games that do it tend to not care a lot about giving the players a lot of mechanical choice.

I'm sure they were just examples not meant to be thought about too much but a pirate would easily be made by creating, for example, a rogue or fighter perhaps multiclassing with advancement, making sure to choose relevant athletic and navigational skills. "Pirate" as a specific class is likely to be some setting specific splatbook material that the DM will include if it's relevant to the campaign.

When I think of a woodsman I think of bushcraft skills, living off the land, otherwise they are just a forester. So tracking, hunting, gathering, finding safe sources of water, surviving environmental extremes, typical ranger fare. These are all skills a desert dweller needs also. That class can and should cover a wide variety of archetypes and skills than just Strider clones.

>It's a balancing act, but it also makes sense. Don't get me wrong, it does get irritating seeing the same archetypes over and over, but this is a problem with the setting, rather than the system itself.
That's exactly my gripe. I'm not a fan of special snowflake shit like tieflings for example, but as a DM it's my setting and I'm free to choose those tools from the box and tell my players "no wuxia half-orcs this time".

What the fuck is "b6", you trying to coin a phrase for low effort bait? As bloated as WHFB was, before it got axed it still would have been still the most popular fantasy tabletop wargame. Dwarf rangers are a unit and a bit of a thread running through the background of that game. There's the Hobbit, dwarf diaspora driven from their home hold, from memory several of them were pretty much itinerants, bushcraft skills would fit in very well there.

It's particularly annoying for me because I've never actively shopped around for a retroclone, but many lightweight rulesets also go for similar oversimplified class/race lists. Just because I want something relatively lightweight doesn't mean I want to run a tabletop equivalent of a single dev indie roguelike.

I like how Adventurer Conquerer King did it, where dwarves and elves get their own classes, but they each get multiple classes to choose from. I think that makes sense, as a different race is going to have different roles for their adventurers than humans would due to cultural and physical differences, and it emphasizes these inherent differences rather than other games that make race a secondary choice at best, while still allowing for choice should a player wish to play a dwarf or elf.

Most rule sets with race-as-class don't have a ranger class, so if you wanted to play a dwarf who is good at surviving in the wilderness there's nothing to stop you.

I got this from my old DM once, he had a stick up his ass about Race/Class combos. Always like "It doesn't make sense if you're a Halfling Fighter, cause they're small" or "It's not realistic to be a Dwarf Bard cause they're not charismatic enough" to our group members.
Needless to say he railroaded us a lot during the games.
Finally I got fed up with him when I wanted to play an Orc Wizard, I wasn't even trying to make a meme character I had actually come up with a cool story for this guy and he shot it down cause 'Orcs are too stupid to be wizards'
I told him he was too stupid to DM.

ACKs also has a solid system for writing your own classes.

This is what keeps me out of OSR games. Not specifically race as class, but I'll be reading, nodding my head and then, record scratch, some early D&D sacred cow. Race as class, percentile skill rolls, xp by gold, etc. And you don't often hear the sales pitch on why these ideas make any design sense, more likely some reasoning to patch their inclusion as a sacred cow.

I like them to be restricted like a lot of the racial paragon paths in 4e were: Because they are tied into something physiological with the race. No, other races can't learn to be that paragon path because it's about focusing on your Dragonic Breath as a Dragonborn and other races don't have that ability. No, non-eladrin can't learn to be that paragon path because it's about Fey Step a unique ability to that race.

>common archetypes like dwarf rangers
The fuck are you talking about
I would’ve given you dwarf clerics, but you’re just delusional

ACK annoyed me because the non human classes in the main book were so limited. Once you add in some of the ones in the DM's guide the race specific readymade classes look a lot more attractive, then there's solid rules for building classes.

Fight back with a creative premise to play with the idea anew. Have a setting where there are your basic classes, but some insane mage and/or alchemist has decided to mess with the code of reality, in the form of insane genetic and magic experiments (and with the nature of classes, whatever form of power those take in the setting), in order to conceptually take the 'powers' of a race, and turn them into a 'class' to augment some strange army or sell on black market as a weird mutant path to strength.

Have a soft touch of meta to it with the idea of the system being fooled into accepting 'Elf' as a class at level 2, which suddenly grants the Human Fighter who took it a bonus to Dex, some night vision, and an increased appearance. Suddenly he wonders, on this path, is it possible to try to take class levels in something like Dragon? Archon? Concepts even more complex and conceptual?

Or keep it simple, stupid, and have fun allowing the idea of hybrid races purely through race-class levels of a limited list, meaning your human has to work to achieve the secret to their snowflakey half-elfdom, or wonder at the implications of a Water Elemental taking a class of Fire Elemental and how that gives you a big bad who is a reality-harming paradoxical Nuclear Element.

Most of those mechanics are used because of their simplicity. I find the OSR community is fairly self aware about "sacred cows" + they expect all dms to house rule to their tastes

Classes are a mistake

The only thing I dislike about that is how every race that isn't a human doesn't have any cultural variation. Some human nations are good on horseback, others make good armor, others are good with magic. But in shitty systems some races aren't even given enough flavor.

But honestly it all comes down to me disliking class systems.

I don't think it should be written in rules, though, as these things tend to be very setting-dependent. While there are certain races that thematically fit the basic concept of some races better than others, writing in the rules that, for example, dwarves can never be pirates is veyr limiting when in some setting dwarf pirates might be perfectly sensible (Warhammer actually had a band of dwarf pirates as one of the mercenary units in the "Dogs of War" book). I think the rules shouldn't take stance on what race can be what class (barring some specialist classes tied to the lore of a particular setting, but those are usually better off as prestige classes or class specializations, rather than a full class), and instead the GM should decide whether dwarf pirates or elf barbarians make sense in their setting or not.

If you're going to have classes and races then there should be in built features of both that interact with each other to create something unique in combination without actually being a separate option. This is the most difficult but rewarding part of game design.

So a dwarven ranger should play differently to an elven ranger due to the way dwarf and elf abilities interact with ranger abilities, not because there is a class called dwarven ranger and a class called elven ranger.

>Race bases classes- why?

Mechanically, what is Legolas? A fighter? Surely not - that's the same as Boromir and Boromir doesn't walk on top of snow drifts. Ranger? Not at all - the Rangers are Aragorn and his kith and kin.

Legolas is, as his primary characteristic, an Elf.

Levels are a mistake

RPGs are a mistake

You’re so wrong on the count of gold as XP. That is such a fundamentally important part of the pre-3e paradigm. And it’s also the feature people expound the most.

Race as class makes perfect sense. It's just that the way the human classes are named leads to misinterpretation. For example, a fighting man is not merely a human who trained to be a fighter. In that case every town guard would have a level in fighter. A fighter is a special genetic case, who is also an adventurer. Some people are just born prodigies, which a fighter is.
Likewise, a wizard is a misnomer. Not everyone who wants to learn how to cast spells, can. Some humans are just born with the aptitude, the ones who adventure are called wizards. Think of them more like sorcerers who learn how to harness their power than some random cunt who decided they wanted to warp reality one day.
In this sense, race as class makes perfect sense. All classes are in fact racial cllasses, with the human ones just being human subspecies/mutants.