Nobody Plays These Either

Okay, so a while back I did a post pointing out that nobody plays gnomes and they only play halflings for the thief bonuses.  Just today over at Papers & Pencils was a post on analysis of the barbarian class in Pathfinder (hopefully the first in a series).  I'm on board with his analysis of the class, but then I realized that in 30+ years of gaming I've only seen one person play a barbarian.  Yup, just one.  Likewise the bard.  I've only seen two or three sorcerers (and even then only as a multiclass option).  Wizards are also very rare, probably about three ever.

A lot of the old school renaissance rules coming out now are pushing the idea of only having the fighter, cleric, magic user, and thief as classes.  Some even limit it to fighter, "spellcaster", and thief.  That idea puts me off immediately because it greatly limits player choice.  What's the point of having a class-based game if you only have three or four classes?  Um, well, now that I think about it, from my experience the only classes which I've really seen get played a lot are fighter, cleric, monk, paladin, ranger, and rogue.  Hmm.