Quote Originally Posted by Kurald Galain View Post
No, most early classes exist to represent a particular literary archetype. The classes that aren't (such as the avenger, and everything from PHB3) tend not to be very popular.
That's a bit of a stretch, since, say, fighters haven't been a solid literary reference since after 2e. And even then, fighters would frequently fall short of their hype (Hercules indeed!). Also, the game goes out of its way to make the archetypes mechanically defined in particular ways, so you can't really take one from out of the other. The mechanics and the archetype tend to be stuck together.

As for avengers, they are, in fact, a literary archetype - two really. They're cloistered monastics who are also assassins. There are a lot of both types, and some do this better than others, but they're the only ones who are both in one as part of a single package deal. The monk, psion, and runepriest are also fairly well-established archetypes from out of PHB3 - monks are another type of monastic character, in this case one that draws from a lot of martial arts fiction (with a heavy weight on it from the apparent need to continue emulating Remo Williams), a psion is what everyone thinks of when you mention a character with psychic powers, and the runepriest is a kind of fang shi (Daoist practitioner).