This is the core reason for why RPG design is enslaved to derivatives of Dungeons & Dragons.
Tabletop RPG designers were original, and remain largely, tinkerers with a clue at best. Most of them are ignorant and incompetent when it comes to figuring out what psychology actually works in driving players to pick up a game, stick with, master it, and stay with it for years on end. More than a few over the years have been frustrated as to why D&D and its derivatives continue to dominate the market, especially in videogames. Their counterparts in videogame development figured that shit out years ago, when they started to do what the casinos did and applied psychological research to figure out what works to keep players playing. The answer is now staring gamers and designers in the face, and lots of folks do not deal with it well at all.
It's the same reason why random loot drops persist, even in games whose milieu makes this utterly fucking retarded and makes the studio and team behind it look like retarded Rhesus monkeys. (e.g. The Division) It's the same reason that the slot machine mechanics in gacha games exist. It's all about dopamine hits.
That's right, we're talking about how Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson accidentally hit upon the same psychology that casinos deliberately exploit to make their gambling business suck up all that cash from addicts and more casual players--be they high rollers or not--and now the AAA world (and trickling down into AA and Indie development) is applying it just as deliberately, especially for all Games As Service businesses like MMORPGs.
"But what about Classes?"
That's just as dead-assed simple: to simultaneously satisfy the psychological needs of various player psych profiles (which do exist, and are exploited). In group-oriented games, this also serves to create and support a framework for players to form viable groups with strangers; you know what a Fighter can do, what a Cleric can do, etc. and in more formal team environments this serves the same role as defined positions on a Football team.
The combination is brutally efficient at being something that drives players to play the game. Always one more boss, one more level, one more drop, etc. and so long as you have other players (in multi-player games) that you can rely upon to cover the gaps all of you are on the express train to dominating Dopamine Drome.
Even in single-player RPGs, you see this psychology play out and it's been the case since the earliest videogame adaptations like the original Ultima or Rogue.
Guess what those other RPGs I mentioned yesterday lack?
Yep, you got it: dopamine hits, on a predictable (and therefore managable and manipulatable) schedule.
Other qualities--lack of brick-to-face ease of use by normies being chief among them, followed by fucking retarded hispterism or worse--don't do those competitors any favors.
Like it or not, if you want your totally-not-derivative-of-D&D to actually compete and win then you've got to acknowledge this and make it work for you. More on that tomorrow.
Coming from a Basic Role Playing/Traveller background, I didn't really catch on to this until SSI started releasing D&D computer games in the late 80's. You're right, it IS everywhere.
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