Hi guys!
In your Golarion (or home world), do you player's character know that classes (and their abilities) exist? Because I had a situation last time where my players became very paranoid of musicians (because of the bad habits of Bards and their charm-spells), and tried to resolved an investigation by hiring an Occultist with his ability to read object history!
And I felt really stupid! They were like "it's obvious people know that these mechanical systems exist role play wise". So I decided to go on improvisation for the rest of the game and it ended very well. But still, what do you think of this subject? The big issue being the gap between my knowledge of the system, and the different level of knowledge between the hard players and that one guy who still want to play Core Rogue with core feats.
My personal rule is to never say "NO" to the players. But I was confused' with the Occultist ability, as well as two of my players. The other 3 were rather proud of themselves to think of that. (We got all the hard books I just did not took the time to read Oxcultist for now)
And second question: how do we know the percentage of each class in Golarion? For example the Witch is not core, but between Ustalav, Gyrona, Irrisen... I believe that there are probably more Witches than Bards. Same goes for Warpriests, Clerics, Inquisitors and Paladin/Antipaladin. For example Norgorber requires Stealth and has probably more Inquisitors in his service than Clerics?