Originally Posted by
Silly Name
Are people in your world actually aware of classes and levels? Like, the characters themselves know they're an 8th level Fighter or a 12th level Rogue or whatever?
Because in most worlds that's not a thing. People don't "level up", they naturally accrue experience - the game aspect of levelling up is an abstraction of this process, not a tangible, quantifiable thing in-universe. A Wizard doesn't consciously take her fifth wizard level to access 3rd level spells, she masters the arcane incantations and meditative disciplines necessary to access more powerful spells.
Likewise, a farmer never decides to "take levels" in Commoner: he was born in a farmhouse and will live and die there, never getting to swing a sword or try to cast a spell and thus having zero access to the skills and training necessary to become something else. Or maybe he simply never cared for that. The Commoner class exists to give those people stat blocks if the need be, to represent completely average people with no formal training or innate supernatural talents - those are for special people (PCs and their opposition), not James the innkeeper or Mary the cook.
I don't think I've ever come across a campaign setting (that wasn't explicitely comedic and riffing on those things) whose inhabitants acknowledged ideas like "class levels", "feats" and "skill points" as real.