Paladins and Bards represent D&D's growth from pure dungeon crawl to actual "role"-playing beyond the role of rock, paper or scissors, each leveraging the alignment wheel's law and chaos to make the player think about following a particular ethos. I can't speak for how well it worked in tabletop, but as to the internet age I invite you to tally up the amount of air time bards or especially paladins take up in cRPGs, as well as fan works like DnD-inspired webcomics. However, designating a particular class for heavier roleplaying is at best a crutch. I was pleased to see extra dialogue options for my IWD2 paladin, but if roleplaying really is intrinsic to the game genres named after it, RP choices should pervade any class choice - perhaps not equally, but comparably.
Given that I spent my previous post in the series arguing clerics need tighter links to their deities (shifting divine spellcasting overall toward lawful) paladins should probably just be folded into the greater cleric class, limited and defined by devotion to specific lawful good (or non D&D-equivalent) deities. The other option is to embrace the definition of paladins as knightly orders with a specific mission (combating the saracens, guarding the roads to Jerusalem, etc.) but let's face it, fleshing out such distinctions with sufficient nuance to supply meaningful choices is beyond both the scope and skill of most cRPG campaigns, at least while every game's writers are already devoting most of their time to angel vs. demon lore.
On the bard side, the interpretation of chaotic know-it-alls as jacks of all trades runs into the unnecessary overlap between the ever more prolific playable classes which I decried at the start of this series. The more you implement classes with specific personalities, the more redundant you'll find the one class which can duplicate any (or all!) of their functionality on a whim. See the endless arguments about bards being under/over-powered, from OOTS's Elan to players soloing the original Baldur's Gate campaigns as bardic one-man-bands, to my own defense of their multifaceted support or condemnation of all-purpose scrappers. On the other hand, a class based on musical/recitative performance was always a great idea, as bards/skalds/minstrels/meistersingers/Orpheus/Marsyas/etc. hold an irrefutable place of honor in historic fantasy. They just need to be re-centered on that core (see Pillars of Eternity's chanters) and downplayed in other ability. The harder question is implementing sufficient art or socialization to supply RP choices for social butterflies, without derailing an entire campaign. Does your game actually have anything for a bard to do bardically? No? Then leave it out, and stick with rogues/wizards/clerics.
Both classes were party-friendly (to aid their appeal) but their songs and auras' limitless team-wide use, changed at will, was always a bit of a stretch. Personally I'd rather see auras reinterpreted as a single party buff selected after resting, active until next rest. A commitment. Songs should be more unpredictable, reactive to each encounter, novel situations triggering the bard's memory or artistic inspiration, giving him an array of recitations apt to the stimulus at hand, from which he can select one. Bonus points for building up one's repertoire via prior RP choices.
Other classes aren't as hard hit by this roleplaying tie-in.
Campaigns don't usually bother with drudic RP aside from a single-note refrain of "nature good, tech bad" but their neutrality in the D&D alignment wheel gave more leeway. I've never seen the NE/CN/LN eco-terrorist angle truly given its due (especially disappointed by BG3's shallow good/evil choices at the druid grove) but at least it's better than every single bard being a CG Errol Flynn.
Monks and barbarians are better discussed in terms of shallow pop culture fads, but it bears mentioning here that monks' distinction of ki from divine energy was pure 1980s Hollywood exoticism, and has little place in a coherent cosmology. If you want unarmored paladins, fine, but just like paladins and clerics monks need to be more strictly defined by their devotion to The Rule, whatever that may be. A monastic order is more than a self-defense course.
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