Now I am confused, given the freedom to play exactly how you want to play you would choose to play in a way you don't enjoy?
I can tell.
Where did you get that?
From when you said it:
The point isn't what I "can" create, but the mutually exclusive choices I'm forced to make.
If I can dress up everyone with the heaviest armor class in the game, with no downside whatsoever, and the only reason to wear lighter armor is self-imposed flavor, for instance, the system is probably crap.
Same if I can maximize both melee prowess and magical power with no compromise of any kind.
If all you create are your cookie cutter archetypes this would never be an issue.
The way I "enjoy it" is precisely to have each member of the party offering a distinct role and playing differently from the other characters (with some possible occasional overlap, of course, like having two different types of "frontliner").
This is always available to you in a classless system. Just create your preferred classes.
Also the best classless systems force you to make choices, if you increase your durability it comes at a cost of locking you out of a high end ability that you would only have access to had you specialized.
Bravo. Exactly.
That was precisely my point from the beginning: "classless" systems are at their BEST only when they *still* create distinctions between different builds that are equivalent to having classes.
A matter of semantics I suppose. Classless systems give you the freedom to build the characters you want to build. Just because those choices have consequences doesn't make them classes.
