I've played games with pretty much all the possibilities listed.
RF Online had classes, and each class had (3?) main categories of powers, each of those was divided into beginner/intermediate/advanced/master type subcategories, each of those had specific abilities/spells/skills within them, and each of those abilities/spells/skills had a percentage AND a level. It was the single most confusing and annoying system I've ever played.
For example, and I might be off here I only played it a week or so and cancelled the account... say I pick a non-ranged attack fighter class. I'll have force skills, melee skills, whatever. My melee skills is divided into beginner, etc. categories. Starting out I can only do beginner, I'm not sure when the stuff inside Intermediate opens up, perhaps when my "CLASS" (which increases via experience) reaches level 30? Anyways, my beginner "Melee" category starts at level 1 itself, and contain things like thrust, stab, wild swing, whatever. Each of those starts at level 1, as i use them they increase in percentage, then go to level 2 after that. Nothing can go to level 3 until "Melee" itself gets to level 2, "Melee" itself gets to level 2 when my class gets to level "whatever".
Unnecessarily stupidly complicated... and regardless of how customizable that might end up in the very long term, everyone still played pretty much the same builds of characters. This was also irreversible, if you started with a bad build you were stuck with it. You could literally dead-end a skill, and thus be unable to raise it due to skills only raising on mobs equal to their level, and only on mobs YOU could gain xp off of (which required your CLASS level as well be equal).
Lineage 2 had a level/class system. While killing npcs you got experience and skill points. Everytime your experience got to 100% you gained a level. Every x levels you gained access to new skills you could 'buy' with the skillpoints. This also was irreversible, but you wouldn't really want to. The classes only got to pick from skills within their own class, so you'd ideally want to get all the skills anyways. It allowed the least flexibility in character advancement, because ifyou were a certain class, then your skills would be identical to all other of that class.
World of Warcraft used the class, level, and skill tree method, which IMO was the 2nd worst. If you made a bad choice (and you wouldn't know it till much later of course) you wasted those points, and wasting them was a sucky thing to do. It also didn't do much good giving people the choices, because everyone went for the same builds anyways for whichever class they had picked.
AD&D had the class and level/xp system. which is pretty much the most restrictive. At level 'x' the fighters can hit this well, the mages can cast this many spells if he knows them, the thief can sneak around this well and climb that wall that well, etc etc. None of this varied whatsoever except by gear and your small modifiers from stats/race.
BUT! it also had weapon and non-weapon proficiencies, which were almost unlimited (limited only by imagination of the DM). At char create you get say, 4 weapon and 3 non-weapon proficiency slots to fill up as a fighter, you can choose to put 2 slots in the long sword so you hit real well with it, and 1 slot with the bow so you can at least be useful at range. Then you put say 1 slot in reading/writing the common tongue (so you can read the sign that says DANGER: KEEP OUT!!!), another in herbalism so you can find the plants that cure the athlete's foot you got from running around in metal shoes all day, and the final slot in dancing, because you really wanna impress the tavern whench that keeps winking at you. Then every x level thereafter, based on your class, you get x more weapon/non-weapon proficiency slots to fill up. Doubling a proficiency you already have makes it better.
People look at AD&D and see "ew, i gotta be either a fighter or mage or whatever, that's so limited!" but they don't realize NOTHING in that game was limited whatsoever, unless the DM and the players chose to limit it. This IMO was the best system I've found so far.
Ultima Online, as dated and unappreciated as it is, is easily the next best system. 50 (50+ now) skills to choose from, you can raise them as high as you want, up to their cap and your skillcap of course, and pick and choose whichever you like. This was great too... except that you either have to limit people to 700.0 total points like OSI did, which is too restrictive IMO, or you have people playing uber-characters that know everything and are one-man armies by themselves, which is too free IMO. Even at 700.0, I can gm magery, healing, a weapon of choice, tactics, parrying, anatomy, and one other skill of choice, thus making me godlike.
What we did with my shard is try to combine AD&D and UO methods. There are 18 different classes: fighter, mage, thief, bard, craftsman, paladin, ranger, and 11 priest classes (one for each of the 11 gods). Each class has a skillcap, tentatively, of 900.0, and gets to pick and choose those skills they wish to learn that are available to their class. A fighter for example gets no magery, a mage gets no blacksmithing, etc etc. Skills that are polar opposites have a 0 skillcap (hiding/stealth on a paladin for example), skills that are kinda used but not necessarily a beneficial skill for that class have anywhere from 35.0 to 75.0 skillcap for that class. Skills that any Tom, Dick, or Harry could know (fishing for example) have normally a 75.0 to 80.0 skillcap for all classes.
I'm sure people will still end up with a favored set of skill choices for each class, and the classes themselves will obviously push toward certain skills by default (magery for mages, tactics for fighters, etc.), but I don't think that can be helped.. as I've seen that behaviour in EVERY game and EVERY advancement method.
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