Step 1: take all the skills and abilities those classes have
Maybe I haven't stressed enough but we aren't just talking about (mechanical in-game) skills there's also the narrative part of the whole deal, among many. Your whole premise is that you can convert these stuff back and forth but it's not like that. In order to cover everything as in every imaginable skill you can come up with you would need thousands of skills. Yet, if I say 'Art' as a general concept or 'Entertaining' as a general concept you can easily attach these to a Bard or Geisha class. A class that way remains open-ended since even if you don't have a mechanical in-game skill equivalent of Calligraphy e.g. you can still hand-wave the whole encounter by saying that 'Geishas spend their childhood practicing every forms of art and entertainment so ofc they know how to do that.'...
Prelude to Darkness is a very good (if horrendously buggy) classless RPG which has a "music" skill. It doesn't have a lot of utility but can be used several times during the game for things bards might do. Singing, playing instruments, etc.
A classless system also allows for broader skills and abilities like "art", "music", "entertainment" etc rather than having to split it into "wind instruments", "string instruments", "singing", etc.
Furthermore, you can enhance classless systems with backgrounds, as I mentioned in several examples above, like GURPS allows you to, for example.
If you want your character to be proficient in calligraphy, just pick the background "had a classical education". Now your character knows stuff that you get taught during such an education regardless of his other skills.
In a classless system, you can easily create a sorceress/masseuse/courtesan, as easily as you can create a monk/masseuse/courtesan.
In a class-less system you might just as easily imagine the same thing, that a class-based system offers you plain and simple from the get-go.
Yes, and? A classless system allows you to play the same kinds of characters a class-based system does... and more beyond that. I don't get your point here?
Class-based systems offer you a handful of pre-packaged character concepts. Classless systems allow you to build those concepts yourself,
or go beyond that and come up with your own concepts. The only limit is determined by what skills, abilities, backgrounds, advantages, disadvantages the system offers, and by how many points the player gets to spend on his character.
In a class based system it's the developers who name your character. Any character concept that is outside of what they've explicitly designed cannot be played.
Yes, and here's why that's a good thing... any skill outside of the skills implemented in-game are also off limits to the player. So, what's the big deal? It is constraining to have classes yet it is not constraining to have 'just the skills' those damn developers coded into the final product? I mean I admit the difference in the magnitude, all I and others are arguing is that the additional 'safe space' does not worth the effort since you lose out more on not having class-based concepts than winning on a point buy-esque system.
What do you lose out on in a classless system? I played many different class-based and classless systems, both in cRPGs and in pen and paper, and I always found the classless ones to be a lot richer, more replayable, and more open for experimentation. Classless systems even allow you to do completely retarded shit that you know isn't going to work out, but you can still try it and have some fun - like playing a techno-mage in Arcanum whose abilities cancel each other out. Not a character I'd stick with for a full playthrough, but it was fun seeing how far I could take her. Class-based systems just don't allow you to do anything like that in the first place.
Not to mention that in pen and paper, this opens up a lot more interesting character concepts for the players to try out than a more rigid class-based system.
In a classless system it is the player who actually gets to shape and name his character. Maybe you want to play as literally Conan the Barbarian? Yeah, go ahead, pick the skills, abilities, advantages and disadvantages that make your character as close to Conan as possible.
As I stated before, there are many other factors in an average rpg that helps further shape your character aside from the base class. Constraining really is not an issue, especially not of the imagination, if anything, the class helps to give some framework to your character, as well as weaknesses and 'can't haves' something that I rarely see in skill-based games. The former is more role-playing the latter is more power fantasying.
My favorite classless systems are those that allow you to pick advantages and disadvantages at char gen, or offer you perks that come with a bonus and a malus during level up. Daggerfall's character creation was amazing by how many different options you had. Wanna play a pure fighter? Get bonus points to spend on skills by making your character completely unable to ever cast a spell. Wanna play a lightly armored thief? Completely disallow your character from equipping any armor heavier than leather. Works out very well.
And if you want to play a character within a class framework, all Elder Scrolls games - which are classless since Daggerfall - also give you "classes" to choose from, which are basically selections of major and minor skills, as well as (in Daggerfall at least) advantages and disadvantages. But you can also just say nah, fuck this framework, and create your own "class".
In a class-based system you have to hope that the devs included a Barbarian class, because if they didn't, you're shit outta luck.
Sure thing, but generally speaking if you build a game world then you should build all possible adventurer type classes as well that should belong to the world, in your opinion ofc. Mind you, just because as a player you have a fantasy idea, the game itself is not bound to cater to all your ideas and all players' fantasies. Due to the sales machine it is unfortunate that this rule had long since been forgotten. If I as a writer/designer build a game world (first and foremost) and I say all elephants are pink in my game, then a player who wants to have blue elephants can fuck off. Just as in politics you cannot simultaneously cater to all, so then you might as well focus on a group and cater to their needs tenfold. Any attempts otherwise will end up like every single shit game that has been shet out in the past decades.
Of course. And by including all the skills, backgrounds, advantages and disadvantages adventurer characters might reasonably have in your world (you can safely discount stuff like fishing and basketweaving because no adventurer does that), you also give the player the framework within which he can create reasonable characters for that world. I don't approach classless systems with the idea of "I want to play Red Sonja and if the game doesn't allow me to, it's shit" but I look at all the available skills, stats, etc etc and then come up with the kind of character I want to play based on those available character creation tools.
You guys are all a bunch of larping noobs. You care more about building up your virtual Barbie than you do about the quality of the combat. I think this is because you have never played something with truly great combat so you don't even know how good it could and should be.
I found Underrail's combat to be pretty great, despite being single character turn based (usually turn based is better with a party). Lots of different weapons and abilities, and you're forced to at least somewhat specialize if you want to be competent at something as there are tons of perks to take but you only get one perk every few levels, so you can't be great at magic and guns and melee and crossbows at the same time. But you
can experiment with builds and try something like a sniper with some backup debuff magic, things like that. And the game's combat is a lot more fun thanks to all the experimentality.
Overall, it depends on what you want from your game, of course. A dungeon crawling blobber where exploring dungeons and fighting are the main elements of the gameplay plays very well with classes. But classless works better for pretty much anything that isn't purely combat-focused, as long as your classless system is well designed (similarly, class based will also fall flat if it's got shit design, so let's just assume the perfect class-based and the perfect classless systems for our argument).
Why wouldn't you play a sword-swinging, spell-slinging, lockpick-turning jack of all trades in classless system? Because a jack of all trades is a master of none. Because maybe your strong and agile barbarian doesn't have enough Aether Affinity to cast spells well, while your seductive sorceress has pumped up her Aether Affinity so much, she doesn't have any points left for strength. Maybe metal armor interferes with spellcasting like in D&D, which is a feature that can work regardless of class restrictions (and a much more clever way of preventing wizards from being tanks than simply disallowing them from equipping armor at all; what are they, too stupid to pull a chainmail shirt over their head? their int is supposed to be high, not retard-tier).
A solid enough character system doesn't require classes to balance it.
