If I remember correctly how Ultima Online works - or at least worked 10 years ago - you have a set of skills for random stuff (magic, combat, craftmanship, etc). Now let's say you fight for 2 hours, your combat skills raise a bit. You do some magic, your magic skills raise a bit. It all depends on your actions. At some point eventually one of your skills will reach a high level, because it's the one you use the most. At that point you'd get a title such as "apprentice swordsman" or similar, and eventually the apprentice will change as your skill level increases.

Now the trick is that, like someone said above, there is a kind of pool, and eventually the sum of your skill points will reach that limit. When that happens, some of the skills you don't use will decrease as others go up (technically that already happens even when you haven't reached the limit).

I find this way more natural, because your class is based on what you do, not what you picked in some menu 6 months earlier when you created your character...

@Josh:
It is my goal to prevent the player from creating such a powerful character :)

@Tangireon:
Yeah, there's the danger of class based character owning classless character. The problem with just attribute-based autobalancing skills is, that
skills, which use the same attributes, like all magic skills, will not be autobalanced. So a self-healing,fireball casting, and demon summoning character
just needs to level the same attributes for all his magic skills. In a class world I would create a healer, a necromancer and a wizard class, where the
necromancer has access to powerful summoning skills, some special (low level) healing powers, and a medium nuke skill. The classless character just would
select the powerful summoning version of the necromancer, the healing powers of the healer and the nuke skill of the wizard which leads to a uber-character.
Hmm... This could only happen, if skills are overlapping in their powers.

@brent_w
I have to agree with Tangireon that this could lead to over-powered class based characters.

@Bearhugger:
I'm the only one left loving class based games ? I'm getting to old for this job ;-) I'm not a fan of gear based character development (=>WoW),
but I got the point to choose just one system :)

@Rewdew:
Ultima Online is a good example of what I try to avoid ;_) Never played it, but heard that you're able to create platearmor wearing, self healing,
fire mages. In my RPG system you have to buy skill-level and not to train them. I hate games where you have to ignit 100 torches to increase your
fire skill, that's just an other form of grinding.


Well, I think I will drop the classless character system, ...but I'm not giving up completly. After doing some research I discovered that
oblivion uses some kind of custom class system (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Classes). Either you have the option to choose one of
the predefined classes or you can design your own class. Finally all classes have the same benefits. It is still a classbased system, but
the player got the option to create his own custom class at the beginning. The problem with this approach is, that you need quite different
skills. I.e. a warrior got a blunt-weapon, an axe-weapon and a sword-weapon skill, a custom class character would drop the blunt-weapon skill in favour of a
healing skill making the predefined class dispensable. To prevent this you have to use a more generic skill like 1h-weapons.

--
Ashaman

Well, In defense of skill based class bonuses.

An open system in which players can employ any skills ... yet gives bonuses for skills related to a class ... gives your players the freedom to make that plate wearing fire mage and yet still have it balanced with a traditional knight or mage.

The armored mage receives advantages from combining the strengths of very different classes ... yet he will never benefit from the armor as well as a knight would, nor will he ever cast a fireball as well as the pure mage would.

In this way, players have the option of being a jack of all trades or a specialist depending on the playstyle they prefer.