General Discussion

I think the text MUD DragonRealms (play.net/dr) from Simutronics gives a format which would work.  Everyone could use nearly every skill in the game, there were probably 60-65 different skills. Skills were divided up into 5 categories, Armor, Weapons, Lore, Magic and Survival.  There were numerous skills in each category, but particularly for weapons (light edged, med edged, heavy edged, 2hand edge, same 4 blunts, couple staff types, bows, xbow etc), same for armor.  How high of a skill you had in that weapon determined how effective you were with it. Some of the metal armors would impair magic skills but I think you could wear most of the armor regardless of what class you were and you could train just about any skill with a few limited exceptions (no magic for certain classes).  The 'natural' weapon/armor for that class would give bonuses but if you were willing to forgoe the bonus and accept certain impairments on your skills from non-preferred armor, you were free to use them.

The classes were called guilds: 2 mage types, cleric, healer, paladin, barbarian, ranger, thief, trader, bard.  Each guild would give different special abilities and spellbooks (no magic for barbs).  Once you joined a guild, the 5 categories of skills were ranked as Primary skill (1); Secondary (2); Tertiary (2).  DR used an experience system where you would have an available pool to fill up by doing various activities. Combat was only going to work your armor and weapon/magic skills. Other skills had to be trained using non-combat activity.  The pool was bigger for Primary skills then secondary and smallest for Tertiary.  How the pool drained into permanent skill was a bit funky but in effect, you learned your Primary skills much faster than any others and tertiary were pretty slow.  In short you would fill up your tertiary pool quickly and it drained slowly (any excess xp into that pool was lost if it was full).

To advance levels in your guild, it wasn't exactly an earn X amount of XP and you magically level up.  For each level up, you needed to check your skills with one of the guildmasters for your guild.  You would have a set of specific requirements and then some general requirements.  Once you meet all the requirements, you'd level up.  But if you were short .01% on a single skill, even if other skills were well beyond the requirements, you weren't going to level up.  I'll give an example.  Barbs were weaponmasters, so they were required to have say lv 50 skill in a primary weapon for lv 20, lv 40 skill in  a secondary weapon.  It didn't matter which 2 weapons they used, as long as 2 weapons matched that requirement, they would meet it.  If you switched weapons, you'd need to get your new primary up to say lv 55 for level 21.  If you had 155 in your primary but 39 in your secondary....well you weren't going to level up until you satisfied all of the requirements.  There typically would be a number of primary secondary and tertiary requirements for each level.

So how do I equate this to a methodology to do what you suggest?  Well it's really fairly simple.  You want to be a mage wielding a longsword?  To obtain lv 20 skill with a longsword, you'd need say 500k xp into that skill.  However a melee fighter would only need 250k xp for level 20.  Each class would simply have a different set of skills that it learns faster. 

If a graphical game came out using this type of system, I'd gladly play it.  DR was an excellent game in many respects but it had a few flaws that I really disliked.  I played it for a number of years regardless.

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Originally posted by slippyC

Tell me a game where all the classes are balanced?

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Pretty much most MMOs that have PvP try to "balance" the PCs so they survive longer in PvP. Personally, if they want it make it highly unbalanced as with PvE, as should be to match hardcore.