Subclasses in YappyLord

Continuing my thoughts from yesterday, I had some other ideas on how I would handle classes and subclasses in YappyLord.

Instead of having subclasses, I think that I would have "paths" for each class.  Each path would be related to the sun, the earth or the moon.  All paths are open to a class, but the further one walks down a path, then the weaker becomes in skills of other paths.

An example: suppose we have a healer who has three paths available: the path of the sun, the path of the moon, and the path of the earth.  Our healer decides to walk along the path of the Earth, and gains benefits from its studies.  Our healer grows physically, becoming quite a skilled combatant and being able to withstand a great amount of damage (does anyone remember Jackie?), but our healer's skills slowly diminish in the realms of Moon and Sun skills.  At a later point in time, our Earth-strong healer could change paths and begin exploring Moon skills.  As the healer grows in Moon skills, the healer's Earth skills slowly diminish, and the Sun skills diminish further due to neglect.

One of the features that I don't like about subclasses is that once you make a choice, then you're stuck with it (unless you meta-game your way out of the class, which is a entirely different topic for discussion).  One of the GMs explained subclasses this way: it lessens a player's choice.  I didn't understand what he meant, but the more that I thought about it, the more I've come around to understand this point: if we were to combine all of the fighter subclass trainers and make them available to all fighters, then – asides from that being pretty cool! – allows a fighter to have many, many training choices.  As the system stands now, when a fighter chooses a subclass, then only one third of these subclass trainers become available to the fighter.

YappyLord would allow one class, like the healer, to branch out a little and specialize in a path, but at the cost of skills from the other paths.  Maybe I would go one step further and eliminate classes all together, and, using the above model, just allow players to train as they wish.  A player that studies fighting becomes a lousy healer/mystic.

I'm deep into SACWAG territory now, but isn't that what YappyLord is all about?