FrankTrollman wrote:More broadly, you should make the number of choices you get to make as high as possible. Further, you should make the number of choices that noticeably limit future choices to be as small as possible.
Your character should be able to wear a red tunic or a blue one. Your character should be able to use a Bohemian Ear Spoon or a Lucern Hammer. Your character should be able to drink wine or mead. And so on and so forth. And the number of these choices that profoundly limit future options - and thus cause deep and painful decision trees - should be kept to a minimum. So the number of times you are forced to take the red pill or the blue pill and permanently change the landscape of the possible should be small. The smallest number of such choices in a D&D-like game is two: Race and Class.
Actually, after rolling Abilties and placing them in order, thus largely eliminating choice entirely, became unfashionable, it was three choices: Race, Class, and Abilities.
But anyway, eliminating de jure choice chains does not eliminate de facto synergies, as you've said yourself. In a world where feats are easily available with no prerequisites and you can freely take Whirlwind Attack after Mounted Combat, you still would be much better off taking Spirited Charge. And having separate Knight and Paladin classes won't change that fact, in fact it will increase probability that at least one of those classes won't be benefitting from a specific combination of feats nearly as much. And having 500 feats instead of 50 won't change that fact either, that is unless the vast majority of a character's abilities come solely from feats, which is not the case in my concept - without that you'll just end up spreading the same level of competence over a greater number of feats, thus creating even more de facto chains and mandatory picks, which, as I said before, was what happened to 3.0's Fighter, and, for that matter, to Pathfinder characters in general. As long as there are choices there is the possibilty to choose badly, and it is multiplied by the amount of choices. That is the one of the reasons I want to make as many choices as possible into the power acquisition schedules, such as spells and maneuvers, where making them non-fixed or less harshly fixed requires considerably less mental gymnastics.
Feats/talents, on the other hand, should be not so much defining what you do, as helping to define who you are. There is a clearly big demand for that, but solutions so far were rather far from satisfying. Prestige classes sucked because you needed to wait a lot and gather shitty requirements to be what you wanted to be. PF class archetypes perform this function way better, but being stuck to one, often inherently low-level, identity in a game where you start stabbing goblins and end up stabbing gods is hardly satisfying for the same reason that having Fighters and Rogues go to 20th level is hardly a satisfying solution. Finally, writing a whole new class for each possible identity is not only a super massive, super complicated work but will demand some sort of complex mandatory multiclassing, such as with Paragon Classes you propose, and that will lead right back to planning your build from level 1, as was the case with prestige classes.
So for now I envisage that being a Knight, or an Assassin, or a Necromancer would require taking a talent, with talents available approximately once per tier (thus four choices during an 1-20 campaign), with no prerequisites save BAB/Attributes. Looking approximately like this:
ASSASSIN
You have mastered the art of murder by surprise, be it through stealth or dirty tricks like suddenly drawing your sword and striking with the same motion.
Prerequisites: Dex +1, base attack bonus +1.
Benefit: You automatically score a critical threat if you hit a creature with any light, one-handed or improvised melee weapon in surprise round.
This will still lead to de facto limitations and chains, where you will have to be stupid to pick Necromancer if you do not cast spells, or when picking Rage Master after your first pick was Mounted Archer would be quite suboptimal, but hopefully with a relatively limited number of choices, free of tiny fiddle bullshit options, these chains would be understandable enough to players. And while the element of planning your build from level 1 still would be there, as most power is going to come from spells/maneuvers/manifestations anyway, I believe it would be much less demanding than in the case of your Paragon Classes proposition.
FrankTrollman wrote:And the thing is that any selection of a profoundly limited nature is going to be like that, even if they aren't explicitly gated or chained. Zen Archery is going to implicitly preclude advancing into Whirlwind Attack if the number of feats are low whether or not Whirlwind Attack has a specific prerequisite that Zen Archery does not fulfill.
And how exactly it won't if the number of feats is high? So far your argument seems to be simply that a hit to a character's competence would be relatively small. My counterargument is that such hits would happen more often and would be more difficult to notice to advance due to sheer number of options.