I seem to disagree with every one of the opinions you've presented in this topic, so I kinda expected it .

I've always found that levels make more sense because it makes progression less overspecialised. Even if you're not focused on a specific facet of adventuring (or whatever activity the campaign/setting revolves around), you're still going to learn a bit just from doing it all the time. In pretty much any system, though, you're never going to be able to do it as well as someone who is specialised in it - which means that such skills are essentially pointless since games are intended to challenge the players and anything feasible by the less skilled characters would be ridiculously easy for the specialised character to accomplish. So in a point-based system, learning to do anything beyond your specialisation is a waste of points that could have been used on something worthwhile. Thus, hyper-specialised characters. And that makes no sense to me.

One of my friends has gotten really into the White Wolf system, and I've realised there's only one way to make characters for that: max out all the skills you can at creation, and leave the rest blank. Trying to design a balanced character will only lead to overall mediocrity.

Say you start off an Exalted character with attributes scores of 3-3-3 in one category, it would take you 28 experience points to get to 5-3-3. But if you start off at 5-3-1, it will only take you 12 experience points to reach the same attributes. You could actually sacrifice two points and start off handicapped at 5-1-1 and it would still take you only 24 experience points.

Classes are something else entirely, and many of my homebrewed mods do away with them. But levels are definitely my favourite mode of progression, of any I've used.

As for naked fighters slaughtering kobolds, I really can't say anything about that without a context. It could be awesome or it could be terrible, but if it's the latter, it's probably the DM's fault.

EDIT: Also, I hated Icewind Dale, so you'll probably love it . I would describe it as Diablo II with less story and using 2nd Edition AD&D's byzantine ruleset, both being things I thoroughly despise, but you probably love .

I tried playing it a few times, and every time I reach the part with the Fire Giants I realise I have no idea where I'm going or why, except forward because that's the only accessible area I haven't explored yet. That's pretty much where I stop playing.