Primary objective: fun.

I’d share my work for free. At best, I’d add a little “If you had fun, consider sponsoring me. If you can’t, share it with others and keep having fun and causing mayhem.”

I’d laugh my head off if someone told me they used a Fire Wave in a narrow alley to take down a group of mobs and in the process burned a hole in the city wall or torched half the town.

Yes, it was created with classes/professions in mind and each class has a unique skill tree and some even have subclasses or class specific skills.

As an example: a magic user would need to choose which college it would start with - healing, fire, water, etc - and as the character evolves it can access higher tiers with more complex spells and skills. I had an idea to also cross skills to unlock others, as in having a given skill in the college of water and by acquiring a skill under the college of life, it would unlock a mixed nature spell/skill.

There was a lot of thought thrown into it. I wanted some very complex under the hood yet easy to play and approach by any person and get gratification by getting into the game, in the moment.

CoC hit the playing scene of the place I used to go back then and made a success for how fast paced it could get but I failed to get enthralled by the system.

Don’t know that system.

I used that specific example because I had just read my notes on it but yes, your intuition is correct.

I’ll admit I got the short straw when it came to GMs.

The overall skill trees I was working on were huge and skills were tiered, linked to class/profession.

An easy example: a magic using character.

Magic requires mana and spells burn specific amounts of it to be cast. A player could invest their experience several ways: spend their experience to increase their mana pool, spend experience to improve the grasp of a spell (better understood spells would be easier to use, quicker, last longer, etc), acquire new spells within a college or access another magic college (a magical healer could access offensive magic, like fire/lightning based spells, as a quick example, or defensive, like barriers).

It was fun to think about it, then.

I’m abusing the notion of level, I think.

The intention was to make growth intentional and incentivize role playing, with the characters growing as the game progressed.