If this is your position, I find it pretty strange that you are using this statement to defend 3e over 4e. 3e was very limiting on what you could play and how you could play it because of the things they tied into the basic system.
First, though, to be fair, the 3e PHB had 10 classes and the 4e PHB has 8. If you're trying to compare 4e now to 3e at the end of its run, well, that's a pretty skewed way to go about things. Wait 8 years, then compare. Those 10 classes in 3e had a very limited range of options (do I want my fighter to have a longsword and focus or a greataxe and power attack?). Both games are built to expand through future products, its the business model. New options for existing classes, new classes, new pretige/paragon paths, etc.
In 3E, it was easy to multiclass and rather expected that you would. I already mentioned
Dragon magazine's series of articles building about fifty different "classes" simply by mixing the core 10. In ten years of playing 3/3.5, I used non-core classes a total of twice, both on the same character.
That said, 3e attempted to pigeonhole characters pretty strongly. All fighters pretty much looked the same.
That's simply not the case. Even if you stayed pure fighter, which IME only NPCs ever did, you quickly became very good at whatever your specialization may be -- or you quickly became very flexible in a variety of situations.
One might trip, another cleave, but they had the same pitiful skills and none of them could effectively utilize the other skill based systems like craft. You couldn't make the character you wanted, unless you could justify any non adventuring details mechanically. A fighter/blacksmith? How you going to pull that off without making a subpar fighter? You had to do it by not actually taking fighter levels, you had to dip in something else for skill points, never mind your concept is not rogueish at all.
How many ranks in Craft do you need to be a competent blacksmith? An Int of 10 gives a 1st level 3E fighter 8 skill points. Put 4 of those in Craft (which is a class skill) and you've got a perfectly good blacksmith, with 2 more each for Jump and Swim.
I'll happily agree that 3E fighters could use more skill points -- but you didn't have to make a sub-par fighter just to make him a blacksmith.
Spellcaster multiclassing was awful and severely limited what you could do and how far you could do it.
I've acknowledged this already. That was a design flaw, not a philosophical one.
Class doesn't define character and character doesn't have to be represented mechanically (although its easy to do so if your group desires). Class represents the skill/powerset that a character uses while adventuring. Right now, class choice is limited, just as it was at the beginning of 3e.
Except it wasn't, that's my whole point. The reason I came back to
D&D with the release of 3.0, after a decade of being a HERO-only player[1], was because you could finally use
D&D to build a wide variety of characters with nothing more than the
PHB.
I dunno, maybe there's some super-wifty piece of game mechanic I'm just not seeing for all the neon lights and tiefling horns ... but what I've seen of 4E character building sure doesn't
look flexible to me.
-The Gneech
[1] And no, I don't want to go back to HERO, for reasons that aren't worth ranting about here. Suffice to say it's also suffered over the years.
