As soon as there is any limit whatsoever, then any system can be trivially reduced to a "class based MUD" if you allow the possibility of there being so many classes you can't give them a name. But this is a pretty silly and certainly useless definition of "class".
I wanted to throw in some numbers to back up this claim…
Assume that you have 50 skills, and that over your career as a player you get 100 skill points to distribute however you like. There are C(149, 49) ways to do this [1]. C(149,49) = (149!)/( 49! * 100! ) = (149 * 148 * … * 101)/(49!) = 6,709,553,636,577,310,764,746,744,793,643,105,249,380 ways to do this.
So sure… we can speak of this as a "class-based system" where there happen to be 6 ubergazillion classes (I don't want to bother counting to find the proper unit). But this would be, err, dumb.
[1] if you don't believe this, I can explain how you get it.
I wanted to throw in some numbers to back up this claim…
Assume that you have 50 skills, and that over your career as a player you get 100 skill points to distribute however you like. There are C(149, 49) ways to do this [1]. C(149,49) = (149!)/( 49! * 100! ) = (149 * 148 * … * 101)/(49!) = 6,709,553,636,577,310,764,746,744,793,643,105,249,380 ways to do this.
So sure… we can speak of this as a "class-based system" where there happen to be 6 ubergazillion classes (I don't want to bother counting to find the proper unit). But this would be, err, dumb.
[1] if you don't believe this, I can explain how you get it.