Or rather unlimited unlimited freedom. What I especially love about Genesys is the immense flexibility in most aspects. Would every person have the exactly same set of skills if their job was the same? For me I know it won't. At work the basic tasks are the same in my team, but while I excel in programming where other cannot write a single line of code, others of my team excel in other aspects I am rather akward in.

So I pondered why not having the players choose 8 skills as their "class" skills freely and afterwards have them define their "role" in the group by themselves. Often I see how much work a lot of you put in creating custom classes of existing settings to emulate the original mechanics behind that setting. The results are often phenomenal, but is it really necessary to put a corset on a system that was created to offer free and flexible character developement?

So I asked our saviour Sam Stewart about the following:

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I love the fexibility in Genesys' character creation so I pondered to go a step further and have my players decide on the class skills themselves and then let them define the "class" or "role" depending on the choice of skills. Would it be appropriate to have the players choose 8 "class" skills freely instead of building classes in advance with a pre defined set of class skills?

And the prophet's response made me overjoyed:

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Sure, I think that would be totally reasonable! As long as you sit down with your players beforehand and talk about what kind of game you’re going to run, I can’t see any problem with it.

Don't get me wrong, I do not speak of every aspect in character creation to be 100% free form. Such aspects as archetypes/races should be predetermined and the setting itself can require prerequisites as well, like not everybody is allowed to choose the skill arcana and thus be able to cast spells if the setting restricts the usage of magic.

I’ve pretty much stopped using Careers since Genesys came out. If you look, none of my OmniSphere settings use Careers. I let my players pick their career skills in all my games, and it has worked out great.

My only caveat for a player choosing their own skills is they need a catchy name that encompasses the reason for having the chosen skills. But otherwise, I'm right there with you about letting players choose what they want.

Doing a D&D flavored approach, we first came up with a concept (primarily using D&D classes/sub-classes but not strictly limited to those). I then worked with each player to identify which combination of the four root D&D archetypes (fighter, mage, priest, rogue) would represent their concept best. We then reference a list of skills for each of the four root archetypes and the players got to pick their career skills from the list.

I know it sounds a bit convoluted for just skills, but in my homebrew, I also categorized each talent as defensive, offensive, magic or skill-based, and those root archetypes give discounts on buying certain talents.

Pardon my quoting myself:

I don't think choosing one's Career Skills individually would be game breaking, if one followed a few simple guidelines:

only one Magic Skill,

not more than three Combat Skills/Magic Skills combined,

not more than three Skills linked to a single Characteristic.