[Morgeruat]

Personally my favorite character and gaming experience was with 0 lvl characters from the greyhawk adventures book, watching characters rise from joe nobody's to great heroes was alot of fun. as far as being able to play any class I agree, as long as the character can meet the stat requirements! I completely agree with ability score requirements for classes, it makes the powerful ones (like monk or paladin) more exclusive and keeps things from getting muddied up, but for the most part, if you could meet stat requirements and and give a plausible reason why the character would be that class (a dwarven mage is an absurd idea).

I give special event XP, for instance if I kill a character in a spectacular way (a wyvern recently bit into an elf mage, while flying around the party on a cliff face, the wyvern was killed the same round, I ruled that the wyvern got a death grip and carried the character with it (character had time to cast spells to save himself, ie feather fall etc. but failed to prepare them) and so he was splattered into the cliff face with the Wyvern) he recieved 20xp as a reward for spectacular death, I also give warriors a bonus of 200xp for rolling a 20 as it grants them a greater insite into combat and tactics, not merely a "lucky shot" to balance mages/clerics/psionicists getting xp for using spells, psionics, pooping etc.