When Do Limited Options Become Stifling?

[KorvinStarmast]

Or if you're okay with the systems, join D&D or Pathfinder official play. Then you can have your unique PC walk into a bar with an entire fantasy menagerie party.

Official play is ripe grounds for finding players for a homebrew open table living world campaign that actually has limits if you run them in the same game stores.

Great advice, I should have added "public play" in my answer.

And no matter how much is excluded, there's an unlimited set of characters inside just about any kind of bounds - even single race, single class, or single alignment. Most characters in most fiction are just plain vanilla humans, with no special abilities, and yet they are still very distinct.

Yes.

In my experience, people that hate boundaries will always want to pick something outside of the boundaries, no matter where those are drawn. The draw to them literally is being outside the boundary. People that can work with boundaries are mostly happy regardless of where they are.

It is indeed the archer, not the arrow.