So that you could play without regard of how your actions in the moment affect your progression.
Point 1: As Kadmus pointed out, Skyrim lets you do that
Point 2: Does it
actually ensure that? Plenty of RPGs with basic level-based progression have ways to screw over your long-term progression. For some examples (of a slightly more specific issue), check TV Tropes's
Permanently Missable Content and
Unintentionally Unwinnable pages.
(Or Unwinnable By Design, if the designers are feeling mean.) It's just a matter of changing
what can mess with your long-term progression.
Point 3: Is the ability to play without regard to how your momentary actions affect your progression desirable? Or does it make your momentary actions meaningless? Is it a problem that (to quote hbomberguy) everyone's JC Denton ended up different? Is it good that everyone's Adam Jensen ended up the same?
Think about Star Wars games, or Mass Effect, or the other games with a crude alignment system. (The good ones, anyway.) Is it bad that doing too many Dark Side actions will cripple your Light Side power progression? Or is that an essential component of what makes those power sets Dark Side and Light Side instead of just Red versus Blue?
Different games require different systems, because different games are different.
However, to me, at least, the existence of those incentives creates a persistent feeling that I could be playing better, more optimally, that I'm missing out by not engaging with the system to the fullest, so I strongly dislike systems like that.
Is there
any game where this isn't a problem?
Final Fantasy 1 has the most dead-simple RPG progression system possible, with spells for spice. The only way to affect it is to savescum if you don't get as many stats as you wanted when you level up. And yet, people still worry about optimizing their parties, just in different ways. (Or sometimes by savescumming suboptimal level-ups.)
When researching explanations of why thieves are bad, I came across people saying they kept resetting the first part of the game and adjusting their party comp. Or think of how Omicron reset to avoid winning battles with part of the party dead, to make sure none of them lost EXP. Or people worry about whether they taught their mages the right spells.
Or, you know. Level grinding.
A game can either have ways that you could play more optimally that you miss out on, or your actions can have no impact whatsoever on the game. Games have to balance the tension between these two undesirable outcomes, but you can't improve one without worsening the other.
(And it's hard to worsen one without improving the other, though you might ruin other parts of the game in the process.) There are many ways to balance this tension, and none of them are innately bad.
Well, if social contract's not to your liking—
You misunderstand my point.
(Well, calling it a "point" is a bit generous. You misunderstand my joke.) There is not one singular Social Contract that governs tabletop roleplaying; there are several, variable. Unless you define all the unwritten rules around the TRPG as a single contract, but then there are multiple rules with multiple potential settings, so that's the same result.
My point is that both "players shouldn't disrupt the game" and "DMs shouldn't railroad the players" are important aspects of the typical TRPG social contract. Those rules often come into tension; different tables resolve that tension in different ways, and ways that work for one table might not work at another. Heck, even when the same players are playing the same system at the same table, they might change how they resolve that tension.
For instance: The players need to destroy a lich living in a cave. They could delve into his lair and face countless undead foes head-on,
or they could use magic to redirect a nearby river into the cave and get a bunch of priests to bless the water as it flows in. Are these players stomping all over the DM's carefully-laid plans and destroying the game, or are they finding creative solutions to the problem the DM gave them? It depends on the context. It depends on the tone of the game, it depends on whether the lich is an important antagonist, it depends on what the players (DM included) want out of the game.
Different tables use different social contracts, because different tables are different.
This kinda plays into my main point, but mostly it's an unrelated way that different games are different, which is why I decided to collapse it into a two-word joke the first time.
Skyrim has one of the better level-by-doing systems around (I have many other issues with it, but this isn't a major one), but it still runs into the fundamental problem of what I'm going to call "giving me a day job."
[proceeds to describe level grinding]
If the way I abridged your post didn't make it clear, I don't think this is a problem unique to Skyrim or level-by-doing progression systems. Here, let me show you.
If I want to beat that nasty dragon boss, I'm going to be dedicating a few hours to going out, wandering in the wilderness, fighting random encounters, gaining XP and money, which I will use to restock on consumables and rest and inns, and doing so in an endless cycle, increasing my damage and HP but still always needing to be in the wilderness and the inn, selling vendor trash and then reinvesting them in equipment, until I have reached the level required to beat the boss I hate.
The difference between a basic RPG level system and a level-by-doing system is basically just that the former has you doing
one thing whenever you need to grind for
anything (rare drops, gold, XP, etc), while the latter has you doing different activities to grind for different things.
(Which actually RELATE to the things you're grinding; why would stabbing goblins make you better at brewing potions?)
This is bad if you only like that one activity, but good if you like variety. (Or if you like all the activities.) Different games are different, and so are different gamers. No category of mechanics is inherently better or worse; it's all about what you're using them for. (And the details.)
Incidentally, that's also why stuff like chocobo racing exists. From one perspective, it's another grind you have to go through to see everything the game has to offer; from another, it's something you can do when you're tired of level grinding, which still rewards you with something useful in the main game.
