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Primary and Secondary Attributes:

When you distribute between your four primary attributes, you are limited in that your highest stat may be no more than double that of your lowest.  Each primary attribute has three secondary attributes, and likewise it must distribute all its points between them.  With the exception of magical powers, which permit a 4:1 ratio between highest and lowest, secondary attributes must also be balanced within a 2:1 ratio between highest and lowest.

Physical
   Strength - brute strength
   Vitality - life force; ability to survive injuries
   Endurance - ability to continue to fight despite exhaustion and injury
Mental
   Memory - ability to remember things; critical for spellcasting and fighting techniques
   Cognition - ability to analyze and counter an opponent's techniques; mental reflexes
   Focus - ability to keep your mind on task; essentially mental discipline
Agility:
   Reflex - ability to react quickly physically
   Balance - limits your body movements, both for unarmoured and armoured fighters
   Dexterity - ability to handle things with your hands
Spirit:
   Energy - raw spiritual power
   Control - ability to shape spiritual power
   Imagination - allows for "improv" combat and spellcasting techniques and styles


No character classes:

Rather than approaching character design with set classes, this system aims to allow players to custom tailor their skills and traits to form around a specific set of strategies and playstyles.  It's still possible to create the stereotypical wizard or warrior (in fact, probably quite easy), but there is nothing stopping a player from cutting short his development in one 'field' to explore another at any time, or even pursuing two specialist roles in completely different fields simultaneously.


Training Packages:

During character creation, players may select training packages to give them an edge in their desired field(s) of development.  It is impossible to gain training packages after character creation, so choosing wisely is important.  However, the vast majority of the abilities offered in a training package (or that follow naturally in the prerequisit tree) can be approached by alternate means.  A wizard who attains his knowledge through real world experience and trail and error, for instance, will have fundamentally different spellcasting than one who was trained in the art originally.  It is also important to realize that some doors are actually closed by certain packages, and some are closed  by not taking certain packages.  Berserkergang can never be attained from someone who took a training package related to martial discipline, for instance.  The very concept of losing one's discipline is abhorred in the character's original training and ethos.


Experience Buy:

Skills are purchased by paying experience points.  A skill cannot be improved by paying experience, only learned.  From that point on, it is up to you as a player to learn how to use the skill effectively in order to improve its performance.  Although the article is not yet done yet, skills can also be combined to form new skills.  For instance, combine a charged-up power attack with a spinning attack to get a charge-up spinning attack.  In this way, more complex skills are created by the synthesis of others.  The critical point here is that experience buy cannot improve existing skills directly.  The whole system is built around the concept of balancing versitility and specialization. 

Many skills have prerequisits and discounts associated with them.  For instance, having "short sword" proficiancy will lower the cost of "long sword proficiancy", and in turn both of these will stack for a cost reduction on "broad sword proficiancy".  However, you will require at least one of these sword proficiancies before learning the "parry" ability.  It should be noted that an ability's cost cannot be pushed below "0" via discounts, but once it has reached this critical threshold, you will receive it for free.  Sometimes this causes a domino effect, where one ability is learned automatically, reducing the cost of another one and causing it to be learned automatically.  This is equivilent to reaching a state of mastery in that "field" of skills.


Stats Modifier:

As you gain experience (regardless of how it is spent), you may gain stats modifiers.  There are three types of modifiers:

Global: your global stats modifier increases as you gain experience (independant of how it's spent), and literally just multiplies all your stats linearly.

Specific: a specific stats modifier is just like a global, except it focuses only on one primary stat.

Enlightenment: an enlightenment modifier is a scalar (multiplied by any stats modifiers) that is usually applied to all spirit-based attributes to very experienced characters, usually at about the time combat specialists reach the limits that their technique can offer.  Sometimes enlightenment modifiers may apply to physical, mental, and agility.  The purpose if this is that expect the game mechanics to break down at the higher level, where spellcaster development hasn't capped out yet, but combat development has.  This bonus essentially allows a combat specialist who reaches the "late game" so to speak to pursue an entirely new field to complement his original one. 

These modifiers allow your character to actually become stronger as the game goes on, allowing you to make better use of high end abilities and create a bigger "bang" so to speak.


That's it:

Seriously, that's it.  The system is as simple as that.  Pick your base stats, buy some skills as you earn experience, and get stats modifiers to become a stronger character overall.  The simplicity is tempered by what will be an awe inspiring mesh of skills and abilities players can pursue, and the many different prerequisits that may lead to the same - or remarkably similar - results. 

Darvin, I'm rereading all your stuff now and it seems to me that your Training packages are in effect not much different from classes. You gain benefits at some points, some of these cannot be gained at any other time in the game, which means that sometimes you have to choose a specific package to learn specific skills later on. On the other hand, some packages can make some specific skills unavailable to you.

Sure it's not completely the same, but the way you wrote the bit about not being restricted by classes makes going on about limits opposed by training packages a bit sour.

The main difference, as I understand it, is that with your training packages, you select a general direction, with a few unique possibilities and a few limits, at character creation and from there on, you are free to take whatever route you want to take, not being limited by a fixed set of skills for your specific class, but being able to choose from a shared pool of skills, available for every character. No bonus skills or special abilities that are granted at level x and upgraded at level y.

I stand with your decision of having training packages instead of classes, I just think you should have made the comparison between your packages and the classes system to make the differences more clear and not to create a false sense of having a completely open system, even though just for a short while.

Solinx

Btw. Your system may turn out to be quite complex, hearing you about making certain combinations with skills, turning them into other skills, etc.

I've actually been making similar considerations to what you're talking about with packages.  First of all, to clear up confusion, each character will pick many packages to add some diversity from the start.  With that in mind, a somewhat more free-form solution would just be to make certain packages incompatable, then tweak the prerequisit tree to make it more difficult, but not impossible, to combine these polar opposite techniques.

Ahh, multiple packages, I missed that. Yes, you clearly use the plural form, it just didn't got through to me I guess. It will really be different from classes then.

Solinx

New additions:

Training Package Update:  many training packages may be related, and will 'overlap' certain skills.  In the event that these skills are overlapped, the character will receive an experience bonus (reflecting that his specialized training has allowed him more time for development).  However, this experience bonus will be capped, and if that cap is exceeded, the player receives an extra training package rather than a huge experience bonus.  This would prevent a character from gaining high level skills at a very low level of experience by specializing.

Character Traits: similar to training packages, character traits allow for customization of a character.  However, these traits can only be picked at character creation, reflecting that they are natural skills and attributes, not learned ones.  There are no prerequisits, but some traits are non-compatable (you can't be both ambidexterous and left-handed, for instance).  Traits may passively favour certain abilities or packages, but will never act as a prerequisit.  In a select few cases, a trait's bonus may render a skill redundant (it's pointless to invest in "off-handed" fighting skills if you're ambidexterous, since you don't have an "off-hand".  However, it may be a prerequisit for a two-handed fighting style, which would be VERY useful for such a character), and in these cases the trait allows the skill in question to be bypassed for others it may lead to that are not redundant.

Nice addition on the traits. It will certainly increase unique character development.

Solinx

Primary and Secondary Attributes:

When you distribute between your four primary attributes, you are limited in that your highest stat may be no more than double that of your lowest.  Each primary attribute has three secondary attributes, and likewise it must distribute all its points between them.  With the exception of magical powers, which permit a 4:1 ratio between highest and lowest, secondary attributes must also be balanced within a 2:1 ratio between highest and lowest.

Physical
   Strength - brute strength
   Vitality - life force; ability to survive injuries
   Endurance - ability to continue to fight despite exhaustion and injury
Mental
   Memory - ability to remember things; critical for spellcasting and fighting techniques
   Cognition - ability to analyze and counter an opponent's techniques; mental reflexes
   Focus - ability to keep your mind on task; essentially mental discipline
Agility:
   Reflex - ability to react quickly physically
   Balance - limits your body movements, both for unarmoured and armoured fighters
   Dexterity - ability to handle things with your hands
Spirit:
   Energy - raw spiritual power
   Control - ability to shape spiritual power
   Imagination - allows for "improv" combat and spellcasting techniques and styles

And moral and faith?? Don't you think these two things won't modify violently the attitudes of the soldiers?

Hey, don't forget that this is the forum of Demo 2, what is dicussed here does not apply to the RTS engine