Pick three primary skills three major skills and six minor skills from a total list.

Spread 50 points among your attributes (strength, agility, stamina, intelligence, etc)

Take advantages (like immunities to a debuff type, expertise in a type of weapon, or fast healing) and disadvantages (like critical weaknesses to certain damage types, lack of spellcasting ability or inability to wear certain armor materials) for more or less difficulty (xp needed) to level.

When you level, you get bumps in your skills depending on how often you use them, more HP/MP and points to spend on your attributes.

Which means your character can do whatever you want it to (no more “you rolled a main healing class, you must heal!” it becomes “you actually rolled a character with the intention of healing, since you took lots of the completely optional healing spells, so go ahead and do the job you clearly want!”) and levels based on what you want to improve. You buy spells from spellcasting guilds. You practice fighting skills at fighting guilds.

Then yeah, give people swords made of metal, armor made of leather, and stop with the gear creeping. Wear the armor you found or made yourself the entire game, if you want to. Because your character will actually progress as your character, not like Priest #59990, wearing the same tier 70 armor as every other priest, with the same spells and the same talent/trait setup.

Typically the armor with larger -coo gives higher bonuses to resists (which seem to make more of a difference, as armor comes secondary to the dodge skill). It’s up to the player to decide how to balance out your gear. Resists vs straight melee defense. If resists, which do you want to focus on, etc etc.

Also, all rifles give -60 melee defense. This isn’t a huge problem as most things are dead before they get into melee range but in terms of pvp riflemen can be sitting ducks up close.

Diablo 2 had that, but they also had things like… here’s a piece of gear that gives you some Barbarian talents. Or some Sorceress talents, etc. etc. Want a Necromancer spamming fireballs? You can! Want to stack up lightning resist reduction then go to town with chance-to-proc lightning gear? Or fire gear? Or any other element? Go for it!

It presented quite a few options and allowed those classes to have a multitude of gear and play-style choices.

In the first Diablo, there were explicitly stated effects on items, whichever way they swung. Diablo 2 made gear all but positive, hiding only the penalty to traveling speed due to weight (though you could find out about it on their website.) World of Warcraft has no such reductions, except perhaps for some joke items.

I honestly think it would be better if items were about singular trade-offs rather than between a hierarchy of equipment. There seems to be no reason for developers to pursue that line of thought, because following it has no obvious way of creating incentive to play.

For a sci-fi/modern setting you simply “upgrade” your weapon with items like scopes, hair-triggers, extended clips, nuclear ammo, etc.

And as a strong proponent of TF2 Engiedom, I have brought down a heavy or two in my time with lucky crits from my 9mm. Of course what bearing that has to this I have no idea.

I want a spreadsheet and flow chart to be necessary for even the most basic of tasks. Want to kill that pig with a sword? Let’s calculate chance to hit: (sword quality/skill with sword of said quality)+pig knowledge+(((dexterity/strength)*coordination)*character fatigue)+environmental conditions (IE weather, terrain, position relative to said pig) etc etc

Success! You’ve hit the pig! Now lets calculate damage…

Want to run way over there? Well it’s 3 miles over wet, rocky terrain and you’re carrying 150lbs of random stuff. You recently ate a full meal, don’t drink nearly enough water and smoking all that pipe weed means your vV02max is going to be pretty low…it will take you ~45 minutes assuming you don’t fall on your face. Good luck!

Stat bonuses won’t matter nearly as much, if at all, when your relative position to the pig on the “battlefield” means more than how much +agi you get from wearing earrings.