Limiting

A further advantage of limiting how many powers the user can have active (and further such neverwinter tier them) is that it makes the ones you do have more special.

It also gives an argument for the lowest tiet (spam tier) being continous. If it isn't you are just going to cast it again anyway.

Rotations

Been playing a "rogue" in swtor and as they give me more abilities i'm starting to realize that while i do enjoy rotations
1. It is not clear enough for me. I want it as 1-2-3-4. If i remember correctly age of conan dis this well.
2. I do not enjoy deep rotations. I want.me right hand on the mouse and me left hand stationary on left side of keyboard.

Also i do not enjoy having everything on cooldown. Especially global cooldown.
Neverwinter does this well. It lets you have 2 attacks that you can do constantly and those continue as long as the button is pressed rather than happening and then waiting for cooldown.
Then it gives you up to 4 special attacks that are on individual cooldowns along with two extra specials who share a chargeup.
Of course there are many to chose from but they have to be slotted into those slotts.

Edit: and the reason i like the neverwinter approach more is because it lets me feel i am doing something the whole time while letting me watch the world rather than having to watch the attacks the whole time.

Party-based gameplay and the thief/rogue

As far as i can tell the classic adventuring party comes from pen and paper games where it normally isn't just the DM/GM and a single player (i.e. only a single player character).
The presence of multiple players and player lead to several things and among them character based storylines and differentiated roles.

Those two things don't move well to single-character computer games. You have to cut back on some things.
For the character based storylines the cut-back is built in, there is only one character and even that one can't really have a background since it isn't fully created by the player. (There could be a set of backgrounds to chose from, but again those would only be chosen by the player, not created.)

The cutback on differentiated roles are also somewhat built in. In a party of six (the usual size for a party in computer games as far as i can tell) there might be 6 different classes including:
a rogue/thief (disarm traps and pick locks)
a priest/paladin (heal and cure diseases/curses)
a knight (negate and deal damage)
a barbarian (deal a lot of damage)

In a single character game you either have to let the character be able to do all these himself/herself at master level or force them to chose between things such as fighting better and being able to pick locks.

party based games might also have a larger group to chose from such as in Dragon Age where it story-wise is a party of a dozen individuals traveling together. The problem with this as far as i'm concerned is that you miss about half the interaction between characters. And this does not add replay-value, only annoyance value. Furthermore, why split the group up if there is only one thing being done at a time? (Not that such an easy solution as having there always be 2 things needing doing at the same time would fix it.)

Another problem with party-based games is that you have to switch characters when different challenges come up. To me this disrupts the gameplay, which should be avoided.

Classes and alignment

Most RPGs use classes of some sort to determine what skills a character has access to.
There is a roleplaying element to this as a knight is not suddenly going to start learning spells.
On the other hand a mage should not be learning new spells out in the wilderness for no reason at all. Of course this depends on how different a spell is, a mage with experience only from fire spells might have problems figuring out how to do a frost/ice spell on his own but may be able to figure out how to use fire in a new way on his own (especially if it goes from "fireball" to "bigger fireball").
Finding a scroll would be fine, but that is a limited way (in a game that is realistic about were and how often they can be found). Teachers would be less limited in what can be learned but they are limited in where the learning can take place.

Alignment was/is a system to determine how a character should act in the world and to a degree what classes the character has access to. This has a problem built in only if the DM/GM enforces staying in that alignment.
To make it more interesting alignment could be used to determine whether the character gets access to teachers that can teach him/her abilities.
Paladin would be a good example of how classes could be handled based on a dynamic alignment except for that a paladin who strays from the path of his god (such as lawful good maybe) would not have access to his faithbased abilities any longer. Perhaps knight would work better. Lawful knight if lawful and chaos/chaotic knight if chaotic.

Representation thru points

This post is a follow-up to Leveling and skillpoints & statpoints.

As i wrote in the earlier post points are used to simulate the abilities of the character.
This is needed for two reasons.

One is that the player can't perform the actions to determine whether the character suceeded because the abilities are to a great degree physical and/or impossible in our universe.
This type includes everything from swordfighting and damage to lock-picking and spell-casting.
Damage and lock-picking is extra noteworthy. Damage since there is multiple stats involved, not only is there usually one or more stats involved determining whether damage was done at all, but there is also hit-points that ensure that what would kill in real life does not in the game. But it works for both the opponent and the player so it is acceptable mostly.
Lockpicking is noteworthy because computer-games have started including a challenge that the player can do to determine whether the lock-picking succeeded (even tho it is easier then real lock-picking and may still include some stats to determine how difficult the challenge is).

The other reason is to automate parts of the game instead of letting the DM/GM determine everything as he wills. That may make it easier to control and guide the story and thus making that better but it also makes it less of a game and more an interactive story.
Pure statistical gameplay can however remove some of the fun and for some types of games it is not fitting (such as superhero games where it might be better that the hero can beat the odds). Therefore some games include mechanics to go around the stats but these are in the hands of the players, not in the hands of the DM/GM.

story-driven gameplay and linearity

Story-driven gameplay is a way to answer the question of why the players character is doing what he or she is doing.

Linearity is whether the games story goes from A to B to C or allows the player to decide what he or she wants the character to do next.

This can be done in 3 (or possibly more) ways:

• Standalone Actions where the actions don't really affect anything beyond whether for example a quest is done or not (which for quest-chains may affect whether the next quest becomes available but does nothing else).
  
• Boolean Actions where one action may preclude another for some reason (such as there not being enough time to do both).
• Order-Interactive Actions where the order of the actions affect each other (such as doing a quest for NPC A affects how NPC B treats you.
  

These types of actions are on two levels where Standalone actions are the lower, less complex level and Boolean Actions and order-Interactive Actions is on the higher, more complex level.

A game usually includes more then one type of actions. Most actions may be Standalone Actions while Boolean Actions and Order-Interactive Actions are fewer. This both allows a lower complexity for the game as a whole and allows for some interesting interactions where the player have to deal with the consequences of his or her choices.

Equipment

The concept of equipment is well-used concept in RPGs and to some extent FPS/Adventure games.

In RPGs equipments usually includes armor aswell as weapons while FPS games mostly focus on weapons and adventure games mostly on tools. Another difference is that FPS/Adventure games often lets you carry every weapon/tool you find while RPGs forces you to choose what weapons and armor you want to carry with you with different stats and each item having a certain weight.

Armor
For example leather armor may not protect you as much from damage but it is lighter and allow you to move more.
This difference may be theoretical or practical in-game. If it is practical there really is both advantages and disadvantages to the different armors but if it is theoretical it is mostly a way to justify stopping mages and rogues from wearing heavy armor and getting too much damage resistance with World of Warcraft being a good example of the later.

Armor is usually found as different parts named after the bodypart where it is worn with the most usual being:

• head
• chest
• legs
• hands
• feet

The parts can depending on setting usually be interchanged for parts of another type as long as the character can wear that type so it would be possible to wear a plate chestpiece and have the rest being cloth armor.

Weapons
Weapons somewhat naturally lend themselves to advantages and disadvantages.
some weapons allow you more range while others do more damage and/or a greater rate of attack.
Examples would be:
sword (melee) <--> bow (ranged) for medieval worlds
shotgun (short range, medium speed) <--> sub-machine gun ( short to medium range, fast speed) <--> sniper rifle (long range, low speed)


Tools
Tools can be anything from lockpicks/hacking programs to hammers to repair armor. It does usually not affect the stats of the character (except maybe by having a bit of weight) for more then the single task it was intended for (such as high quality lockpicks making it easier to pick locks).

Stats
As i said above equipment can have different stats and this includes changing the attributes of the characters (for example giving a certain amount of extra strength).
This is all but a standard as far as MMORPGs go and allow splitting equipment into different tiers where a later tier has greater stats then a earlier tier.