Rift soul system and rogues in general.

Rift gives the player a set of souls to chose from that can be combined in different ways. This lets the give partial customization where they linit the player with what each soul can do.

How could this be done in reverse?

The player chooses a type of attack (say charged bolt), element and effect? The game limits damage and such based on player level and player input on cost etc. (Hmm, elder scrolls? ).

Distinguish between charged and channeled. Charged spends a moment to gather energy then does a larger effect, channeled continously does a smaller effect. Wirh channeled it doesn't matter if you are interrupted because you don't loose anything. With charged you risk loosing that larger effect (or if dev is kind, you simply get a timepenalty).

Easy (well, easiest) to do for mages.

For rogues i am curious about tiered buildup / attackpatterns. You start with A which lets you do B which lets you do C or D. How many on lowest level? 3? How many tiers? How many different attacks?  Maybe have it that A also unlocks tier two of A? So the player can choose to go A-A2-A3 etc?  Or have A give an effect? That effect is needed for B but also enhances A to sort of A level 2? Say A enhances accuracy, B enhances speed, C enhances damage. So the player can choose to go for more and more accuracy (enhancing crit%) or switch between the three.

Rift soul system and rogues in general.

Rift gives the player a set of souls to chose from that can be combined in different ways. This lets the give partial customization where they linit the player with what each soul can do.

How could this be done in reverse?

The player chooses a type of attack (say charged bolt), element and effect? The game limits damage and such based on player level and player input on cost etc. (Hmm, elder scrolls? ).

Distinguish between charged and channeled. Charged spends a moment to gather energy then does a larger effect, channeled continously does a smaller effect. Wirh channeled it doesn't matter if you are interrupted because you don't loose anything. With charged you risk loosing that larger effect (or if dev is kind, you simply get a timepenalty).

Easy (well, easiest) to do for mages.

For rogues i am curious about tiered buildup / attackpatterns. You start with A which lets you do B which lets you do C or D. How many on lowest level? 3? How many tiers? How many different attacks?  Maybe have it that A also unlocks tier two of A? So the player can choose to go A-A2-A3 etc?  Or have A give an effect? That effect is needed for B but also enhances A to sort of A level 2? Say A enhances accuracy, B enhances speed, C enhances damage. So the player can choose to go for more and more accuracy (enhancing crit%) or switch between the three.

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.