What is an RPG

   At its barest bones, a Role Playing Game is simply any activity that involves pretending to be someone else and playing. Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, and House are all forms of RPG that kids play (or played before they became politically incorrect). However, for practical purposes, RPGs are games that involve gaining experience and leveling up. In the fantasy realm this generally involves character classes (the core four and derivatives), hit points, damage, and healing. Most fantasy RPGs will make some minor concession to the idea of non-combat skills, but RPG players tend to want to be big dang heroes, not village blacksmiths with nagging wives and large broods of children (the "find dowries for my daughters RPG isn't a huge seller).

  Combat is generally broken down into two complimentary avenues: damage and status affects. Damage is how combat is generally resolved (the easiest way to defeat your enemy is to reduce his HP to </= 0). Status affects start by affecting the application of damage, but can ultimately reach a point where they are an alternative route to conflict resolution. Damage and status affects can be further divided into infliction, avoidance, and repair. Therefore, a character is usually capable of some combination of these six capacities (infliction of dmg, infliction of status affects, avoidance of dmg, avoidance of status affects, healing of dmg, and healing of status affects).

  In traditional fantasy RPG, there are four core classes, each of which deals damage, two of which afflict and cure status affects, and one of which heals damage. These tend to be fairly rigid or absurdly open, so some systems offer derivative classes that split some of the difference. Your standard Warrior/Fighter class can be broken off into a healing warrior (Paladin), Nature Warrior (Ranger), fist-punching warrior (monk), etc, while your Wizard class might focus down into one of his many schools. These systems end up rigid in a way that affects storytelling and character development (there aren't many sneaky sword swinging mage types because sneaky, sword-swinging, and mage all are wrapped up in different rigid classes). To build a really great fantasy RPG, we need to strip down the classes to their core skillsets, assign those core skillsets in workable parts, and then rebuild as something modular.