I have played enough of such "balanced later" games. The result is usually terminally dull cavalcade of nerfs and arbitrary restrictions.
I have little understanding how you can possibly balance a game without making it. Some stuff needs to be tweaked dozens and hundreds times. Something that sounds good on paper may not work in the end. PnP creators spend years or even decades on these things, printing new editions with fixes and stuff.
Keeping systems orthogonal and not listen retards who came here before? Sounds simple enough, but I think we have a lot of those who thought that they are smarter than people who designed games in 90s.
And then we get things like Wasteland 2.
For that reason they are also best built of possibly basic building blocks interacting with each other.
Can you give an example?
Coarse attributes controlling fine-grained skills is good when you can force player to commit to a rough build without knowing exactly how they will want to fine sculpt it in the end.
Ironically, that's exactly what I have in mind. Skills themselves will have a broader range (10-15 in total), but the sculpting will come from perks (talents, abilities, whatever). I haven't put much thought it yet, but keeping it separate from skills and attributes may be very hard. The idea is that the more you invest into a skill - the more powerful abilities you can get.
Then your system is poorly suited to what you think you can do. Also, most modern and classic cRPGs are irredeemably shit. Even good ones are often floated by 1-2 elements, often created by accident and usually undermined by all the awful ones.
I still would like to hear what is "complex".
And now also what CRPGs are not "shit".
That's good, but if player can decide their final build just as they distribute their initial attribute points, then the extra gameplay provided by having to refine your build as the game progresses goes out of the window.
I sort of explained it above. Player can decide what kind of character he want from the start, but not in details. Of course I don't like the idea of keeping some leveling mechanics away from player. so there is nothing wrong if some experienced and utterly autistic person will plan everything ahead.
So what you say is that you wouldn't mind having attributes and things they control randomly (say, intelligence determining carry weight), because it's just a game?
Not to that extent. For example, 1 strength in Arcanum gives +2 to hit points, 1 constitution gives +2 to fatigue points, and willpower gives +1 to both.
Being logical will make 1 constitution give +2 hp and +2 to fp, 1 will give +1 to fp and 1 strength give +1 to hp. And removing willpower from any ties to magic skills will result in mages dumping it in favor of constitution and we'll have tank mages doing devastating damage.
This is a side effect that will require extra work to implement, extra work to test and likely end up reducing gameplay variety - are you sure you want it? What is it that offends you so in not having it?
Mostly characters with 1 point in intelligence being able to master any scientific and technological skill without any penalties. The above example is also relevant.