Its surprising that even in games fokussing on fighting the fighting system is often rather uninnovative and inflexibile towards the way of fighting. Of course there are also rather fun systems however this is mostly realised by putting in action good graphics and giving the playr a feeling of power. The great annoying thing is when you are forced to play a certain way thats not really fits your own style. So where are these major problems coming from? You fight to win but developers often forgot what winning actually means. Winning is when your opponent is no thread anymore because he stopped or is not able to fight anymore.Winning is not to do as much damage as possible to kill your opponent as fast as possible. So what does this mean for us? Even if we do not include peaceful ways of winning there are several ways we can go. 1)Exhausting or enemy until he is unable to defend himself anymore and then delivering a final blow. This can be realized by implementing and handling stamina in certain ways. 2)Stunning your opponent by either means of mental or physical pressure rendering him unable to counter. Giving each attack a certain stun effect high rates of attacking(for example by falling into a frenzy) can be used for stunning also the implementation of an mental /psychological status of your charackter can be used in special moves and magical spells to create stunning.Stun can be either short time preventing or decreasing counterattacks or long time which gives the ability to deliver an final blow. 3)To wear down your enemy little by little by using an advanced form of defense. This requires options to fight defensively and specialize your character in a defensive way. 4)Changing and varying attack sytle while at the same time specializing in a certain field of abilities. The prob is that the concepts of classes always limits a character on a certain way of fighting, its better if a char can choose certain qualitys traits and attributes and then choose to train certain skills ,ways of fighting and magic limited by the amount of knowledge he can have at acertain time. These skills moves etc would give him a variety of tactics to choose in combat. So success would be reached by choosing the right skills/moves to bring out the own potential and using them in the right moment.(Because of that features which prevent the specialization into one stat are in my eyes nonsense) Well now i want to give some example how this can work. For example if you have an system where the game remembers the amount of damage dealt with one attack treating this as an "wound" of certain size and based on the size of the wound the wound would bleed more or less. Then you might be more interested in dealing a great wound then as much damage as possible with your normal hits. You could specialize in strength and learn a skill which charges attack power. Others might raise their agility to avoid such damage or raise their regeneration to high levels because regeneration would decrease the size of the wounds(regeneration should always first decrease the big wounds to small wound before healing the small wounds) such the blood loss would be minimized. If attacks would stun the agility player could try to maximize the amount of his attacks by using a fast skill such preventing the strength player to use his slow but powerful charge attack. Well lets say the strength player would have also have high vitality he could use defensive stamina saving moves and wait until the agility player is exhausted. Also their could be a feature of hiding/camouflage people performing fast attacks from the shadow gaining a surprisebonus only to flee and hide again slowly wearing their enemy down with fast alternations of attack and hide. However someone with good regeneration would be immune to this tactic by replenishing the lost lifeforce int the hiding phases. While the one with good regeneration might losse to an offensively playing calssical warrior that goes for agility and strength to maximize his damage per time. Well and like I said there are always also the possibiliteas of peacefully winning(For example by preventing an monster to become aggressive towards you ,by being able to run faster than your enemy or by letting your oponent become stunned unconscious or discouraged of fighting you)