Zephyrous

I prefer point-buy systems. You determine what your character will be good at, what she will be average at, what she will be bad at, generalist or specialist. That puts the choice for what and how the player wants to play the game in her own hands, and not dependent on dice rolls. I feel the same way about character progression. Grant additional build points at each level to be spent however the player wants (within the broad limits of the class, in a class-based system).

This sounds like the reason for the split between "Stamina" and "Health" It looks very much like Palladium's split between S.D.C. and HP. One is punishment you can take and represents your will to keep going in the face of adversity, or the ability to shrug off minor wounds. The other is actual real damage to your person, the difference between being grazed across the thigh and the bullet shattering your femur. Healing need not be "Mundane", the point is that it is not common, and it is not fast. A good night's sleep and you might feel better after a fistfight, but if you break your leg, even the finest medical technology the modern world has to offer won't make you better overnight. It will just increase you chances of healing well and not dying of infection while you do.

Rather than generic terms like "+1", how about quality, material, or property modifiers? Cloth: Padded -> Reinforced Cloth -> Brigandine -> Reinforced Spidersilk Hide: Bullhide -> rhinohide -> -> -> dragonhide Leather: Tanned Leather -> Boiled Leather -> -> -> Gryphon Leather Chain: Ring Mail -> Chain Mail -> -> -> Elven Chain Banded: Scale -> Splint -> Lamellar -> -> -> Dwarven Lorica Plate: Plated Mail -> Half Plate -> Full Plate -> -> -> Articulated Plate With modifiers based on craftsmanship, enchantment, coverage, etc. "Fine", "Masterwork", "Muffled", "Reflexive", "Fire Eater", "Sanctified", "Shirt"/"Cuirass", "Hauberk", "Haubergon", "Suit", etc. As to making certain armor types preferable to certain classes, or multi-class builds (if those become an option) here are some possibilities: Armor skills, either trainable or autogrant, improving a certain type of armor based on class levels. Armor specializations: Broad - Light Armor, Narrow - Cloth Armor, Focused - Brigandines (Rogue gains light armor at level 1, improves at 3, broadly specializes at 5, improves at 7, narrowly specializes at 9, improves at 11, focuses at 13, improves focus at 15 (stretch or compress based on max levels) (Fighter gain armor of choice at 1, improve at 2, gain second armor choice at 3, etc.) Or, each armor type has strengths and weaknesses, heavier armors offer more protection, and reduce speed, or are noisier, or have some other drawback. If the goal is to make each character use multiple types of armor based on the situation, inherent bonuses and drawbacks shouldn't effectively cap stat contributions, but might offer other intrinsic tradeoffs.

First point of order: Antibodies are not medicine, they are an produced by your immune system (T-cells) in response to infection. People never "died all the time from the simplest infected cut" and the body has build in mechanisms for reducing the incidence of infection: bleeding pushes contaminants out of a wound, white blood cells attack pathogens (pus is primarily made up of dead white blood cells and lymph, expended to fight and encapsulate the infection) scabs form to prevent additional foreign material from entering wounds. Similarly, spread of disease in a generally healthy or resistant population is generally slow. In modern times we build up resistance artificially through vaccination, which art has improved over time from the most basic (transfer pus from an infection survivor onto a rasped of an uninfected person), to modern cultured vaccines and anti-viral or retro-viral drugs. The big difference is that without vaccination, you end up with epidemics when a non-resistant population encounters a new disease. As supportive healing without healing magic or medicines, how about things like using fire magic to cauterize a wound, blood magic or water magic to flush it any sort of buff magic to maximize a characters chance to fight off an infection naturally, etc. In this sort of world, where you don't have the knowledge base for epidemiology, microbiology, or complex surgery, you might still have things like setting a broken bone, amputating an infected limb, perhaps even magical or Alchemical salves such as Sulfa drugs to prevent or treat infections, which all still require the body to undergo a natural healing process. Maybe magical healing is all slow, delicate, support magic, as another poster mentioned, it might be that serious wounds like broken bones, rather than just flesh wounds, require bed-rest, immobilization, and possibly a lot of time to heal properly. Or magic can handle the maintenance and feeding of the body in what amounts to an induced coma, with or without increased healing during the downtime. Still got the same problem, doesn't explain how a person can magically sleep off major wounds and if its so rare pretty much nobody uses it, then the world really should be filled with mass graves and the average people should be sickly to make the world believable. Lack of advanced medicine would likely make the people more resistant to diseases native to their home biome, as the weak and sickly die young. infant mortality might be as high as during the 13th and 14th centuries in Europe, but unless you had some sort of a plague, or a disease introduced from a foreign biome, you wouldn't see mass graves from the results of disease, just as you didn't get mass graves in Europe during the dark ages, except in the case of a plague or epidemic. If curative magic is rare, it will likely be expensive, so you probably would see mass graves near any major battlefield, as the curatives available are saved for the wealthy, high-ranking or mission-essential personnel (like heroes?)

There are a couple of other interesting possibilities for a New Game+ mode than just carrying over the same character. For instance, passing along an item to a new character as an "heirloom", gaining a few additional build points, allowing a skill or ability from the previous character for the next character, etc.