I'm tired of playing stick thin mages and dumb as bricks fighters. I know, I know, classes must be differentiated to offer a diverse experience and meaningful choices; and if a character is good at everything it utterly destroys this. I agree. At the same time I feel it's unrealistic that a fighter must utterly lack charisma and intellect (See Alexander the Great) and a mage must have never been outside in their life.
I saw an interesting idea from a poster on the something awful forums that may offer a solution. Essentially, it amounted to having two entirely separate stat pools during character creation. So for example, using D&D stats (again, JUST an example), instead of dividing points from a big pool between
STR
CON
DEX
INt
WIS
CHA
You would have two separate and equal pools (naturally modified by race and class) that looked like this:
1. Physical stats
STR
CON
DEX
2. Mental stats
INT
WIS
CHA
Point taken from one pool have no influence on the other. Now you can have your clever fighter, your buff mage, your charismatic ranger, etc. I'd like for their to be even more mental and physical stats to differentiate this more, but most class differentiation would come in the form of skills and talents. You may have a fastidious wizard that insists on a balanced diet and frequent exercise, so he's actually quite strong and not going to be KO'd by stiff breeze; but compared to the fighter that's been in martial training most of his life, he's still very ineffective in combat due to a lack of technique. Fencing is about far more than strength. Conversely, the fighter may be poor in academic matters, but still possess a shrewd intellect and street smarts.
This could differentiate characters even within a class. One wizard may have a very high INT score, and a low WIS. You now have something of a savant. Another might have a low WIS but very high CHA, being an excellent if unorthodox communicator.
Thoughts?