Several valid points for sure.
The Skyrim thing reminded me of the original Realms of Arkania series. There you actually get random events if you run around without pants.
I think most of the things which bother me the most are around the character development as I am have a minmaxer mindset. But at the same time it's also horrible for new/inexperienced players as they don't see the full picture and might gimp the party up to unplayability.
Bad Explanation of the Skill System: As explained in the article, when the game just doesn't tell you what the skills or attributes are good for
Random Elements in Skill System: If the game makes you roll for initial attributes, or skill increases. Realms of Arkania is a good example. In the old DSA-System you rolled all your character attributes, and on level up you had "tries" to increase your skills, your hitpoint increase was rolled. So initially you take hours to create a "good" character, and then you enter save/load sessions when leveling and are never quite happy about the result. Or you just accept that your party becomes gimped, mage getting more hipoints than your fighter due to bad luck.
Uncertainty in Skill System: Some games add trainers or books which allow additional skill increases which you can also do on level ups. So if you know that there are 5 "Sword fighting +1" books it would be a waste if you increased your skill to 100 before you found them. So if you know that these option might exist, you keep your skill at a certain degree just that you don't waste any potential. In the end there might not even a book for that particular skill in the game. This was actually the case with Eschalon, where you should look into a wiki /forum postings beforehand.
Missing retroactivity: What I absolutely hate in Character Systems is missing retro-activity. Something like "For each point of constitution you get 1 hitpoint at level up".
Now if you start a character at 10 constitution and then at a later point realize "oh, he just dies to fast", you are out of luck. Putting points into constitution won't help you anymore as you don't get the hitpoints you missed out on the previous levels. So a character which starts with 15 STR and 10 CON and then increases Con each level, ending up with 15 STR and 15 CON might have just have 15 hitpoints less than someone who started with 10 STR and 15 CON and increased STR instead.
An especially bad case of this can be found within Wasteland 2. You decide to increase Int later on, it has no use at all. This was in combination with another problem of WL2: Breakpoints.
Breakpoints: Some character systems work with very small numbers. So small numbers that not even all increases have an effect. So for example that your Strength increases your damage by 0.5 points. But the damage is always rounded down. So effectively odd numbers are useless. You need to study the character system beforehand to know where these break points are. An exceptionally bad case can be found in Wasteland 2, which had these Breakpoints with Intelligence, which then increased your Skillpoints per level, and with the Action points you have for combat. And due to the AP for shooting the action points themselve had break points as well. So lets say you can shoot once with 4 AP. And depending on your attributes you can have 5-10 AP, how many AP would you want to take? Exactly: It's 8. Having 7 AP is useless and having 9 AP is useless as well. So you have this AP breakpoint and need to match it with the Attribute breakpoints. Combined with missing restroactivity the WL2 character system became a total mess.
Excessive XP value by having limited XP in the game: There are multiple scenarios how the XP system can be really bad. The most extreme is that you don't have a level cap in the game, and not even a significant softcap, but at the same time the XP you can get in the game are limited. This makes you do things for the XP which are just absurd. E.g. if a combat solution gives you more XP than a peaceful solution you take the combat. If there are items which give you additional % of XP, you stack these. And if sacrificing items to a Dark God you actually want to defeat, you do that as well, like Lords of Xulima, which is a very good example on how to not do it. Lords of Xulima further added on that by also making the Gold supply limited. (well in fact they were unlimited, but to get unlimited money/XP you had to spend hundreds of hours to get a minimum increase).
Now of course there are even worse scenarios, like in Oblivion. But Oblivions System was so horribly bad that it's hard to actually make a rule out of it.
Oblivion has the worst Character System of all the games I know by making the choice which seems to be the most intuitive one, the worst one you can take. For those who don't know it:
-You select primary skills at character creation.
-All skills are tied to attributes
-You increase skills via learning by doing
-once you accumulated enough primary skill gains, you increase a level
-when you gain a level you get attribute gains depending on the skill gains you did since last level
-enemies scale to your level
So normally you'd think "I am a fighter, I make swordfight my primary skill!". Worst choice in the game. If you fight a lot, you gain points in your primary skill and level up. And you do so very fast, having almost no time to build up attribute gains. So the only attribute rising might be the one tied to sword fighting.
Now on level 2 you have a sword fighting skill which is better than on level 1, and your strength is better, but that's it. All enemies leveled up as well, and they probably are now stronger to you in comparison because they did a better level up.
What you need to do instead is using primary skills which you can rise on demand. Like jumping. Then you just play normally. If you want to max out your possibilities you note down every skillgain on paper. So that you know what attribute gains you get. If you maxed out the potential, you start jumping around. You get your primary skillgain, your level up, and with that tons of attributes gain. The enemies skill up as well, but you gain the edge as you leveled more effectively.
I guess my post became extremely specific about the character system now and again became a wall of text. Anyways, will leave it there as it is now.
