Within crossfire, the races & classes are not different enough in most cases. Reasons for this:

• Pretty much all skills are learnable, so starting skills are not that important.
• A couple point state bonus/penalty is easy to overcome with magic devices.
• Any object can be used by any race/class (save for armor/weapon restrictions)

Various suggested fixes:

• Add ability to limit certain items to certain classes & races. Thus, archers could get the best bows in the game - much better than anyone else could get.
• Add different versions of the skills (basic, expert, master, etc), with better ones giving more exp or other bonuses, and only way to get the better ones is to start with them.
• Another possiblity is to limit max level in certain skills.
• Increase stat range - may not do much - if 55 vs 60 is same as 23 vs 25, and items are now +5 instead of +1, it is just a wash.
• Maybe with increased stat range, each time a level is gained, a stat goes up, and what stat goes up is related to the characters race.
• Perhaps add minimum skill level requirements for certain objects (one handed weapon at level 40 to use some cool sword, etc)

Some other changes vaguely related to this (reasonable to do at the same time, since best done when everyone has new characters)

• Make the stat potions (potion of strength, int, etc), only rarely permanently increase a stat. Instead, these potions would temporarily increase a stat for a very long duration (real time of hours)
• Chance of increase would be related to how close character is to max stat.
• Could only have 1 temporary boost per stat (no stacking 5 potions).
• could add better versions of the potions, that increase it by 2 points temporarily, and has increased chance of permanent increase.
• If stat array is increased to 100, maybe remove limit of potions only doing permanent increase to max natural stat (maybe 2 or 3x max natural stat)