I guess what I’m looking for are articles, books, or post-mortems that discuss how major RPG games tackled the issue of how they handled different types of items, characters, monsters… Right now I’m looking to expand my knowledge about this – studying things like inheriting from classes, or the entity-component system. Ideally I’d like to know about what different kinds of techniques are there, what is best for the RPG medium.

I guess what I’m looking for are articles, books, or post-mortems that discuss how major RPG games tackled the issue of how they handled different types of items, characters, monsters… Right now I’m looking to expand my knowledge about this – studying things like inheriting from classes, or the entity-component system. Ideally I’d like to know about what different kinds of techniques are there, what is best for the RPG medium.