Thomas Shey
Legend
OK, so one extreme would be B/X D&D
Uhm, no. Pemerton actually had closer to what I was thinking of with Fate. Early D&D didn't embed things in broader abilities for the most part; it just outright ignored most of them outside some limited things, and it wasn't exactly friendly to mixing and matching.
4e is closer to what I was talking about with the second, but it still really wants you to bucket things and has a very limited ability to move outside of how things work except the limited things in Feats and the like. Its better than many games in the D&D sphere, but its still not particulate enough for what I'm talking about, which are things like, well, the Hero System.
(Yes, neither of these are in the D&D sphere, but I'm not particularly sold class-based systems are at all good for this sort of thing).