The original version of Stormbringer was very much like this.
A PC's magical potential was measured by his Power (POW) score, and POW was almost entirely determined by your race or country of origin.
Melniboneans had a high starting POW, Pan Tangians had one nearly as high...others? Not so much.
To balance this, the default ChaGen system determined race randomly- IOW, you rolled for your PC's race, THEN made all of the rest of the relevant decisions. There was, as I recall, only a 2% chance of being Melnibonean, perhaps 4-10% chance of being Pan Tangian. (Odds were similar about being one of the bestial races.)
One other balancing feature was that, true to the source material, the sorcerers weren't slinging around lightning bolts, etc. in combat. Almost all magic was ritual magic- and that mostly to bind Demons, Elementals or Virtues into items. A sorcerer in the party wasn't going to dominate combat, but he sure could help his teammates tear it up.
As such the nature of the game entirely depended upon what kind of PCs you had in the party. The very first game of Stormbringer I played, the party consisted of 2 Melniboneans, a Pan Tangian, and about 4 normal humans. This statistically improbable group gained powerful weapons fairly quickly, and were able to act with impunity.
OTOH, a second campaign had only a single sorcerer who was a non-Pan Tangian human and a Myyrhyn (winged person), so the power curve was much flatter.
It was like the difference between a Funny Car and a Model T.