morolf: Age of Decadence seems like a good fit.
yogsloth: The reviews really scared me off this one when it came out. Lots of negativity about character builds and difficulty.
Well, don't expect to play a bad-ass fighter, or a bad-ass assassin, or a bad-ass anything, really. The game is unforgiving, and thus goes contrary to most of our RPGs reflexes.
For example, your professionnal, experienced assassin is cornered in a dark alley by two armed thugs, mercenary-types. In most RPGs, it sounds like a classic early-game combat to spice things up, right? Well, in AoD, you'll want to flee, because seriously, facing off 2 muggers on their home turf is stupid.
In my game, I chose the assassin carreer. I put most of my points on "killing stuff", "killing stuff by surprise" and "lying my ass off so that I can kill stuff by surprise", which sounds cool, but means that I have an "hybrid" build, and that I suck at pretty much anything. I can maybe lie my way past a drunken guard, use my reputation to bully a random scholar, or fight off 2 beggars (3 if I can knife one of them by surprise). And most of the missions I can take now (I'm at the end of chapter one) set me against groups of 4-6 trained, armored fighters led by suspicious and vigilant leaders.
So I have now 2 options : Be a very polite, very meek assassin who gets the city guards to do the dirty work for him, or be a dead assassin.
So yeah, that game is HARD
But fun, though. You'll die often, but the designers aknowleged that by giving you colorfull death descriptions to read before you reload your save ^^