I started working on an item system for my (first) game, and I'm having a problem conceptualizing how it should work. Since Items can produce a bunch of potentially non-standard actions (revive a character vs increasing some stat) or have use restrictions (can only revive if a character is dead). For obvious reasons, I don't want to create a new Item class for every item type. What is the best way to handle this?

Should I make a handful of item types (field modifiers, status modifiers, )?

Is it normal to script item usage? Could (should?) this be combined with the above mentioned solution (have a couple of different sub item types, make special case items usage scripted)?

Thanks.