Lately I tryed a few times to create characters for some games, but at some certain point (especially when collision detection came in) everything became messy and the interaction between chars, the world and certain items had a lot of bugs. So here is my question, how do you ussualy keep track of actions that your character is allowed to do, or more in general do you have some links / advices how to set up a char efficiantly?

I´m working on a char right now, who should at least be able to run, jump, pick items up and use different fighting animations. Most ideas I came up with until now use some kind of action.priority / action.duration system to determain whats possible and what not, or a "action-manager" which defines for every action what is possible from that action on but it all doesnt work that well together.