I prefer to not have ability scores and instead things be based around skills. Derived numbers from attributes naturally create a disparity for their usefulness. I.E. Charisma.

Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Charisma
All the rest is skills

>>47229081
I think skills are a bit too granular to use without broad abilities as a back-up.

Example:
A player may not invest in the Balance skill if the character archetype doesn't warrant it, but any character should be able to have a go at sidling along a narrow surface. Lack of skill or experience doesn't really stop you from putting one foot in front of the other. You could just have everyone take the same 'unskilled' check, but I think adding a little variation through Dexterity offers the players a welcome bit of control over their character.

>>47229117
>Charisma
I wish no one had ever come up with this. It's a shining example of rollplay over roleplay.

Power - Strength - Intelligence - Presence
Finesse - Dexterity - Wits - Manipulation
Resistance - Health - Willpower - Composure

>>47229156
>I wish no one had ever come up with this. It's a shining example of rollplay over roleplay.

why? If you are able to play a strong barbarian when you are not strong or competent swordsman, or being able to play a wizard when you are neither super intelligent or able to cast spells why do you have a problem when someone wants to play a savvy guy when he is really shy in real life? What makes your needs more important than his? if the system helps you accomplish your fantasy it should allow other players as well. Hell I seen players who were shy, bad roleplayers but with help from the system they gradually broke from their shell and improved.

>>47229156
I can say the same about Intelligence. If we already have mental stuff as numbers, why drop certainly non-connected to INT and important stat?

I quite like the stats from Arcanum:
>Physical
Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Beauty
>Mental
Intelligence, Willpower, Perception, Charisma

>>47229194
It's impossible to really act out feats of strength or combat at the table. Social interactions are the one thing you can roleplay properly at the table. Cherish this. Replacing it with a die roll is mind-numbingly tedious.

However shy a player may be, he's already made the decision to play an RPG with actual human beings. Talking to the other players and the DM shouldn't be a problem.

>>47229220
I'm not against giving Intelligence the same treatment as Charisma, to be honest.

Charisma just seems more glaringly annoying, so it catches more flak.

>>47229066
GURPS attributes govern smaller ones though.

>Strength (aka ST)
Lifting strength, striking strength, HP (Essentially bodymass)
>Dexterity (aka DX)
Basic Speed (Reactions, dodge etc), Basic Move (Running, jumping etc) and DX-based skills.
>Intelligence (aka IQ)
Will, Perception (Hearing, Sight etc), IQ-based skills.
>Health (aka HT)
FP (Fatigue, basically endurance), used to roll vs Death, Major Wounds etc. Few HT-based skills.

>>47229066
I'm rather fond of SPECIAL. Feels like it covers all the bases quite nicely.

>>47229256
Luck's a little weird. When would you ask a player to roll a Luck check? A particularly mouthy and convincing player could probably have it apply to every ability check.

>>47229066
As usual, GURPS is the best.

>>47229274
Yeah, rolling dice is already an abstraction of luck and randomness, it's kinda redundant.

>>47229306
It relies heavily on the underlying set of statistics. Merging the two and creating one somewhat larger set of abilities would be more practical.

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I had a glimmer of a stat system once, but I never worked out the math

>>47229346
What's the difference between Knowledge and Insight and what does Fitness do?

>>47229240

basic talking is not the problem. Problem arise when you take into consideration social interaction with NPCs.

You like it or not we are all biased. So when someone proposes some idea if you as a GM, or he as a player doesn't like it no matter how long you converse about it; it will go in circles. You will give an argument, he will give a counter argument. And round and round it goes. There won't be no conclusion. You will both stick with your point of view. Social skills and rolls are there to break that stalemate and give conclusion.

And I'm fine with that. If we roll weapon attack, damage and defense rolls and if we roll fortitude, dodge and willpower to be able to avoid harmfull spells... I don't see the reason why there should be similar system to social interaction. Especially as I said if someone is not a good roleplayer. He can give general idea what he tries to convey (doesn't need to make an entire speech and frankly very few people make good speeches on the fly, politicians have people written their speeches in advance for them by other people) and then you make a roll to see if he was able to convince people to his point of view.

>>47229386
You have a point, but I've yet to see an elegant system for social interaction.

A single die roll that either succeeds or fails with hardly any input from the target is kind of barebones.

>>47229382
Knowledge vs. Insight is basically book-smarts vs street-smarts. Fitness vs. endurance was basically for physical feats that require a single effort vs. physical feats with a sustained effort. I never worked out all the details.

>>47229066
I like my Mary Sue snowflake system, with STRENGTH, AGILITY, ENDURANCE, PERCEPTION, ACADEMIA, and PRESENCE

These roughly align with the standard str dex con Wis int cha 6 way, but the different terms are important because what affects what is important

Furthermore every ability is affected by three different stats, primary secondary and tertiary. Accuracy with ranged weapons is primary perception, secondary agility, tertiary strength. Your basic melee weapon is primary agility, secondary strength, and tertiary perception. Heavy or two handed weapons are primary strength, secondary endurance, and tertiary agility. Small or finesse weapons are primary agility, secondary perception, and tertiary strength. This three tier system extends to skills. As a result there is no such thing as a dumpstat.

>>47229346
Not bad at all actually. I've got some doubts; like would you have Stat skills and skills or are the stat skills the last step of the ladder? Would you distribute points or roll the stats (on wich level?) and then derive the ones on other levels from the ones you rolled?

Personally i had a 8 stat system in my heartbreaker; they were on a grid in wich you had Body and Mind on a axis and then Power, Speed, Precision and Resistance on the other so it was:

Power: Strenght and Reasoning
Precision: Dexterity and Memory
Speed: Reflexes and Intuition
Resistance: Stamina and Control

you could assign points or roll for the stats and then derive Power, Speed, Body etc calculating the averange; you'd then use those as basically modifiers and saving throws.

>>47229422
Chronicles of Darkness has its new 'doors' social system, but 'elegance' is up to the player.

Still, you might as well say "a single die roll that either hits or misses with no input from the target is kind of barebones". It's just the way the systems are.

TO ANSWER OP:
I like systems that are either all skills, or all attributes.
Or if there are skills, they don't have much of a 'point value' - they just represent something you're good at and can do without rolling.

I'm currently working on a system where Abilities determine your target number for certain tasks, and Skill determine the size of the dice pool you get to roll.

If your Strength is 4 and your Weapon skill is 6, you get to roll 6 dice and count every result of four or higher as a success.

You either try to get more successes than an opponent, or try to get a set number of successes for more static challenges.

>>47229460
The idea was basically the core was rolled and then other stats were derived. Levelling up gave you a core stat point, you put it into body, mind, or soul, then (somehow or other) cascaded changes to the outer rings.

Different classes had to spend different amounts of points, like wizards could buy a mind point for 1 core point, but soul points cost 2 core points and body cost 3. So it would be possible for a wizard to level up body-based stats, it just took more points.

>>47229529
It sounds pretty straightforward. I like how simply investing in three abilities cascades out into a comprehensive set of skills.

>>47229529
That's pretty elegant, but perhaps i'd have people roll the middle ring of stats and then derive the inner and outer; it would offer more variability without being insane (if you roll the inner circle all stats are similar, if you roll the external one they're all over the place and the inner circle will allmost surely just be averange).
Can i use your system as ispiration?

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>>47229346
Which of those would you use for manual dexterity? Like a thief's skill in manipulating locks and traps, for instance?

>>47229066
I actually really love Apocalypse World's core stats:

Hot
Cool
Hard
Sharp
Weird

It's the only part about Apocalypse World that I think is really neat, on top of its player character relationship ties, and I never understood why other *World games used the bland backing to AW and scrapped its really interesting core stats.

>>47230506
I've never played AW. How do these translate to character actions?

>>47230533
Hot = Charisma in the bard sense
Cool = Dexterity, kind of
Hard = Strength/Constitution
Sharp = Intelligence
Weird is basically just a dedicated stat for magic

Hot is used for general rolls to persuade characters and seduction (Apocalypse World is really obsessed with sex to the point where it comes off as something a horny teenager would write)

Cool is for rolls to act cool under pressure. Things like driving, keeping your composure when things go bad, etc. It's basically the stat that defines how close to the guy from Drive your character can go.

Hard is for general fighting and not going down.

Sharp is for pretty much any thing that requires you to be smart.

Weird is for anything to do with psychic powers.


Each character in your party sees the other characters as one of these stats measure by a certain level, and what others see your characters as can be used in different ways. Somebody might see some creepy mutant as Weird, a security expert as Sharp, and the group's medic as Cool.

I like Silhouette with a few stats dropped and Agility split to reduce god stat syndrome.
Agility, Build, Dexterity, Perception, Creativity, Influence, Knowledge, Willpower.

Skills are flexible so Small Arms + Dex is for shooting people, while Small Arms + Knowledge is for identifying an usual weapon etc.

>>47230652
Apocalypse World has rules for the AFTERMATH of sex - the emotional effects. There are no rules or descriptions of sex itself.

>>47230696
Yeah, but giving each class their own move related to sex is a bit much.

>>47230702
For you, maybe. I run my games as erotically charged sexventures.

>>47229066
I prefer GURPS, but Unisystem and S.P.E.C.I.A.L look fine too. I very much dislike D&D division of Wisdom and Intelligence. But I don't like many other things about D&D too.

>>47230702
Are you american?

>>47229066
Might, Speed, Intelligence

>>47230721
>I very much dislike D&D division of Wisdom and Intelligence. You could be super intelligent but human interaction is alien to you (Monk the tv series is good example). Also you could easily read people emotions, know the way to approach them. Being a people's person. Simple farmer, that everyone loves, but he knows nothing about world, and how it works, outside his village boundaries.

there is no problem with division between wisdom and intelligence.

problem lies in that intelligence wisdom and charisma ended as merely modifiers for different types of spellcasters and everything else based on them is bare bones.

>>47229768
Not my system, but that's pretty much what I thought when I saw it, too.

Though my instinct would have been to use Body/Mind/Soul as your max hit points for different kinds of attacks.

>>47230310
Merging manual dexterity and body agility together has always been a huge problem with systems.

I guess the answer is that PCs are assumed to have steady hands unless they take a drawback. And that some skills, like medicine and lockpicking are taken as part of your background, not your stats.

>>47229422
Target rolls Will to resist, obviously.

>>47229066
Cyberpunk 2020
>Body, Empathy, Cool, Reflex, Technique, Intelligence, Attractiveness

>>47229228
Was gonna say this. I liked how they made a distinction between Beauty and Charisma as well.

God, I want to replay Arcanum now.

>>47229438
>primary perception, secondary agility, tertiary strength
Guns or is the designer dumb?

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STRENGTH
SKILL
WILL
fable table top game when

>Physical, Mental, Social

I am working on a generic system. What are your dream core stats for a generic RPG?

And yes I know I am doomed to fail.

>>47229081

I did that in my system. You got 10 character points, you only had skills, skil 1 cost 1, skill 2 cost 3 total, skill 3'cost 6 total, etc. leftover points were spent on traits like Sharpshootrr or Atractive.

Problem was creature stats felt really bland. I am trying to think of a way to incorporate stats that isn't stat plus skill. I don't of anything except the savage worlds method, and that wouldn't work with character points.

I'd love to do 8 to 15 character stats like GURPS does, but that probably won't work with my 1d10 or 2d6 mechsnics

>>47233089
look up the cypher system. Even with it's flaws I think that what it does with the stats is interesting.

>>47233139

It's very interesting but not what I am going for. I might use something like that for my apocalyptic fantasy game though.

>>47231386
It sounds like you're contrasting Int to Cha to me. I know sense motive is Wis but it should be Cha in my opinion.

>>47233089
You could look into the way Edge of the Empire's dice pool works. I'm not sure how you are currently using dice, but in EotE, you assemble a dice pool based on your skill and its related attribute. The larger of the two numbers is the size of the pool, and the smaller of the two numbers is how many dice in the pool have their size upgraded.

For example, if you did something like 3 dexterity and 1 balance, you could do a dice pool with 3 dice, one of which has its size upgraded. Like I said, I'm not sure how you're doing conflict resolution so this might be useless for you.