Ideas for stats in RPGs?

[MammothBlade]

I was wondering, if you could design the character stats of a game, what would you use?

A lot of RPGs still seem to hang on to a system in which stats mostly determine combat abilities, not dialogue or story progression.

I'd like something which separates physical and mental stats, e.g:

Physical
Strength
Dexterity
Speed
Endurance

Mental
Intelligence
Charisma
Cunning
Perception

Ooh, that spells SPC DICES.

I think it would finally stop min-maxing if games made mental stats more important to story direction and special abilities in combat. That and it changes the variables in dialogue a lot more.

A character with high intelligence? Able to solve intellectual problems with great ease. High charisma? Able to talk down a madman. High cunning? Able to lie and trick NPCs into getting their way. High perception? Sees things that other characters don't. There are benefits to each, and they could be doubly applicable to combat abilities.

 

[RJ 17]

Machismo: the raw badassedness of your characters.
The higher the score, the more monsters flee in terror at the sight of you...and the more women swoon for your character...even if you're character is a woman as well. :3

 

[BloatedGuppy]

What's wrong with SPECIAL?

SPECIAL was a good system.

 

[MammothBlade]

What's wrong with SPECIAL?

SPECIAL was a good system.

It only has six useful stats. And special is not an even number of letters.

 

[Kahunaburger]

A character with high intelligence? Able to solve intellectual problems with great ease. High charisma? Able to talk down a madman. High cunning? Able to lie and trick NPCs into getting their way. High perception? Sees things that other characters don't. There are benefits to each, and they could be doubly applicable to combat abilities.

This 100x. Games with stats need to use the stats for things.

OT: After trying a couple of roguelikes, I actually really like the way Rogue/Brogue/Shiren do it. You have one stat: Strength, which measures your level of physical conditioning (and current state of health). Intelligence is represented by the player's ability to think laterally, plan, and find creative uses for their resources. Exactly as complex as a stat system for a dungeon crawler needs to be.

Other than that, I think that games with complex stat systems should do three things:

A) Use the stats for things other than hitting dudes with swords and determining health/mana.

B) Pay attention to the stat systems used in other RPGs, both computer and otherwise.

C) Not make statistics scale too much. Dragon Age: Origins is an example of what not to do - at the point where my sneaky rogue has 50 Cunning but my equally sneaky mage has 15, the "Cunning" stat has ceased to correspond to anything that makes sense in a real-world context.

 

[DoPo]

What's wrong with SPECIAL?

SPECIAL was a good system.

I agree. Even better than GURPS' system on which it's based.

Oh, and OP, Arcanum already has sort of what you describe - Strength, Stamina, Dexterity, Beauty, Intelligence, Willpower, Perception, Charisma. Intelligence gives you more dialogue options (while lower score makez yo' saund stoopid). High Charisma allows you to recruit more people to join you (and allows you to level up Persuasion), so you can virtually go through the game without doing any of the hard work yourself, instead letting your underlings handle it, while you talk away everything. Or you could play the big sutpid fighter who's missing out on lots of quests.

Bloodlines has that element too - the attributes are even further broken down into Physical Social and Mental. High Charisma let's you easily influence and manipulate NPCs, while high Appearance makes seducing them easier. Well, and for some reason Manipulation gives you better deals at stores, while Intelligence makes you toss threats around easier. It is possible to go through the game with nothing but combat skills but it would be boring, and you'll lose out on quests and rewards. Moreover, there are only like few combat skills, while the rest of the skills are non-combat and you'll be forced to spend XP on something other than "I hit stuff better".

And besides, haven't the D&D games had that separation since...a lot of time? There are three physical attributes (Strength, Constitution, Dexterity) and three non-physical (Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma) and a selection of skills that are generally for outside of combat. Including Persuasion, Bluff and Intimidate.

 

[SoranMBane]

I'm having a hard time thinking of anything that would be better than the SPECIAL system. It's got an equal number of mental and physical stats, plus Luck, which is neither (or Perception, which could be considered both, but then that's just getting into semantics). It also shaves things down to the bare minimum number of stats needed to have a fully fleshed out character, which keeps things manageable and avoids redundancies, and you can add a lot of extra depth with stat-dependent perks and dialog choices.

Of course, any stat system is only going to be as good as the way in which it's used, and it's up to the designers to make sure that every playstyle is supported and every stat is useful, so the system itself can hardly be faulted if something doesn't quite work. SPECIAL just seems to me like one of the more elegant and easy to implement systems.