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Hi all, I think I could use some advice on a system I have been putting together, on and off, for some time, and this forum seems to be the best place to get advice based on what I have read here over the years. If needed I can be more detailed about any of the below.

Anyway some basics:

The influences for mechanics are most heavily D&D (3.x) and GURPS (4th). There is some influence from Hackmaster (4th and 5th), other D&D (earlier more than latter), some of the other D20 systems, and likely some other systems as well.

The system is 3d6, roll over, and class based.
Dice can "explode" (are open ended for high rolls), with the number of "6"s rolled indicating a critical success should 3 or more be rolled (with more "6"s indicating a more extreme success).

Basic Attributes: What they do
STR: Lift/Carrying Capacity, Modifier to damage with muscle powered weapons, Bonus to hit points per level
CON: Modifier to Hit Points per level, Max Fatigue, CON Save
DEX: Modifier to Attacks, Initiative Modifier, Base Move, DEX Save
INT: Bonus Skill Points, INT Save
WIS: WIS Save [also the basis of perception skills]
CHA: Bonus to Magic Item limit, CHA Save
APP (Appearance): Initial reaction roll modifier (rolled into CHA)
WIL (Willpower): Sanity points, WIL Save (rolled into WIS)
LUC (Luck): Number of rerolls, LUC Save (rolled int CHA)

Classes:
Rogue: The "mundane" class.
Mage: Vancian magic user like D&D Magic User / Mage / Wizard
Priest: Vancian magic user like D&D Cleric / Priest
Sorcerer: Magic user like 3e Sorcerer
Psionicist: energy point based sorcerer like caster with "psionic" flavor

Characters get to pick 1 class feature from a list at each level, 2 extra at 1st, and also get 1 feat per character level, 1 extra as 1st. Also between 1 and all attributes improve at each level.

"Good" class based bonus is never more than 8 6 better than the "Poor" class based bonus, and always at least 2 better than it. Non-STR attributes never get higher than 25.

Weapon/Armor Proficiency: You get a number of points based on class and level in that class to spend for proficiency. You take a penalty from -2 to -6 depending on the weapon if non-proficient. Armor works pretty much the same way, you use the same pool of points for both.

Skills: You get points based on your level in a class. You may not spend more than your level in a skill. Each point gets you a +1 to the roll, with the first point getting you an additional +3. List is mostly taken from 3.5e D&D and D20 Modern. Skills tend to get broader as you put more points into them (i.e. you know 3 ways to perform at 1st level, +1 way per point) though Knowledge and Crafting are divided into finite numbers of skills.

Wealth: There is a by level chart, growth is exponential.

Combat:
Roll initiative with bonus for knowledge of enemy location/presence
1 second turns in order from highest to lowest initiative.
"Mundane" combat is pretty much GURPS but modified to be a roll over system.
Spellcasting is pretty much D&D 3e style but spells take 1 full second per spell level to cast. Spell damage is upped to be about where it was in 2nd edition AD&D relative to expected HP levels. Pretty much any spell from a D&D 3.5 or earlier, or a Hackmaster 4e can be converted easily (most trouble is deciding on spell resistance and save).


Misc:
Number of Magic Items that you can have active at once is limited based on level and CHA.
Max bonus from a Magic item is limited based on level
Magic items are very much unfinished
HP works like in GURPS, so you die after taking 2x to 6x HP damage depending on CON and rolls.

I'm sure that I'm making some choices that deserve more scrutiny.

Edit: (bold is new)

Can you give an example of saves each of the 8 attributes are used for?

What's your reasoning for having an appearance score, will beholders and nymphs be affected by the same standards of attractiveness?

What's your reasoning for having WILL be something separate from CHA or WIS (or INT?)

Is your Rogue the Fighter+Rogue combined? (So lots of feats/skills/BAB/sneak attack?)

Are the monsters PC's will face basically the 3.5 ones?

Why should someone play your game instead of say, Pathfinder? What design goals are you going for?

OgreBattle wrote:Can you give an example of saves each of the 8 attributes are used for?

Only 7 of the attributes have saves associated with them.

Going with most of the 5th level SRD spells
DEX: Cone of Cold
CON: Cloudkill, Blight, Animal Growth
WIS: Lesser Planar Binding, Shadow Evocation
INT: Feeblemind
CHA: Dismissal, Magic Jar
WIL (Will): Dominate Person, Hold Monster, Mind Fog, Nightmare, Telekinesis
LUC (Luck):

General things:
DEX: avoid/reduce area effects
CON: poison, disease, staying conscious when near death, avoiding dying when at negative hit points
WIS: Things where perception or enlightenment would help
INT: puzzles, mazes
CHA: social manipulation
WIL: torture, pain, forcing a march
LUC: avoiding random things (i.e. getting hit by a long range artillery barrage or a grenade fragment)

OgreBattle wrote:What's your reasoning for having an appearance score, will beholders and nymphs be affected by the same standards of attractiveness?

The appearance score is for (mechanically) initial reaction. Charisma is more for force of personality. Beholders are pretty insane and strange so they may be an exception. Intelligent, non-aberrations will almost universally be affected by the score regardless of species/culture.

OgreBattle wrote:What's your reasoning for having WILL be something separate from CHA or WIS (or INT?)

WILL is separate from WIS to allow a strong willed but unperceptive/absent minded character.
WILL is separate from CHA to allow characters that are good at manipulating others, natural leaders, and inspire followers but are subject to pressure and stress when things challenge them.
WILL is separate from INT to allow a genus/scholar type that is meek and passive in terms of personality.

OgreBattle wrote:Is your Rogue the Fighter+Rogue combined? (So lots of feats/skills/BAB/sneak attack?)

Characters pick class features from lists, so he may not have sneak attack and combat feats are not Rogue ability options, but it will have lots of skill points, high BAB, and could have sneak attack as well as many fighter feat equivalents. So pretty much yes.

OgreBattle wrote:Are the monsters PC's will face basically the 3.5 ones?

At current the math does not work out to 3.5 monsters working very well (damage per second scales with the square of level so their HP would be low for one). If I put some work into it I could make a rough Monster -> NPC conversion system, but guidelines and looking at each monster individually would be better.

OgreBattle wrote:Why should someone play your game instead of say, Pathfinder? What design goals are you going for?

Why place instead of Pathfinder?
The math works for scaling characters from 1st to 100th level. (Though there are not that many good high level options for abilities at the moment).
The character classes are more flexible. You don't need to take 3 or 4+ classes to make your character how you want, you just pick the set of abilities that fix how you see your character or how you want to play.
At every level players have meaningful options for advancing/altering their characters.
You don't know all the minute changes, so might as well learn a system with more meaningful changes.
You want to stab someone in the face and have that be different that stabbing them somewhere else.

In my humble opinion there are too many stats with a lot of overlap between.

Are you sure you want to use "skill points"? Accounting sucks.

sigma999 wrote:In my humble opinion there are too many stats with a lot of overlap between.

So LUC and APP into CHA, while WIL goes into WIS?

sigma999 wrote:Are you sure you want to use "skill points"? Accounting sucks.

So maybe Non-Weapon Proficiencies, maybe multiple levels of skill: Good > Fair > Poor > None. Maybe even roll NWP and Weapon and Armor Proficiencies into one system?

Ze'ev wrote:

sigma999 wrote:In my humble opinion there are too many stats with a lot of overlap between.

So LUC and APP into CHA, while WIL goes into WIS?

sigma999 wrote:Are you sure you want to use "skill points"? Accounting sucks.

So maybe Non-Weapon Proficiencies, maybe multiple levels of skill: Good > Fair > Poor > None. Maybe even roll NWP and Weapon and Armor Proficiencies into one system?

The more stats you have, the harder it is to make those stats equally valuable. If you're going to create a game from scratch and not inherit the six stat system of D&D as a requirement to keep the fanbase, you should probably do a 4 or 3 stat system because that allows RPS or the ability to equally divide in half twice. Anything else leads to RPS/Lizard/Spock or further.

And if you're stats aren't aimed at creating either
A) RPS mechanics (in D&D this works by fighters having a poor will save, and a wizard having a poor fort save while a rogue is the only one with a good reflex save, at least in theory) that allow people to have different strengths vs different attacks/defenses
B) Even splits. Symmetry has some advantages. I'm not sure what, but for example you could do Speed/Toughness/Analysis/Will and reasonably have a go to defense for every attack you could generate.

If you have more stats than defenses are actually tied to, you just walk yourself into the "Everyone dumps charisma" issue. Creating stats that are flat out weaker than other stats (say, appearance) means that everyone in every game got hit with the ugly stick unless they happen to be building a diplomancer.

YMMV.

ubernoob's covered the attacks/defenses angle, but there are other things one can use ability scores for:

Randomize in order: It's a simple way to put randomization into character creation, and to establish the tone for your game. For this, 3 to 20 ability scores can work.

Class stereotypes: If you want all Wizards to be smart, all Sorcerers to be convincing, and all warriors to be strong or dextrous, then Single or Limited Attribute Dependency is your friend. For this, 5 to 8 ability scores is probably ideal.

Correlating (derived) statistics: If Dexterity is sufficiently necessary for ranged attacks and dodging, you can assume that creatures who are attacking you from a distance would be better fought using poison gas and mind control. For this, 3 to 6 ability scores makes sense.

Diversifying characters of the same class: If a class actually uses more ability scores than a character can afford to put points into, ability scores can actually be used to influence the playstyle of a character in ways other than "do I suck at my class schtick or not". For this, each class wants maybe 2 to 6 ability scores, and for multiclassing, every class should rely on the same or nearly the same set of ability scores.

I don't know you, but Fuck You. Consider this a welcome to the Den.

Foxwarrior wrote:ubernoob's covered the attacks/defenses angle, but there are other things one can use ability scores for:

Randomize in order: It's a simple way to put randomization into character creation, and to establish the tone for your game. For this, 3 to 20 ability scores can work.

Fuck you. Adding onto this, if your game has roll down the line in order as a generation method expect that people are going to purposely kill off their characters for the chance to roll another one with not shitty stats. Make character generation fast and easy. Low customization. This actually works well in certain genres. Dark Heresy for instance is super duper lethal. But creating a starter character takes about five minutes. So it's ok and it fits the genre. So be aware of the consequences of this method.

Class stereotypes: If you want all Wizards to be smart, all Sorcerers to be convincing, and all warriors to be strong or dextrous, then Single or Limited Attribute Dependency is your friend. For this, 5 to 8 ability scores is probably ideal.

Sounds about right.

Correlating (derived) statistics: If Dexterity is sufficiently necessary for ranged attacks and dodging, you can assume that creatures who are attacking you from a distance would be better fought using poison gas and mind control. For this, 3 to 6 ability scores makes sense.

This goes back to RPS, but yeah.

Diversifying characters of the same class: If a class actually uses more ability scores than a character can afford to put points into, ability scores can actually be used to influence the playstyle of a character in ways other than "do I suck at my class schtick or not". For this, each class wants maybe 2 to 6 ability scores, and for multiclassing, every class should rely on the same or nearly the same set of ability scores.

A good example of this would be the Tome Knight. His challenge dice aren't tagged as melee exclusive, so you can totally build a Knight that is archery focused (and this is a pretty strong build) or one that is melee focused. 3E paladins are the bad version of this where they just don't have enough stats to do their thing 99% of the time.

Welcome to the Den.

I don't know you, but Fuck You. Consider this a welcome to the Den

Thanks.

RPS mechanics / Correlating (derived) statistics There is some RPS but its not something I am trying to stress. Its more for monsters (i.e. don't try and poison the zombie use holy water, don't bother with a fireball on the fire elemental use cone of cold, don't try and directly magic the golem collapse the roof on it) than for PC classes.

Even splits Eh?

six stat system I'm am pretty set on keeping the six in the game, question is are other stats useful? Maybe go with a sub-attribute: WIS has Perception and Willpower (maybe Enlightenment for the rest); CHA has Luck and Appearance (maybe Ego for the rest). Given the sub-attributes have names, there can be things that modify them w/o messing with the super-attribute.

Randomize in order This is something I do not want. I want players to be attached to their characters and care about them, not kill them off until they roll up one that is extra powerful. Also randomized generation makes asking players to do homework a bit more difficult.

Class stereotypes That is fine. The mundane can pretty much use any stat depending on the build (though physical stats are better for their combat). Mage is INT, Sorcerer is CHA, Priest is WIS, Psionicist was WIL so that should go to WIS if WIL dies.

Diversifying characters of the same class The Rogue certainly can take advantage of any stat but shouldn't need to focus on a particular 1+ to be fun/usable/relevant. The magic users are pretty SAD as is.

Ze'ev wrote:

I don't know you, but Fuck You. Consider this a welcome to the Den

Thanks.

RPS mechanics / Correlating (derived) statistics There is some RPS but its not something I am trying to stress. Its more for monsters (i.e. don't try and poison the zombie use holy water, don't bother with a fireball on the fire elemental use cone of cold, don't try and directly magic the golem collapse the roof on it) than for PC classes.

This is better handled by different tags on your attacks and different immunity defenses than something related to stats. Zombies are flat out immune to poison, but vulnerable to holy damage. This has nothing to do with the number of stats you use in your game.

Even splits Eh?

For instance, having twice as many physical attributes as mental attributes would mean that that all mages are SAD while all warriors are MAD. If you have equal physical and mental attributes and the mental attributes being analogous to the physical attributes (say one being the attribute you use to avoid things, but the other being the attribute that calculates damage) then your magic classes are more similar in design to your physical classes and you avoid a whole lot of the typical caster/melee problems people create when designing D&D clones.

six stat system I'm am pretty set on keeping the six in the game, question is are other stats useful? Maybe go with a sub-attribute: WIS has Perception and Willpower (maybe Enlightenment for the rest); CHA has Luck and Appearance (maybe Ego for the rest). Given the sub-attributes have names, there can be things that modify them w/o messing with the super-attribute.

Charisma can be rolled into wisdom and strength can be rolled into constitution and no one will ever complain. One of those stats is dumped by every single character in D&D. If you don't want dump stats, don't have stats that do nothing for the vast majority of archetypes.

Randomize in order This is something I do not want. I want players to be attached to their characters and care about them, not kill them off until they roll up one that is extra powerful. Also randomized generation makes asking players to do homework a bit more difficult.

Class stereotypes That is fine. The mundane can pretty much use any stat depending on the build (though physical stats are better for their combat). Mage is INT, Sorcerer is CHA, Priest is WIS, Psionicist was WIL so that should go to WIS if WIL dies.

So basically you want to keep dump stats. I mean, you can do this, but it makes it a worse game than it could have been.

Diversifying characters of the same class The Rogue certainly can take advantage of any stat but shouldn't need to focus on a particular 1+ to be fun/usable/relevant. The magic users are pretty SAD as is.

That's bullshit. Whatever keeps you on the RNG is your primary stat for every character. The only purpose of having stats in a game is to alter the RNG, so every character is going to end up having a primary stat if you include stats in your game.


Do a search on TNE (the next edition) here at the den. We had some really good threads discussing attributes and how many you need/what purpose they serve a few years back.

Ze'ev wrote:So LUC and APP into CHA, while WIL goes into WIS?

In my heartbreaker I used three stats since STR relates to CON, DEX and INT both have to do with reflexes, and WIS and CHA are too similar (as well as parallels to INT).
So I came about reducing D&D's 6 stats down to 3.

You can do 9 stats like a White Wolf game but to me it just seems like too much to keep track of.

This is better handled by different tags on your attacks and different immunity defenses than something related to stats. Zombies are flat out immune to poison, but vulnerable to holy damage. This has nothing to do with the number of stats you use in your game.

Agree

For instance, having twice as many physical attributes as mental attributes would mean that that all mages are SAD while all warriors are MAD. If you have equal physical and mental attributes and the mental attributes being analogous to the physical attributes (say one being the attribute you use to avoid things, but the other being the attribute that calculates damage) then your magic classes are more similar in design to your physical classes and you avoid a whole lot of the typical caster/melee problems people create when designing D&D clones.

Shouldn't all attributes be useful to most characters? WIS is good for mental resilience, CON is good for physical resilience, any character probably would like to be both resilient to both mental and physical attacks. DEX is useful to avoid attacks and target attacks, something that is important for both classes (though a Mage can use area effects to counter poor accuracy somewhat). INT gets the Rogue more skills, but he has a lot anyway (the Mage needs it to make his spells hard to resist and to get bonus spells). CHA gets you more usable magic items, more friendly strangers, more favors from friends, and maybe luck, all of which should be useful to everyone.

Charisma can be rolled into wisdom and strength can be rolled into constitution and no one will ever complain. One of those stats is dumped by every single character in D&D. If you don't want dump stats, don't have stats that do nothing for the vast majority of archetypes.

The issue with STR into CON is that STR is more variable and open ended than any other stat. Having a very high STR is less game braking than high any other ability as STR never interacts with the other attributes in contests. It would also mean that anything big would be extremely hard to kill, as not only would it have very high HP, it would not fail checks to fall unconscious or fall dead due to excessive injury. CHA and WIS are less problematic if rolled into one attribute, but perception, willpower, and charisma/social being linked as one seems a bit much/strange.

So basically you want to keep dump stats. I mean, you can do this, but it makes it a worse game than it could have been.

What is so bad about a dump stat anyway?

That's bullshit. Whatever keeps you on the RNG is your primary stat for every character. The only purpose of having stats in a game is to alter the RNG, so every character is going to end up having a primary stat if you include stats in your game.

Took another look at the math and it looks like any optimized character will pick one stat to focus on, might as well force optimization with stat increase progression.

Look, you can grandfather in shitty design or not. It's your game. I'm not going to go over shit that was hashed out in detail by people smarter than me. Here are some threads to read.

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=270529

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=48979
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=48470
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=48978
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=49231

Obviously there are tons of gems on game design in various threads. This shit has been discussed. Go read the words of people smarter than me. I'm just wordvomiting the stuff I happen to remember off the top of my head.

it is too many attributes.

while you can try for finite little things like PO did, there comes a point where you jsut have to say some things cover more than one thing and you don't need varying degrees.

D&D has 3 sets of attributes:

physical: STR, DEX, CON
mental: WIS, INT
misc: CHA

it is extremely unbalanced and needs to be trimmed down and just focus on the important aspects of each of those. CHA is basically just social interactions for all intents and purposes so you can have just 3. (otherwise just have your clone have the same tired 6 D&D has always had.)

physical, mental, social

the majority of a game like D&D wills till use mostly the physical attributes as is often due to the heavy combat nature, but it doesn't need any more than either of the other 2.