GarfunkeL said:
Is dropping INT and CHA and WIS a good idea? Can stats and skills be completely divorced - very, very few RPG's have tried that.
B. S. B.
The way to go would be breaking mental stats up much further than generic INT and fuzzily defined and clearly composite anyway WIS.
There should be willpower affecting character's resistance to a lot of stuff, from various attempts at fucking with them, to pain and torture, to ability to override the bodily needs (like need to rest), but at risk of your own stubbornness killing you - for example a strong willed character would be able to go on till they died of exhaustion, while a weaker one would just let their body force them into shutdown mode and fall asleep at the spot - of course that would mean that, other things equal, weak-willed character would have much less access to their bodily reserves even if those were of the same size.
There should be various forms of intelligence used for different types of problems.
Physical stats should also be far more segmented as well, separate resistances instead of generic END, separate agility and dexterity, separate senses, possibly even strength and speed stats for individual body parts.
WIS should be implemented as modules with various types of knowledge and experience, modified by one of the INTs, skills or other stats.
Honestly, in a cRPG there is no point in keeping the ruleset, including stat system, concise and compact, and this sort of elaborate system would allow, for species with greatly differing bodily and mental capabilities and not in a simplisticly linear way of "strong vs weak", "agile vs clumsy" or "smart vs dumb", greatly different sensory capabilities - again, not in a simplistic manner - add some flags, filters and shadurz and you have characters that see and hear differently often perceiving things other characters cannot.
It would permit mechanics to handle characters to a much greater extent as well - of course, actual writing is indispensable, but automation of those parts that can be automated helps if you have an inordinate amount of characters to script.
Seriously, whenever I remind myself of how hopelessly (and increasingly) archaic the design of cRPGs is I cringe.
