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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7874529" data-attributes="member: 6775031">The most important thing about any set of ability scores is that you can easily distinguish between them. It's easy to see the problem in D&D, which fails to properly distinguish between Intelligence and Wisdom. There's no point in writing down two different numbers, if we can't even agree on when we should be using each one.Strength is good. Everyone is in agreement on when dumb muscle is the relevant factor.Agility or Dexterity is useful. Most people can agree on when a problem needs finesse, rather than power. A lot of games try to use both stats, under the observation that tying so much into one stat might be unbalancing, but that leads to ambiguity. Does it require Agility, or Dexterity, to avoid an incoming sword swing? You could argue equally for both, so a good system should only include one of them. I'll go with Agility, so nobody assumes that Dexterity is only manual dexterity.Constitution is solid. The ability to withstand a hit is distinct from the ability to dish out hits, even if most people who have one will also have the other. It is not a requirement of this exercise that every stat be independent. I'll go with Toughness for the name, though, because Constitution is too strongly tied to D&D.You need some sort of mental stat, to delineate the fact that the character knows different things than the player. Intelligence and Wisdom are too nebulous, though, so I'll go with Mind. If it has anything to do with knowing or understanding things, it's Mind.Wisdom is nebulous. Perception isn't. You need a stat to determine whether or not you notice something, and this solves the whole problem. Never again do you have to worry about the difference between Spot and Search. This also gives you a convenient place to stick a species bonus, if a class has good senses.Appearance is in the eye of the beholder, and Charisma is famous as a dump stat, so you might as well combine both together with every aspect of etiquette and diplomacy into a Social stat.Actually, Social sounds more like a skill than a stat, but there's no requirement that this hypothetical system has to have both stats and skills. Following on that, you might as well introduce stats for Crafting, Magic, Melee and Ranged Combat.I feel like we're missing some, but this is a good start. That's ten stats for use in any game, or nine stats for use in any game that doesn't have magic.</blockquote>

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