Except for one thing: Given a character's class, level, and Constitution score, I can't tell you how many hit points a character has (because of the random roll at level up); hence HP is technically not a derived stat.

(This is in contrast to, say, Final Fantasy 5, where HP *is*, in fact, strictly derived from base Level, base Endurance, whether the character has any HP + abilities equipped, and whether the character has drunk a Giant Drink this battle.)

Incidentally, I think D&D would be better if HP *were* a derived stat with no dice rolls involved at level up.

What about games with lots of stats, but no character creation or stat rolling?

(Some JRPGs would count as examples here.) The problem you have here seems to not be with the stats themselves, but rather having strict stat requirements. Using the number in a calculation (rather than a strict comparison) can solve this problem, and having damage be slightly random can prevent one point of STR from being the difference between 1 or 2 hit kills. INT does have a purpose here: It can be used to differentiate a pure mage (who would get high INT) from a hybrid (who would get lower INT making their spells a bit weaker, but would not need to rely on spells). Also, it makes it easier to tell what effects equipment and passive skills have on the character's spellcasting ability (assuming such equipment and spells have visible effects on the stat).

(Note that, here, I am speaking from a JRPG-esque perspective, where you usually have stats but don't typically control their growth.) What about "learn by doing" linear games? (SaGa 2. when played with a party of mostly Humans/Espers, would fit; if played with a party of Robots, stats become equipment dependent, with many different equipment options (like the ability to wear multiple suits of armor for more defense).)

Frankly I always had issues with D&D combat in general. Hitting something and doing damage to it are two different things, which is why dumping everything to do with armor and with evasion together annoys me to no end. I so much prefer the Warhammer FRP way of doing it where armor rating is simply deducted from damage dealt.

I think six to eight is a reasonably good level... games with three or four stats tend to have to over simplify or dump a variety of unrelated skills or checks on to one stat.

That being said I detest D&D style systems where your stats don't really improve and you are basically forced to make one of the most important decisions about your character for the next 40+ hours of gaming in the first few minutes of playing, and never be able to correct any mistake you make. I also find they tend to favour min-maxing instead of trying to be balanced and a jack-of-all-trades type character.

To me the most important thing is that I notice a difference. I want to see that when my STR has increased from 10 to 100 that I'm doing a lot more damage, or able to lift much bigger things. I also want reasonable growth, DO:S annoyed me because the stats were good and all provided useful effects but you got so few points throughout the game you couldn't make good use of them (and Hybrid classes, which were better from the skills point of view, sucked because you didn't have enough points to have high STR and INT say).

My favourite system would be one where you have a group of core stats and then a wide variety of skills which utilise them, so a skilled warrior is always a skilled warrior but changing weapon type mid game gives you a disadvantage till you retrain with the new weapon and things like that.

I think the main problem here is what I call "accuracy based combat" (as opposed to "damage based combat"). In accuracy based combat, most factors related to combat effectiveness focus on accuracy; higher level fighters hit more often, while heavily armored targets get hit less often. The problem is as follows:
* At levels where things are reasonably balanced, it is common for around half of all attacks (on both sides) to miss. This can be incredibly frustrating, as it can lead to arbitrary long encounters, and it doesn't feel fair when you get hit by an enemy after repeatedly missing with your own attacks; especially obnoxious if the enemy can do sometthing nasty (like stealing gold or draining levels).
* The mechanic scales poorly. At high levels, either attacks (almost) always hit (making armor useless), or they almost always miss (making attacks that require an attack roll useless; the only reasonable way to win battles is to use attacks that bypass the accuracy check entirely).

Damage focused combat, where attacks usually (perhaps always?) hit and where skill and armor mainly affect damage dealt works a lot better. It doesn't have frustrating RNG at low levels, and it scales better at higher levels. (Of course, at high levels things can break down; I've heard that, in Disgaea 3, the game eventually reaches the point where everything is a one-hit kill, making HP and defense useless.) Also, the attack - defense mechanic can lead to interesting behavior in games with multi-hit attacks (imagine having an attack that hits 3 times for 8 damage each or one time for 16, and enemies having defense scores in the 0-8 rahge; which attack to use depends on the enemy's defense).

I also dislike this aspect of D&D and similar systems.

Interestingly enough, some early WRPGs (notably Wizardry, Bard's Tale, and (to some extent) early Ultima) copy some aspects of D&D (including the accuracy based combat that I mentioned), but allow your stats to grow during the course of the game; albeit in Wizardry and Bard's Tale being still limited to 18 (BT3 raised the cap to 30).

Our house rules set up armor and weapons with different deflection vs penetration stats. A suit of plate mail would drastically reduce the damage done by a flanged mace or a warhammer with little to no deflection (high absorbtion vs blunt weapons), but a sword or dagger would suffer almost no reduction, but rather a deflection penalty (a high chance for the attack to glance off and do no damage whatsoever). That's where specialty weapons like a lucern hammer and bec de corbin come into play. Unfortunately, by the time we've done these calculations and such, while far more realistic, combat has become a boring slog of number crunching and status checks to see if the weapon would indeed be more effective against that fighter in the armor than that rogue who moves like a blur.

So, I guess you don't like the fact that, in AD&D based games (1e and 2e), there's no combat difference between 8 STR and 15 STR?

(Incidentally, Wizardry and Bard's Tale both copy this particular aspect from AD&D; Ultima does not.)

I guess you don't like it when stats don't do anything, either? (INT in Final Fantasy 1 (earlier versions) comes to mind.)

Yeah, that's the kind of thing that really annoys me... particularly if you've invested half of your available stat points into STR only to realise it doesn't actually make a difference...

Well what is the point of a stat that does nothing? It's just a meaningless number...
I agree that damage based systems (like most JRPGs use) tend to be more satisfying, because something is happening. But I tend to like the concept of accuracy based systems as it is far more realistic. No one really survives ten axe blows to the head.

I think for accuracy based systems to work you really need to also have high damage / low hp so that getting hit is a really bad thing. You also need to make the whole process more fun and interactive. Watching your character and your enemy swinging misses at each other for ten minutes with no damage sustained on either side and no input from you is utterly boring.
I'd like (and plan to implement if I ever get around to making a game) a system where characters react to their opponents, like a more complicated attack of opportunity. So depending on your characters stats and current situation they get a chance to react to every enemy action, for example; your enemy starts to swing a powerful but slow attack, you're standing still and paying attention to them so you get a chance to react and succeed. You can now choose to parry (may not work against a strong attack), dodge (most likely to work but may leave you out of position or reduce stamina greatly) or try make a quick attack before his attack connects and hopefully kill him or disrupt his attack.
Now they get a chance to react, but because they are already mid action their chance of succeeding is reduced so they fail the check and continue with their original action.

So instead of just watching your characters swinging aimlessly at each other or hitting each other for meaningless numbers you are constantly making tactical decisions based on your resources (health, stamina etc.) and trying to bring the combat to a more favourable situation for your character.

As far as Final Fantasy 1 is concerned, I suspect what happened is that the developers decided to add the stat early, with the plan being that it would affect spells (I suspect it would have affected spell accuracy rather than damage/healing amounts), but then didn't follow through for whatever reason; the stat likely persisted in the final version because either it would have been too hard to remove, or nobody noticed. (Remember, Square was doing poorly at the time that the game was made, and had the game not been successful, Square would have gone out of business; hence the "Final" in the title.)

The GBA remake made it so that INT now affects damage and healing from spells, but that version was developed way later, after the developers had far more experience with the genre (though that version does suffer from the fact that, while the party tends to be stronger, the enemies (except the final boss) did not receive a boost to keep up, making the game way too easy).

By the way, the game's successor (Final Fantasy 2) is an interesting experiment, and is also a good example of how not to handle armor in an RPG (you are better off wearing no armor than wearing heavy armor); it's a game I would recommend to anyone interested in RPG system design.

The problem I have here is that combat doesn't feel fair when your attacks keep missing and the enemy then happens to land a hit that instantly kills your character in one hit, this is exactly why I dislike low level D&D.

Yeah, I always feel like it's key to keep combat fast and not allow it to take too long, especially if it's not supposed to be a major battle. For example, even after years of playing it, I always only stuck to the "basic" armor rules in Warhammer, so we wouldn't have to check for specific hit locations every time (only for critical hits). And even so I've seen some encounters that were supposed to be fast and easy turn into ridiculously prolonged battles simply because of botched die rolls or particularly crazy player ideas :P

Personally, I dislike this sort of thing for two reasons:
1. It goes against the idea of a turn based system by allowing characters to act out of turn.
2. It slows down combat, as one needs to constantly check which situations allow characters to act out of turn, and for such decisions to be made.

With attacks of opportunity specifically, I have a third issue:
3. It requires one (the game for a CRPG, the players and DM for a TRPG) to keep precise track of positioning; I prefer combat systems that abstract that aspect away, as keeping track of positioning does slow things down. (It also creates the potential for balance issues when it comes to movement versus attack range.)

I'm going to admit openly, the old Avernum and Exile games had too many stats and too many numbers. It starts simply enough, with a basic four, but then there's things like melee skills, cave lore, and so on. And rather than being able to distribute evenly among each subset of skills, you get one or two skill points to distribute to a single stat, and that's it.

The Eschalon series also has an awful stats screen with too many numbers. Look at that scrollbar.

I prefer the 6-8 system of many RPGs, but Terranigma is a strange one with 3 stats.

Looking at the Eschalon screen, I notice that the game has both Dexterity and Speed. Why? And what's the difference between them? I remember Wasteland 1 being even worse, having Agility in addition to Dexterity and Speed.

Incidentally, the second Ultima trilogy (4-6) also has only 3 stats plus level and HP.

I actually think that 6 stats is too many, and 4 seems like an ideal amount (1 for power, 1 for speed, 1 for defense, and 1 for magic); this can be seen in Final Fantasy 5 and 6, as well as SaGa 1 and 2. It is clear what stat does what, and there's no obvious overlap between them (though, in SaGa 2, the game would be more balanced if STR affected the accuracy of STR based weapons; as is a high STR low AGI character can't hit, while a high AGI low STR character can hit easily *and* do damage with an AGI weapon).

Numenéra (pen-and-paper that is, the video game is slightly different) has three basic stats: might, speed, and intellect (of course, I frequently call it "intelligence"), each of which as an accompanying stat called "edge". There is also another stat called "effort" that affects how you use all three pools.

You make use of the basic stat pools when performing actions, depending on your training in said action. You can use extra points (your effort determines how many extra points you can use) in order to make the task easier (so that a lower die roll is sufficient). Your edge for each pool is a permanent cost reduction when doing actions that use that pool.

For example, you might use a point from your might pool to hit you opponent harder, thereby giving more damage, but if you have a point in might edge, that harder punch is free (but not automatic). You might instead chose to spend a point of speed to make sure you get a hit that round, or to make sure you dodge your opponent's hit. If you have two points in effort and one point in might edge, you can punch still harder while only using a single point. If you're trained in unarmed combat, you might do more damage by default, get the more powerful punch for cheaper, or you might have a greater chance to hit.

Your stat pools are also your health (the video game has a separate HP pool). If you take physical damage, it goes first to your might pool, then to the speed pool if might is empty, and finally to the intellect pool. Damage that primarily affect speed (for example a poison that reduces reaction time) uses the same order but begins at speed (might last). Mind-affecting damage starts with intellect and ends with speed.

I already used up three accuracy upgrades to my sniper rifle... only to read in some FAQ that in case you will invest in your rifle skill, accuracy updates for the sniper rifle are pointless (something like that if you reach the 3rd (Advanced) level with the rifle skill, then you already get the max possible accuracy with the sniper rifle, even without any accuracy updates).

So I guess I wasted three accuracy updates for nothing. Then again, fortunately you apparently will still find quite many of them throughout the game.

I've already decided that at this point I mostly concentrate in these skills, in this order:

Hacking (already in Advanced level, probably going to go to Master level)
Computers (Advanced already now, not sure if going to go Master)
Lockpicking (now Trained, there are so many doors and safes I want to open...)
Rifles
Sneaking (maybe, I like to club enemies from behind without having to kill them, and conserving bullets)
Heavy Weapons (maybe, just for the rocket launcher I guess)

Rest I will care only if it seems I will have "too many" skill points.

The main problem for now is that I constantly seem to be out of picklocks. If I even find one, I already know a couple of places which I'd like to open, and unfortunately many need several picklocks. I read somewhere a few good tips to conserve picklocks:

- Try to open the door/safe first with the nano key ring. If it says "you don't have a suitable nano key", then it means there is somewhere a nano key for it, so better not waste a picklock on it. If it just says it is locked, then there is no nano key for it, but can be opened with explosives, a button or keypad, and/or a picklock as a last resort.

- If you have some explosives or a rocket launcher, then many doors and safes can be opened with them, as long as it doesn't have infinite durability.

Plus, not all doors or crates are quite necessary to open either. There was a fence which I simply climbed over with a few stacked boxes (instead of wasting one picklock), and sometimes I just decide the stuff inside the room or the box wasn't worth the picklock, so I load an earlier savegame and forget about it.

Multitools are not that common either, but at least I have four of them at the moment...

And yeah the game doesn't feel that hard, even in the Realistic difficulty. I am glad I did choose the highest difficulty I could choose. Sure I do die quite easily if I resort to firefights with several enemies, but that is life: sometimes you die, and then you just have to try again with a new life (if you are a hindu or buddhists).

Hence my modifications to the system to make it more interesting and fair, a hit or miss isn't just random so it is down to your tactical choices whether you live or die.

That is kind of the point. Turns fail at representing the intricacies of battle, a strict turn system allows characters to be killed off completely without being able to respond.
Slow combat isn't a problem when you only need a few hits to kill.

That is true, but this system would only really work in a computer anyway so I wouldn't be too worried about the effort of tracking things as the computer would be doing it.

And I disagree about positioning, I think it makes battle much more tactical and interesting.
This sounds like quite an interesting system, I'll have to read up a bit more about it.