Well, it took me a while but I finally figured out the abilities I want to use for my story: Strength Physical strength, affects how much a character can lift, how hard they can swing a weapon and increases the amount that they can carry. Agility Affects a character's speed and flexibility, as well as his ranged attacks. Improves a characters chance to dodge and controls stamina regen. Fortitude Fortitude controls the stamina pool of a character, as well as their resistance against diseases and poisons. Potency The potency of someone's mind affects how much info they can store. This increases the speed with which skills are learned and the amount of spells a character has access to. Wits Wits affects the speed of a character's mind, their processing power to put it bluntly. It affects how fast they pick up on clues, the ease with which they can cast spells and controls their mana regen. Willpower The strength of one's will affects their resistance to pain and makes a character more resistant to mind altering magic and debuffs. This also controls a character's mana regen. Presence Presence controls how likely others are to take notice of a character. Combined with strength it affects a character's chance to intimidate someone. Combined with agility it affects a character's chance to charm someone. I'm really happy with it this far, but would love any feedback I could get! The only thing that still bothers me is that Presence is only useful in social situations and I would like to change that. I was thinking it could help tanks draw aggro and help pet classes with their control but that's about it. Not sure if that would be enough to justify it, though. Help anyone?
I think that it totally depends on the story. A lot have their own systems and stats mean different things (or have different names or things outside of the usual DnD type stuff). As for how it’s presented I’m a sucker for text boxes, most especially like The Land does. So pretty.
I like to think wit can be employed to charm also ;-) Tolkien's elves have a spiritual presence, at least.. in the movies. Been so long I think my memory of the books can no longer be relied upon. You might have one route to magic, or not bother explaining/exploring it's underlying mechanics but one system might be that people don't actually have magic, rather they can act as conduits for natural laws, animistic principles, spirits, gods, daemons or whatever and Presence could be significant to drawing and/or maintaining the attention of such sources of mana. As to what I like to see, not sure it matters, so long as it isn't implied that 'that's all there is.' If a game system is so simple that best builds are obvious after a moment's thought, or even a week's reading, it doesn't bode well for a vita ex machina/life in the game/2300ad game so far as my own taste goes. Something I often wonder about authors is whether they give up when they realise their system doesn't make much internal sense =) As to intelligence and how to describe a more intelligent player, I guess that depends on the style. Authors routinely use all sorts of 'mechanics' to ensure a satisfactory outcome from any given scenario, and can rebuild that scenario any number of times to get the outcome they desire, there's not really any reason why many of the reasons for those reworkings couldn't just be evolved through storytelling a character's increased awareness of likely outcomes instead of rebuilds. Of course, then you might have to explain decision making steps which can put people off for a variety of reasons.
Some really interesting takes on it so far in here! The one i'm using is more or less the same however I have gone to the effort of changing up the names just a little bit. Might Capability Resilience Resolve Fate Might is Strength, Capability is Dexterity Resilience is Constitution, Resolve is Willpower and Fate is Luck. In a LitRPG book especially stats are a necessity in my mind, even if it's only on gear -if you don't have them then you may as well just make it a fantasy book. They are a touch less important for GameLit but still a nice touch.
