Okay this is my first post in a good stretch.
so I've been trying to put serious work in to an rpg i started work on at ground level in 2012.
This game has gone threw several phases of work and rest but this is the first time I've really hunkered down and tried to make a good functional system out of it.
some basics about my system.
Core inspiration Jrpgs such as The Tales series A little outside the realm of most of the posters here historically despite this my systems core dna is rooted in d&d with some systems bolted on and some stat changes.

My bigest fear is that im simply taking extra steps to end up at the megaversal system and even if reasonably different from that system i expect some comparisons.
 
the core resolution is D100 additive apposed roll there is a reason for this. Because I wanted stats that grew slowly in a slightly random manor dependent of your initial rolls at character creation.
I found i needed the extra space that the D100 provided.

The way i do this is you roll separate growth levels for your given stats placed as the player wants.
the current stats are

strength (melee attacks weight general strength things)
dexterity (ranged attacks dmg)
agility (evasions and likly initiative)
vitality (physical defence and hp)
inteligence (skill points starting languages and magic and psyonic dmg and effect)
spirit (replaces wisdom to an extent magical defence resistance and mp and force of will)
Charisma ( psyonic defence and resistance as well and its normal shtick)
sight ( the accuracy statistic combined with the other relivent stat to see how accurate you are)
luck (not a meta currancy gives a small bonus to accuracy evations and skills likely giveing the bigest overall bonus held in place by its in baked small effect.)

There is no armor class or base attack bonus its strictly stat and weapon dependant.
 
Question and fear 1
I've been thinking of adding a courage and beauty statistic but I'm not sure if thats a good idea
I'm not sure if i can find enough room for courage to do though i can see benefit from splitting charisma and beauty.

Question and fear 2
I've had thought of making proficiency as skills in the megaverial manor but i worry about stepping on toes if i do that. to clarify skills are skill point based with in a manor you would recognize from d20 system but with better skill point gains and a baked in expectation of competency.

Courage and beauty are on the slippery slope since you have a stat that takes control away from a character and a stat that is narrowly focused on a specific culture's standards.

I think if you already have a willpower stat in "Spirit", then a separate Courage attribute becomes kind of redundant. I'm torn on Beauty stats in RPGs. I do like the separation of physical appearance from persuasiveness or force of personality, but I find that nothing bums a player out like not being able to make their character look the way they want it to, and there's no attribute players are more willing to make excuses for not roleplaying than ugliness. I'm not sure the benefits gained by it are worth putting GMs in the position of having to remind players "Sorry, no. your character is hideous".

I also might argue that if you want your game to reflect a JRPG tone, then a Beauty stat is inappropriate. JRPGs traditionally deal in very idealized characters.

I you do decide to do a Beauty stat, then I would suggest dropping Charisma and folding its traditional role into other attributes. For example, in a somewhat similar system I started writing a while ago, I had no Charisma stat, and the skills traditionally governed by it were instead governed by a combination of Insight and either Intelligence or Willpower. The reasoning there is that Charisma traditionally represents a combination of physical attractiveness and social intuition. If both of those are represented elsewhere, then I don't know what it's supposed to be representing.

EDIT: Also, I don't really understand what you're asking with the same question. Might be worth rephrasing it.

Courage and beauty stats summon to mind a gripe i have and will share.

It seems to me starting around the middle of third edition we began to see mechanics and abilities introduced which were disconnected or disassociated from the game world, and i recall one of them on some prestige class or something in one of the many d20 books featuring a class ability of about 4th level which did something like allow you to add charisma bonus to hit or damage, was called something like charming strike or something grace...i hate this.

like what, she just so damn cute it hurts more when she stabs you? its not far from there to the 4e rogues bloody swathe or what have you.

an ability that normally doesnt contribute to combat mechanics such as charisma, if employed as a class ability or level enhancement mechanic, should stay within its realm as it were; it should not have a combat effect, have it effect some other aspect of the game. just my inner curmudgeon griping but there is 2 cents and you don't owe me a dime.

Quote from: Slipshot762 on November 04, 2024, 09:11:26 PMlike what, she just so damn cute it hurts more when she stabs you?

A person with a high Charisma using an ability like this has such a powerful presence that it warps reality, their weapons causing more harm than they should because they want it to do so.

Which is of course only one such explanation. There are many possible others.

In worlds where an asshole can throw balls of flame or shoot lightning out of his fingers, I don't see a problem giving the sword people a few nice things now and again.

nah.

Quote from: Slipshot762 on November 04, 2024, 09:51:03 PMnah.

"I want to stab dragons the size of a small keep with skin like supple adamantine and command over time and space to death with my longsword in head to head combat, but I want to be totally within realistic capabilities of a real human being!"

Funny thing is there are very solid grounds for every one of the traditional six attributes making you better at fighting, except for Charisma. I think most people would say that Charisma makes you a great shit-talker, but there's too many situations in a fantasy game where that just wouldn't apply. The best you could do would be to say that since Charisma affects persuasion it must also contribute to your ability to read people, but that's a big stretch.

I don't hate the idea in principle, but I don't like when games tie too many of a class' abilities to its prime requisite. It just encourages min-maxing.

EDIT:

Quote from: GnomeWorks on November 04, 2024, 09:46:32 PMA person with a high Charisma using an ability like this has such a powerful presence that it warps reality, their weapons causing more harm than they should because they want it to do so.

Ultraviolet Grasslands had an interesting justification for using Charisma as a Luck stat:

Quote"The concept of Charisma comes from Ancient Greek, where it referred to grace and divine fortune bestowed by capricious deities. This wasn't some approximation of "sex appeal" or "leadership potential." This was straight up divine favoritism. A hero could be a complete dirtbag, but her divine mother had dipped her in god ju-ju and given her teflon skin. Others got the plague, she was untouched. Others got scarred, she glowed with beauty and grace. Classical Charisma is utterly unfair, which is why it works so well in games as a proxy for luck, misfortune and encounter checks."

Quote from: GnomeWorks on November 04, 2024, 09:59:01 PM

Quote from: Slipshot762 on November 04, 2024, 09:51:03 PMnah.

"I want to stab dragons the size of a small keep with skin like supple adamantine and command over time and space to death with my longsword in head to head combat, but I want to be totally within realistic capabilities of a real human being!"

"if one thing is not quantum glued in place as it is in the real world, such as a man being able to create fire with a word, then there is no reason anything should be nailed down and waterfalls are now waterflies"

oof.

anyway, "flavor text" vaguely associated with a mechanic as an explanation is a magic the gathering tier cop out in my book. bloody swathe indeed.

https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Bloody_path

my bad is bloody path perhaps, but should be perfectly illustrative. so if one has to roll to attack ones self as this ability would imply...do we now make touch attack rolls for spells cast on self or with 0 range? this is crap, this is playing card mechanics or board game mechanics that are out of place in more than one way.

You already have 9 stats and you're thinking about adding 2 more.  That's a lot.  You're already at the point where you really need to figure out how to make them all useful enough for a player to consider.  Otherwise, you will end up making special case dump stats that no one takes but the GM can pull some form of "rock falls, everyone dies."  (I don't recommend this as a design feature.)

One of my all time favorite games is Cyberpunk 2020 but Fashion became a dump stat with only one published adventure (that I can remember) putting it into play and then only as a one time check.  For most games I was in, it was a universal dump stat.  It just didn't have enough utility or versatility to justify sacrificing more crucial stats and skills to get it up high enough to mean anything.

OTOH, I'm all about derived stats.  In D&D, passive perception is a derived stat for checks to see if you happen to notice something while you are focused on something else.  It's a great single use stat that isn't it's own thing.  You could make courage a derived stat from Spirit and Vitality as a way to resist the fear condition.

Because you are taking inspiration from JTTRPGs, maybe you would be solid if you straight up used BRP by Chaosium.  It has an open license for you to do that and it is a d100 system that really works well (and would work extremely well for the kind of game play you're wanting.)  There's also the benefit that it's easier to on-board people to your game if they don't need to learn everything from scratch.  With BRP, most of the players out there have at least some experience with Call of Cthulhu (that BRP is the core for) so you are leagues ahead in teaching players how to play.  The other system you could think about is Savage Worlds.  It has a great play quality if you're going for the more anime flavored JTTRPGs.  I'm not saying don't make your own system, I'm just saying that you should consider whether your project would really benefit from having a unique system over adapting one that already is tried and true.  One of the things I have noticed is when someone wants to do a new system from scratch, there's the potential for system pitfalls they may miss without extensive play testing.

A final note, I'm not trying to be argumentative or negative about your project.  Rather, I hope I provide enough of a challenge that you crystalize your choices with well thought out reasons and consideration.  I've looked at many new RPGs on the market and so many of them are just janky and unplayable because good ideas weren't tested and polished.     

Quote from: kosmos1214 on November 04, 2024, 08:15:19 PM--Snip--
Core inspiration Jrpgs such as The Tales series A little outside the realm of most of the posters here historically despite this my systems core dna is rooted in d&d with some systems bolted on and some stat changes.
--Snip--
Question and fear 1
I've been thinking of adding a courage and beauty statistic but I'm not sure if thats a good idea
I'm not sure if i can find enough room for courage to do though i can see benefit from splitting charisma and beauty.

Question and fear 2
I've had thought of making proficiency as skills in the megaverial manor but i worry about stepping on toes if i do that. to clarify skills are skill point based with in a manor you would recognize from d20 system but with better skill point gains and a baked in expectation of competency.

Personally, I don't care much for the Tales Of series except for Berseria. With that said, I think the stats you have are fine. When it comes to things like Courage and Beauty, those seem more suited for Perks/Advantages or Traits. I don't know if you have thought of adding such things. If so, make sure the characters have Disadvantages to make things more interesting. Since it's based on JRPGs, have you thought about having Backgrounds or a kind of Life-Path system? Having those would be good for Advantage/Disadvantage, as well as giving the PCs a bit of background spice.

A lot of it comes down to adventure design.  What are the characters going to be doing?  Ideally all of the primary (not derived) stats should either have equal value during a typical adventure or they should have varying costs to advance that reflect their value.  Otherwise it's likely that a few stats will be prioritized by the players and the rest ignored, meaning you wasted your time on writing mechanics for those ones.  Courage could be important if a fair bit of your combat mechanics are based around morale, which would actually be kind of cool.  A beauty stat made sense in Teenagers from Outer Space (a high school / aliens mashup rpg back in the day).  For D&D not so much, at least IMO.

I'll share a bit of the design philosophy for my current project, not because I think you should make any big changes at this point, but because maybe it'll spark a helpful idea.  Most games have strength, dex, etc play into how well you attack.  I thought it would be easier to balance the stats if I had one exclusively for each type of action exclusively.  So one of the "talents" is attack, which is just how good you are at killing stuff.  It might be because you hit harder, are fast enough to bypass defenses, or know the best places to hit something.  It doesn't matter to the outcome, so I didn't want to track it mechanically.  Similarly, defense, athletics, guile, sense, and magic each represent talent at one of the primary activities in a typical adventure.  In case you're wondering about "athletics," I'm going more for an Uncharted vibe rather than a D&D vibe. 

Quote from: zircher on November 04, 2024, 08:42:12 PMCourage and beauty are on the slippery slope since you have a stat that takes control away from a character and a stat that is narrowly focused on a specific culture's standards.

Quote from: ForgottenF on November 04, 2024, 09:07:35 PMI think if you already have a willpower stat in "Spirit", then a separate Courage attribute becomes kind of redundant. I'm torn on Beauty stats in RPGs. I do like the separation of physical appearance from persuasiveness or force of personality, but I find that nothing bums a player out like not being able to make their character look the way they want it to, and there's no attribute players are more willing to make excuses for not roleplaying than ugliness. I'm not sure the benefits gained by it are worth putting GMs in the position of having to remind players "Sorry, no. your character is hideous".

I also might argue that if you want your game to reflect a JRPG tone, then a Beauty stat is inappropriate. JRPGs traditionally deal in very idealized characters.

I you do decide to do a Beauty stat, then I would suggest dropping Charisma and folding its traditional role into other attributes. For example, in a somewhat similar system I started writing a while ago, I had no Charisma stat, and the skills traditionally governed by it were instead governed by a combination of Insight and either Intelligence or Willpower. The reasoning there is that Charisma traditionally represents a combination of physical attractiveness and social intuition. If both of those are represented elsewhere, then I don't know what it's supposed to be representing.

EDIT: Also, I don't really understand what you're asking with the same question. Might be worth rephrasing it.

Okay clarification if I added bravery it would not be in the manor of pendragon but would be the metacurrancy stat likely in the relm of A character focused bonus to character type.
Not the grab at the naritive type I have a few ideas for it mostly to help pad against pc death and help aid in pc comitance. If the system has moral checks I think I'd do it as a NPC only thing unless subjected to exceptional circumstances things like terror psyonics or a fear spell.
As to charisma the idea I was operating on was that charisma was also force of personality and strength of mind hence the psyonic bonuses. Thats why it bonuses psyonic defence and power points.  Last moment Post Script in the system I'm trying to build defence for a given type of damage is darmor not fully sure if it will work out but thats what the play testing will before.

Quote from: Slipshot762 on November 04, 2024, 09:11:26 PMCourage and beauty stats summon to mind a gripe i have and will share.

It seems to me starting around the middle of third edition we began to see mechanics and abilities introduced which were disconnected or disassociated from the game world, and i recall one of them on some prestige class or something in one of the many d20 books featuring a class ability of about 4th level which did something like allow you to add charisma bonus to hit or damage, was called something like charming strike or something grace...i hate this.

like what, she just so damn cute it hurts more when she stabs you? its not far from there to the 4e rogues bloody swathe or what have you.

an ability that normally doesnt contribute to combat mechanics such as charisma, if employed as a class ability or level enhancement mechanic, should stay within its realm as it were; it should not have a combat effect, have it effect some other aspect of the game. just my inner curmudgeon griping but there is 2 cents and you don't owe me a dime.

Well the way this game is built at its core you dont exactly have prime ability scores its more like you class is a set of things you get as you level up with the leftover delt out as ability points to spend. The exact version of dnd/ D20 that this game cribs from is besmd20 which used a similar set up the biggest difference is that I'm trying to not leave the point rates quite as tight and core features like learning magic is rebaked as an ability (ie magic casting) and the type of magic as an ability(example arcane secrets) and these abilitys act as prerequisits to learning a given magic spell.

2nd thought on your comment about "cutie strike" abilitys like that are semi common in vjrpgs out side of final fantasy are semi common. Two examples in my mind are sexy beam from dragon quest 8 and Enta from disgaea  has a similar ability in the same game Flonne has power of love as a healing spell.
Depending on the game and how down to earth it is things like that are most often expressed as an unburdened or underhanded strike. I actually have an ability idea I havent done yet called
 "twist of grace" that I was going to give to the knight as a masters killing stroke.

Quote from: BadApple on November 05, 2024, 08:07:01 PMYou already have 9 stats and you're thinking about adding 2 more.  That's a lot.  You're already at the point where you really need to figure out how to make them all useful enough for a player to consider.  Otherwise, you will end up making special case dump stats that no one takes but the GM can pull some form of "rock falls, everyone dies."  (I don't recommend this as a design feature.)

One of my all time favorite games is Cyberpunk 2020 but Fashion became a dump stat with only one published adventure (that I can remember) putting it into play and then only as a one time check.  For most games I was in, it was a universal dump stat.  It just didn't have enough utility or versatility to justify sacrificing more crucial stats and skills to get it up high enough to mean anything.

OTOH, I'm all about derived stats.  In D&D, passive perception is a derived stat for checks to see if you happen to notice something while you are focused on something else.  It's a great single use stat that isn't it's own thing.  You could make courage a derived stat from Spirit and Vitality as a way to resist the fear condition.

Because you are taking inspiration from JTTRPGs, maybe you would be solid if you straight up used BRP by Chaosium.  It has an open license for you to do that and it is a d100 system that really works well (and would work extremely well for the kind of game play you're wanting.)  There's also the benefit that it's easier to on-board people to your game if they don't need to learn everything from scratch.  With BRP, most of the players out there have at least some experience with Call of Cthulhu (that BRP is the core for) so you are leagues ahead in teaching players how to play.  The other system you could think about is Savage Worlds.  It has a great play quality if you're going for the more anime flavored JTTRPGs.  I'm not saying don't make your own system, I'm just saying that you should consider whether your project would really benefit from having a unique system over adapting one that already is tried and true.  One of the things I have noticed is when someone wants to do a new system from scratch, there's the potential for system pitfalls they may miss without extensive play testing.

A final note, I'm not trying to be argumentative or negative about your project.  Rather, I hope I provide enough of a challenge that you crystalize your choices with well thought out reasons and consideration.  I've looked at many new RPGs on the market and so many of them are just janky and unplayable because good ideas weren't tested and polished.     

Okay so if I made this with another system the 2 that come to my mind are palladium and GURPS and maybe Anime 5E only because I know it exists. One of the big ideas I had for the system is that anything out side of special class abilitys and possibly some races abilitys should have a path to learn out side of the class that we associate with the ability. I used magic as an example earlier in this post but if a mage wanted to learn a bunch of say the knights classes tactical order abilitys it would be the same core path just learning (martial mastery) and I think I called it (knights oath) as prerequisites to 

Quote from: consolcwby on Today at 02:36:37 AM

Quote from: kosmos1214 on November 04, 2024, 08:15:19 PM--Snip--
Core inspiration Jrpgs such as The Tales series A little outside the realm of most of the posters here historically despite this my systems core dna is rooted in d&d with some systems bolted on and some stat changes.
--Snip--
Question and fear 1
I've been thinking of adding a courage and beauty statistic but I'm not sure if thats a good idea
I'm not sure if i can find enough room for courage to do though i can see benefit from splitting charisma and beauty.

Question and fear 2
I've had thought of making proficiency as skills in the megaverial manor but i worry about stepping on toes if i do that. to clarify skills are skill point based with in a manor you would recognize from d20 system but with better skill point gains and a baked in expectation of competency.

Personally, I don't care much for the Tales Of series except for Berseria. With that said, I think the stats you have are fine. When it comes to things like Courage and Beauty, those seem more suited for Perks/Advantages or Traits. I don't know if you have thought of adding such things. If so, make sure the characters have Disadvantages to make things more interesting. Since it's based on JRPGs, have you thought about having Backgrounds or a kind of Life-Path system? Having those would be good for Advantage/Disadvantage, as well as giving the PCs a bit of background spice.

I was thinking of going background Parents occupation personal occupation to handle part of the skills the character would have training in. part of doing that way is its sort of bolt on bolt off if someone was trying to run the system "light" or for new players. I do have some work on a trait/defect system but if a player doesn't engage in it there left over trait points just turn in to  ability points (perfectly viable option) leaving it as an option.

Quote from: Mishihari on Today at 03:39:39 AMA lot of it comes down to adventure design.  What are the characters going to be doing?  Ideally all of the primary (not derived) stats should either have equal value during a typical adventure or they should have varying costs to advance that reflect their value.  Otherwise it's likely that a few stats will be prioritized by the players and the rest ignored, meaning you wasted your time on writing mechanics for those ones.  Courage could be important if a fair bit of your combat mechanics are based around morale, which would actually be kind of cool.  A beauty stat made sense in Teenagers from Outer Space (a high school / aliens mashup rpg back in the day).  For D&D not so much, at least IMO.

I'll share a bit of the design philosophy for my current project, not because I think you should make any big changes at this point, but because maybe it'll spark a helpful idea.  Most games have strength, dex, etc play into how well you attack.  I thought it would be easier to balance the stats if I had one exclusively for each type of action exclusively.  So one of the "talents" is attack, which is just how good you are at killing stuff.  It might be because you hit harder, are fast enough to bypass defenses, or know the best places to hit something.  It doesn't matter to the outcome, so I didn't want to track it mechanically.  Similarly, defense, athletics, guile, sense, and magic each represent talent at one of the primary activities in a typical adventure.  In case you're wondering about "athletics," I'm going more for an Uncharted vibe rather than a D&D vibe. 

Okay that is interesting. In my case I have a setting I have never used for anything that kind of influances the way I've worked on and tried to incorporate things in to the design. At its core this game is a fantasy heart breaker if I'm being honest. The basis of the setting I keep drawing on it that it is a world of adventure and that some pretty big stuff went down in the past with an unmapped Continent living gods walking around pretty basic stuff. One catch is that things like supernatural sword skills and such expressly exist and are fairly common depending on how or who taught someone.
So for example people sometimes call there attacks but its baked in they are using the "shout" technique and for a small bit of mana expenditure increases the power of physical blows and abilitys but it's a little noisy. A good simple example of the kind of abilitys on point in the setting would be "roaring shot" which is a smaller fire ball but for gunners instead of the mage.
What the heck heres a copy paste of the core abilitys of my version of the artificer. I may rewrite some of this as this is sort of the first draft version so I know it's going to need play testing and smoothing.

"
ex cs in artifice abp2
each time an artificer gains a rank of in artifice they gain 1 rank in a sub tech of there choice from the list of arcane secrets ,holy lore , fell knowledge , nature's lore.

Ex cs  Single spell artifice  abp1
the artificer gains the ability to quickly make single spell use items in a manor similar to an alchemists alchemical items they make a batch of items of a spell they know in 1 hour or prep time and 3 hours of study if they do not know the spell. If aided by a person who knows the spell they may make them in 2 hours of prep time. The artificer is considered the caster regardless and at least 1/3rd of the cost of the item in materials must be provided. Each item consumes no mana on use but takes it cost in mana upon being crafted and is consumed on use. The artificer may use these items with no use magic device check (they still make checks for normally crafted  items) others using these items must make a check of 60 +5 per spell level.
Further more an artificer using the item acts as though they were casting the spell in the moment including there current stats where as others using the item act as though it where a crafted item using item stats. They may not exceed the normal maximum spell level they would be able to cast.
These items have been known to take meany forms from marbles to chess pieces to strange coins, stick pins and other forms as fit the crafters fancy or the norms of there society. They may carry an amount of these items equal to thrice there maximum mana .

Ex cs multi spell artifice  abp3
the artificer gains the ability to craft mutispell items that can cast multiple times before being expended
these items are different then normal magic items do to there slap dash construction they tend to be frail and fail regularly when over used. They may make one of these items in 1 hour if they know the spell or and 3 hours of study if they do not know the spell. If aided by a person who knows the spell they may make them in 2 hours of prep time. The artificer is considered the caster regardless and at least 1/3rd of the cost of the item in materials must be provided. Each item consumes no mana on use but takes it cost in mana upon being crafted. The artificer may use these items with no use magic device check (they still make checks for normally crafted  items they do not craft) others using these items must make a check of 60 +5 per spell level. These items may be recharged by the artificer expending mana equal to the mana cost of the spell.
Further more an artificer using the item acts as though they were casting the spell in the moment including there current stats where as others using the item act as though it where a crafted item using item stats. These items have been known to take any number of larger forms swords, knives large rings torques amulets or other more numerous forms .
Rank 1
item may hold at maximum 20 mana for spells and when the item would cast a spell that would bring its mana total to 0 or less roll 1d4 on a 1 the item burns itself out and needs to be reforged as though creating a new item to repair it. This roll is made again every time the item in used at zero mana or less.

Rank 2
items may hold a maximum of 30 mana for spells and the break down roll changes to 1d6. 

Ex cs crafting learning  abp1
the artificer may select two spells that use arcane secrets ,holy lore , fell knowledge , nature's lore as requisites and learn them at normal cost even if they do not meet the normal prerequisites.

Ex cs multi spell reforging  abp2
the artificer gains the ability to reforge existing items in to multi spell artifice including existing magic items if the item breaks down only the multi spell artifice cost need be paid and the normal magical effects continue to work as normal. 

Ex cs crafters insight abp1
 the artificer gains a bonus of 15 to all use magic device and crafting checks.
"