Moxxmix
2019-05-29, 06:37 PM
This is purely for my own enjoyment. I know this has the potential to break all kinds of things, but I still want to have fun playing around with how it could work, and how it might affect the game.
Despite that caveat, I'm still looking for feedback on the design and implications of these changes.
New Stats
This is derived from an idea that someone had about dumping Constitution as a stat, because of its limited impact on the game. I played with the idea a little, and then ran with it a bit further. Thus, a complete rework of the base stats of the game.
Consolidate and rearrange attributes into five stats (renamed to avoid confusion with the original stats):
Body - Strength, constitution, physical resilience, athleticism, health
Agility - Hand-eye coordination, body coordination, fine manipulation, precision, balance
Mind - Memory, attention, retention of detail, problem solving, accumulated knowledge, perception, analysis
Presence - Notability, sociability, attractiveness, leadership, reading people
Spirit - Attunement, purity, magical capability
3-character abbreviation: Bod, Agi, Mnd, Pre, Spr
4-character abbreviation: Body, Agil, Mind, Pres, Sprt
I'll mostly use the 4-character abbreviation, I think.
Review:
Body: This is a combination of Str and Con. As far as skills go, Str and Con pretty much go together. Most characters that boost Strength will also boost Constitution (and vice-versa), so keeping them as separate stats doesn't add very much except add to the cost of stat allocation.
Agility: This is basically the same as Dexterity. It might also be called Coordination. The only reasons I chose Agility is to avoid confusion with the old stat, and because it's shorter. It covers most of the same things as Dex, while also handling targeting ability (ie: to-hit rolls).
Mind: Intelligence is almost always a dump stat for anyone other than Wizards. There should be better motivation for having it as a stat. Part of the reason for having it as a dump stat was because of the association of the three mental stats with magical power. I've removed that, which changes the dynamic balance of stat choices. I also shifted some of the skills and saves around, to make Mind a more attractive option aside from pure roleplaying choice.
Presence: A renaming of Charisma. It covers most of the same things as Charisma, while allowing somewhat better association with the social skills due to separation from using it as a magic stat.
Spirit: Int/Wis/Cha as magic casting stats creates a bias in their usage and the resulting skills that characters end up with. I want to separate that idea. As such, I'm refactoring magic out into its own stat entirely. This allows some interesting secondary modifications, which I'll get to later.
Wisdom: Wisdom has always been rather difficult to reconcile as a stat to correspond with skills, since its intrinsic meaning has always been rather vague. As such, along with Constitution, I'm removing it as a stat entirely, and distributing its skills among other stats.
Summary of conversions:
Strength → Body
Constitution → Body
Dexterity → Agility
Intelligence → Mind/Spirit
Wisdom → Body/Mind/Presence/Spirit
Charisma → Presence/Spirit
Skills
With the adjustments to the stats, there's a corresponding adjustment to the skills:
Survival is moved from Wisdom to Body.
Medicine and Perception are moved from Wisdom to Mind.
Insight and Animal Handling are moved from Wisdom to Presence.
Arcana is moved from Intelligence to Spirit. A new skill, Arcane Lore, replaces the Mind version of Arcana.
Body
Athletics
Survivial
Agil
Acrobatics
Sleight of Hand
Stealth
Mind
Arcane Lore
History
Investigation
Medicine
Nature
Perception
Religion
Pres
Animal Handling
Deception
Insight
Intimidation
Persuasion
Performance
Sprt
Arcana
Summary:
Body retains Athletics, and gains Survival, which to me always felt more like a physical skill than a mental one. EG: Setting up camp, foraging for food, anticipating and avoiding bad weather, watching out for dangerous trails or wild animals, etc. It's a reflection of time spent without the comforts of civilization doing the work for you.
Note: I could see moving Survival to be under Mind, but don't quite feel confident in that yet.
Mind gains Medicine and Perception, both of which are decidedly mental disciplines. In the case of Perception, it's about being attentive, noticing details, and being able to figure out what those details mean.
Presence gains Insight and Animal Handling, both of which are more about social interaction than mental power.
Spirit gains only the skill Arcana (which I'll elaborate more on later). It's the only casting stat, and remains separate from almost all skills. This allows greater flexibility in what skills you do focus on, and prevents the magic stat from being a double-dip, or a forced assignment of personality based on class.
Optional new skills:
Mind
Navigation
Research
Tactics and Traps
Pres
Etiquette
Streetwise
Charisma
These are skill checks that occasionally come up, but for which there are no explicit skills, and that feel like they cover enough that they should be complete skills themselves. Navigation is a common one that usually gets dumped on Perception, even though it's rather different in practice. Similar for Research. Etiquette and Streetwise are additional ways of interacting with people.
Charisma: This is a skill to attract people to you, gain followers, seduce, be remembered by the people you meet, and so forth. While most Pres/Cha skills are interaction-based, this is more about long-term effects.
Arcana
Arcana was split into two forms: Lore, based on Mind, and practice, based on Spirit. Lore is what you'd expect lore to be: Knowledge of magical practices and systems, types of magic, history of magical spells, prevalence of magic in different realms, etc. Practice, on the other hand, reflects experience with actually using magic — feeling, manipulating, shaping, and directing magic.
I had a thought about building an actual skill-based magic system, but that's a (large) project for another day. Instead, I only want to extract a handful of spells out of the manual, and put them under the skill instead.
As such, if you have proficiency in Arcana, you can use the following spells as skill checks instead: Prestidigitation-class cantrips; Detect Magic; and Identify. Roughly speaking, cantrip effects would be of trivial difficulty [5, maybe 10], Detect Magic would be of moderate to high difficulty [10-15], and Identify would be high to very high difficulty [15-20].
Why all these changes to Arcana? Well, that gets into what I'm imagining Spirit to be. To get to that, first I'm taking a side trip down Saving Throw lane.
Saving Throws
Examples of saving throws appropriate to each stat:
Body: Handles saves vs strength or resilience checks (grapples, poisons, diseases, etc)
Agil: Handles saves vs movement checks (entanglement, falls, dodging AOEs, etc)
Mind: Handles saves vs mental effects (illusions, magical blindness, psychic attacks, reading thoughts, etc)
Pres: Handles saves vs mental influences (charm, dominate, fear, etc)
Sprt: Handles saves vs spiritual effects (necrotic attacks, antimagic, spirit drain, Turn Undead, banish, polymorph, etc)
Spirit in particular is resistance against raw magical or soul/spirit-affecting attacks. It also becomes the resistance against something like Turn Undead for undead creatures, and thus suggests a medium by which undead can even exist. That is, Spirit is their binding energy, what you disrupt when you destroy them, and what they feed on to sustain themselves. Special note: casters with high Spirit are extra juicy targets.
Also, rather than have a single catch-all stat for most mental effects (Wisdom), they are largely split between Mind and Presence — the equivalent of Intelligence and Charisma, which were largely lacking in useful saves before. Mind saves are against things that you can figure out, such as illusions. Presence saves are against things that affect your emotions directly, such as fear. This should give a solid justification for wanting decent ratings in each stat.
With the change in stats, I'd have to figure out what the default saves are for all the classes. I came up with this:
By Class:
Barbarian - Body, Pres
Bard - Pres, Mind
Cleric - Pres, Sprt
Druid - Body, Agil
Fighter - Body, Mind
Monk - Agil, Sprt
Paladin - Body, Sprt
Ranger - Agil, Mind
Rogue - Agil, Pres
Sorcerer - Body, Mind
Warlock - Pres, Sprt
Wizard - Mind, Sprt
By Stat:
Body: Barbarian (Pres), Druid (Agil), Fighter (Mind), Paladin (Sprt), Sorcerer (Mind)
Agil: Druid (Body), Monk (Sprt), Ranger (Mind), Rogue (Pres)
Mind: Bard (Pres), Fighter (Body), Ranger (Agil), Sorcerer (Body), Wizard (Sprt)
Pres: Barbarian (Body), Bard (Mind), Cleric (Sprt), Rogue (Agil), Warlock (Sprt)
Sprt: Cleric (Pres), Monk (Agil), Paladin (Body), Warlock (Pres), Wizard (Mind)
I'm happy with most of them, though there's a couple that are a little sketchy.
New: Spreadsheet (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yi0npJuthbA7ePat0MMuoY2UD6Lp6OLQ/view?usp=sharing) detailing old and new saving throws per spell.
Stat Buy
I considered adjusting the points allocated for a stat buy, and decided that there's really no reason to change it. Take the standard array (15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8) and simply drop the 8 (which costs 0 points), and you're left with (15, 14, 13, 12, 10), which is a perfectly reasonable set of values for a 5-stat system. You can still sacrifice points to go below 10 in order to boost up one of the other stats, but it no longer assumes that you're going to be starting with an 8 somewhere. Which is fine, because we don't want to encourage the idea of a "dump stat". All the stats are important to various degrees, and merely being average (having a +0 stat mod) is already pretty limiting.
Further implications and review
Spirit
So now I can more fully speak on what Spirit actually is.
Between skills and saving throws, the idea of Spirit is starting to take shape. It is the source of magic, and/or the ability to manipulate magic. It is the power of the soul. It is what keeps the dead alive when they should have passed on. It is what allows you to maintain your sense of self, such as resisting polymorph.
Having a strong awareness and skill in shaping magic — Arcana — allows you to manipulate magic directly, in small ways. It allows you to see magic. It would be the source of the Paladin's ability to detect undead, or other unnatural, extra-planar creatures that simply do not 'belong'.
It is the key to connecting with the gods, and thus the cleric's ability to channel their power, since it's a reflection of the soul. It is the tool that allows a wizard to craft and shape his spells. It is what binds a warlock to his patron. It is the raw essence of a sorcerer. It is a monk's ki.
It is the non-physical quintessence of a person that allows him to see beyond physical reality, and begin to be able to manipulate it. It is the light reflecting off of the soul.
And, on the flip side, it is the power that undead, or other monsters lacking in Spirit, crave. It is the energy that cultists steal during a human sacrifice. It is the part of a person that shapes her on the material level, such that, while it may resist a polymorph, it may actually force that change, such as with a werewolf.
As an aside, this does weaken a little of the barriers between different casting types, since it's easier to cast magic between "stat" schools. But since that bleed-through was already happening to an extent anyway, this doesn't actually change too much.
To-Hit
Something I mentioned earlier on is that Agility is your to-hit stat. I mean that in the broadest sense, as this is another potential change. Specifically, all attacks should use agility for the to-hit roll, whether that's a dagger, a greatsword, or a firebolt.
Agility is hand-eye coordination. That is, your aim — your ability to hit your (possibly moving) target. That doesn't change just because you're using a big weapon, or casting a spell.
One might, then, think that this penalizes a heavy weapon fighter compared to a light weapon fighter, since he'd have to boost two stats instead of just one. But that thought would be wrong.
The damage you can do with a weapon depends on how well you can use your body to transfer force into your opponent, and this is the same whether you use a dagger or a greatsword. The greatsword does more overall damage because it's the bigger weapon, and thus adds its own weight to the equation (reflected in the higher damage die). But the damage you personally contribute to the attack depends on the strength of your Body. This includes ranged weapons, where your Body is used to create the potential energy that is unleashed. Magic is similar, except that it uses Spirit in place of Body.
What does this mean? It means that all attacks of any sort use Agility to hit. Physical attacks use Body for damage, while magical attacks use Spirit for damage.
Now, that provides a balance for physical fighters, and encourage two primary stats instead of only a single stat, which somewhat balances out the removal of Con as a stat, but magic users have a way around this: Cast spells that require saves, rather than attacks. In that case, you only have a single stat that matters: Spirit.
Of course, the game already allows that single stat focus, and is balanced around it. At the same time, casters no longer get the automatic boost to a bunch of skills just because the skills are associated with their casting stat. A cleric is not automatically good at Perception; a sorcerer is not automatically good at Deception; a wizard is not automatically good at Investigation.
Overall, I don't feel that there is a strong loss of balance due to the changes. Others may notice things I don't, but until then I think I'm OK with this change.
Based on further discussion in the thread, I'm revising the idea of to-hit and to-damage.
To-damage bonuses are handled either by Body (for physical attacks) or Spirit (for non-physical/magical attacks).
To-hit bonuses are split up among the stats based on the attack type:
Physical melee attacks use Body.
Thrown weapons use Agility.
Ranged attacks (both physical and magical) use Mind.
Psionic attacks use Presence. [Optional]
Magical melee (aka: "touch") attacks use Spirit.
This shifts the balance in how stats are used and valued. Agility, for example, cannot be used as a universal offense+defense stat, even if it still has utility with thrown weapons. That prevents it from becoming a single stat that can provide overwhelming benefit compared to the other stats.
Mind captures perception, and is used for any sort of ranged attack where the attacker's role is more about aiming the attack (ie: bows, crossbows, guns, firebolts, etc), as a sort of fire-and-forget, rather than manually controlling a moving target to a destination, such as psionic attacks might behave.
Psionic attacks fall under Presence, as they are more a direct expression of will. [Note: Entirely optional, as there are presently no psionics in game.]
This also makes the saving throw choices per class fit a bit better.
Hit Points
Bonus HP would be based off of Body, the same way it's currently based off of Con.
Concentration
Concentration checks would be based off of Mind, rather than Con. Concentration reflects the ability to maintain focus and alertness, rather than the ability to take a hit. Of course that does imply that there might be other ways to make someone lose concentration than attacking him. The prostitute trying to lure the young lad into the brothel might present quite a challenge for maintaining that Alter Self spell, for example.
Armor
Use Agility just like Dexterity was used before.
Despite that caveat, I'm still looking for feedback on the design and implications of these changes.
New Stats
This is derived from an idea that someone had about dumping Constitution as a stat, because of its limited impact on the game. I played with the idea a little, and then ran with it a bit further. Thus, a complete rework of the base stats of the game.
Consolidate and rearrange attributes into five stats (renamed to avoid confusion with the original stats):
Body - Strength, constitution, physical resilience, athleticism, health
Agility - Hand-eye coordination, body coordination, fine manipulation, precision, balance
Mind - Memory, attention, retention of detail, problem solving, accumulated knowledge, perception, analysis
Presence - Notability, sociability, attractiveness, leadership, reading people
Spirit - Attunement, purity, magical capability
3-character abbreviation: Bod, Agi, Mnd, Pre, Spr
4-character abbreviation: Body, Agil, Mind, Pres, Sprt
I'll mostly use the 4-character abbreviation, I think.
Review:
Body: This is a combination of Str and Con. As far as skills go, Str and Con pretty much go together. Most characters that boost Strength will also boost Constitution (and vice-versa), so keeping them as separate stats doesn't add very much except add to the cost of stat allocation.
Agility: This is basically the same as Dexterity. It might also be called Coordination. The only reasons I chose Agility is to avoid confusion with the old stat, and because it's shorter. It covers most of the same things as Dex, while also handling targeting ability (ie: to-hit rolls).
Mind: Intelligence is almost always a dump stat for anyone other than Wizards. There should be better motivation for having it as a stat. Part of the reason for having it as a dump stat was because of the association of the three mental stats with magical power. I've removed that, which changes the dynamic balance of stat choices. I also shifted some of the skills and saves around, to make Mind a more attractive option aside from pure roleplaying choice.
Presence: A renaming of Charisma. It covers most of the same things as Charisma, while allowing somewhat better association with the social skills due to separation from using it as a magic stat.
Spirit: Int/Wis/Cha as magic casting stats creates a bias in their usage and the resulting skills that characters end up with. I want to separate that idea. As such, I'm refactoring magic out into its own stat entirely. This allows some interesting secondary modifications, which I'll get to later.
Wisdom: Wisdom has always been rather difficult to reconcile as a stat to correspond with skills, since its intrinsic meaning has always been rather vague. As such, along with Constitution, I'm removing it as a stat entirely, and distributing its skills among other stats.
Summary of conversions:
Strength → Body
Constitution → Body
Dexterity → Agility
Intelligence → Mind/Spirit
Wisdom → Body/Mind/Presence/Spirit
Charisma → Presence/Spirit
Skills
With the adjustments to the stats, there's a corresponding adjustment to the skills:
Survival is moved from Wisdom to Body.
Medicine and Perception are moved from Wisdom to Mind.
Insight and Animal Handling are moved from Wisdom to Presence.
Arcana is moved from Intelligence to Spirit. A new skill, Arcane Lore, replaces the Mind version of Arcana.
Body
Athletics
Survivial
Agil
Acrobatics
Sleight of Hand
Stealth
Mind
Arcane Lore
History
Investigation
Medicine
Nature
Perception
Religion
Pres
Animal Handling
Deception
Insight
Intimidation
Persuasion
Performance
Sprt
Arcana
Summary:
Body retains Athletics, and gains Survival, which to me always felt more like a physical skill than a mental one. EG: Setting up camp, foraging for food, anticipating and avoiding bad weather, watching out for dangerous trails or wild animals, etc. It's a reflection of time spent without the comforts of civilization doing the work for you.
Note: I could see moving Survival to be under Mind, but don't quite feel confident in that yet.
Mind gains Medicine and Perception, both of which are decidedly mental disciplines. In the case of Perception, it's about being attentive, noticing details, and being able to figure out what those details mean.
Presence gains Insight and Animal Handling, both of which are more about social interaction than mental power.
Spirit gains only the skill Arcana (which I'll elaborate more on later). It's the only casting stat, and remains separate from almost all skills. This allows greater flexibility in what skills you do focus on, and prevents the magic stat from being a double-dip, or a forced assignment of personality based on class.
Optional new skills:
Mind
Navigation
Research
Tactics and Traps
Pres
Etiquette
Streetwise
Charisma
These are skill checks that occasionally come up, but for which there are no explicit skills, and that feel like they cover enough that they should be complete skills themselves. Navigation is a common one that usually gets dumped on Perception, even though it's rather different in practice. Similar for Research. Etiquette and Streetwise are additional ways of interacting with people.
Charisma: This is a skill to attract people to you, gain followers, seduce, be remembered by the people you meet, and so forth. While most Pres/Cha skills are interaction-based, this is more about long-term effects.
Arcana
Arcana was split into two forms: Lore, based on Mind, and practice, based on Spirit. Lore is what you'd expect lore to be: Knowledge of magical practices and systems, types of magic, history of magical spells, prevalence of magic in different realms, etc. Practice, on the other hand, reflects experience with actually using magic — feeling, manipulating, shaping, and directing magic.
I had a thought about building an actual skill-based magic system, but that's a (large) project for another day. Instead, I only want to extract a handful of spells out of the manual, and put them under the skill instead.
As such, if you have proficiency in Arcana, you can use the following spells as skill checks instead: Prestidigitation-class cantrips; Detect Magic; and Identify. Roughly speaking, cantrip effects would be of trivial difficulty [5, maybe 10], Detect Magic would be of moderate to high difficulty [10-15], and Identify would be high to very high difficulty [15-20].
Why all these changes to Arcana? Well, that gets into what I'm imagining Spirit to be. To get to that, first I'm taking a side trip down Saving Throw lane.
Saving Throws
Examples of saving throws appropriate to each stat:
Body: Handles saves vs strength or resilience checks (grapples, poisons, diseases, etc)
Agil: Handles saves vs movement checks (entanglement, falls, dodging AOEs, etc)
Mind: Handles saves vs mental effects (illusions, magical blindness, psychic attacks, reading thoughts, etc)
Pres: Handles saves vs mental influences (charm, dominate, fear, etc)
Sprt: Handles saves vs spiritual effects (necrotic attacks, antimagic, spirit drain, Turn Undead, banish, polymorph, etc)
Spirit in particular is resistance against raw magical or soul/spirit-affecting attacks. It also becomes the resistance against something like Turn Undead for undead creatures, and thus suggests a medium by which undead can even exist. That is, Spirit is their binding energy, what you disrupt when you destroy them, and what they feed on to sustain themselves. Special note: casters with high Spirit are extra juicy targets.
Also, rather than have a single catch-all stat for most mental effects (Wisdom), they are largely split between Mind and Presence — the equivalent of Intelligence and Charisma, which were largely lacking in useful saves before. Mind saves are against things that you can figure out, such as illusions. Presence saves are against things that affect your emotions directly, such as fear. This should give a solid justification for wanting decent ratings in each stat.
With the change in stats, I'd have to figure out what the default saves are for all the classes. I came up with this:
By Class:
Barbarian - Body, Pres
Bard - Pres, Mind
Cleric - Pres, Sprt
Druid - Body, Agil
Fighter - Body, Mind
Monk - Agil, Sprt
Paladin - Body, Sprt
Ranger - Agil, Mind
Rogue - Agil, Pres
Sorcerer - Body, Mind
Warlock - Pres, Sprt
Wizard - Mind, Sprt
By Stat:
Body: Barbarian (Pres), Druid (Agil), Fighter (Mind), Paladin (Sprt), Sorcerer (Mind)
Agil: Druid (Body), Monk (Sprt), Ranger (Mind), Rogue (Pres)
Mind: Bard (Pres), Fighter (Body), Ranger (Agil), Sorcerer (Body), Wizard (Sprt)
Pres: Barbarian (Body), Bard (Mind), Cleric (Sprt), Rogue (Agil), Warlock (Sprt)
Sprt: Cleric (Pres), Monk (Agil), Paladin (Body), Warlock (Pres), Wizard (Mind)
I'm happy with most of them, though there's a couple that are a little sketchy.
New: Spreadsheet (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yi0npJuthbA7ePat0MMuoY2UD6Lp6OLQ/view?usp=sharing) detailing old and new saving throws per spell.
Stat Buy
I considered adjusting the points allocated for a stat buy, and decided that there's really no reason to change it. Take the standard array (15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8) and simply drop the 8 (which costs 0 points), and you're left with (15, 14, 13, 12, 10), which is a perfectly reasonable set of values for a 5-stat system. You can still sacrifice points to go below 10 in order to boost up one of the other stats, but it no longer assumes that you're going to be starting with an 8 somewhere. Which is fine, because we don't want to encourage the idea of a "dump stat". All the stats are important to various degrees, and merely being average (having a +0 stat mod) is already pretty limiting.
Further implications and review
Spirit
So now I can more fully speak on what Spirit actually is.
Between skills and saving throws, the idea of Spirit is starting to take shape. It is the source of magic, and/or the ability to manipulate magic. It is the power of the soul. It is what keeps the dead alive when they should have passed on. It is what allows you to maintain your sense of self, such as resisting polymorph.
Having a strong awareness and skill in shaping magic — Arcana — allows you to manipulate magic directly, in small ways. It allows you to see magic. It would be the source of the Paladin's ability to detect undead, or other unnatural, extra-planar creatures that simply do not 'belong'.
It is the key to connecting with the gods, and thus the cleric's ability to channel their power, since it's a reflection of the soul. It is the tool that allows a wizard to craft and shape his spells. It is what binds a warlock to his patron. It is the raw essence of a sorcerer. It is a monk's ki.
It is the non-physical quintessence of a person that allows him to see beyond physical reality, and begin to be able to manipulate it. It is the light reflecting off of the soul.
And, on the flip side, it is the power that undead, or other monsters lacking in Spirit, crave. It is the energy that cultists steal during a human sacrifice. It is the part of a person that shapes her on the material level, such that, while it may resist a polymorph, it may actually force that change, such as with a werewolf.
As an aside, this does weaken a little of the barriers between different casting types, since it's easier to cast magic between "stat" schools. But since that bleed-through was already happening to an extent anyway, this doesn't actually change too much.
To-Hit
Something I mentioned earlier on is that Agility is your to-hit stat. I mean that in the broadest sense, as this is another potential change. Specifically, all attacks should use agility for the to-hit roll, whether that's a dagger, a greatsword, or a firebolt.
Agility is hand-eye coordination. That is, your aim — your ability to hit your (possibly moving) target. That doesn't change just because you're using a big weapon, or casting a spell.
One might, then, think that this penalizes a heavy weapon fighter compared to a light weapon fighter, since he'd have to boost two stats instead of just one. But that thought would be wrong.
The damage you can do with a weapon depends on how well you can use your body to transfer force into your opponent, and this is the same whether you use a dagger or a greatsword. The greatsword does more overall damage because it's the bigger weapon, and thus adds its own weight to the equation (reflected in the higher damage die). But the damage you personally contribute to the attack depends on the strength of your Body. This includes ranged weapons, where your Body is used to create the potential energy that is unleashed. Magic is similar, except that it uses Spirit in place of Body.
What does this mean? It means that all attacks of any sort use Agility to hit. Physical attacks use Body for damage, while magical attacks use Spirit for damage.
Now, that provides a balance for physical fighters, and encourage two primary stats instead of only a single stat, which somewhat balances out the removal of Con as a stat, but magic users have a way around this: Cast spells that require saves, rather than attacks. In that case, you only have a single stat that matters: Spirit.
Of course, the game already allows that single stat focus, and is balanced around it. At the same time, casters no longer get the automatic boost to a bunch of skills just because the skills are associated with their casting stat. A cleric is not automatically good at Perception; a sorcerer is not automatically good at Deception; a wizard is not automatically good at Investigation.
Overall, I don't feel that there is a strong loss of balance due to the changes. Others may notice things I don't, but until then I think I'm OK with this change.
Based on further discussion in the thread, I'm revising the idea of to-hit and to-damage.
To-damage bonuses are handled either by Body (for physical attacks) or Spirit (for non-physical/magical attacks).
To-hit bonuses are split up among the stats based on the attack type:
Physical melee attacks use Body.
Thrown weapons use Agility.
Ranged attacks (both physical and magical) use Mind.
Psionic attacks use Presence. [Optional]
Magical melee (aka: "touch") attacks use Spirit.
This shifts the balance in how stats are used and valued. Agility, for example, cannot be used as a universal offense+defense stat, even if it still has utility with thrown weapons. That prevents it from becoming a single stat that can provide overwhelming benefit compared to the other stats.
Mind captures perception, and is used for any sort of ranged attack where the attacker's role is more about aiming the attack (ie: bows, crossbows, guns, firebolts, etc), as a sort of fire-and-forget, rather than manually controlling a moving target to a destination, such as psionic attacks might behave.
Psionic attacks fall under Presence, as they are more a direct expression of will. [Note: Entirely optional, as there are presently no psionics in game.]
This also makes the saving throw choices per class fit a bit better.
Hit Points
Bonus HP would be based off of Body, the same way it's currently based off of Con.
Concentration
Concentration checks would be based off of Mind, rather than Con. Concentration reflects the ability to maintain focus and alertness, rather than the ability to take a hit. Of course that does imply that there might be other ways to make someone lose concentration than attacking him. The prostitute trying to lure the young lad into the brothel might present quite a challenge for maintaining that Alter Self spell, for example.
Armor
Use Agility just like Dexterity was used before.