STaRS v4: This time it's all about abilities (brainstorming for a homebrew system)

[Grod_The_Giant]

I've played with my homebrew game system, the Simplified TAbletop Roleplaying System a fair bit now, and it has been fairly well-received, at least among my friends. But I, as creator, am not satisfied. It's still a bit too dependent on GM fiat for my judgement, mostly due to ill-defined boundaries between abilities and (custom-designed) skills-- even as creator of the system, I flip-flopped a lot on how much you could do with an untrained skill.

The solution, I decided, was to scrap the idea of "skills" altogether. Or almost altogether. My plan is to have all actions in the game be arbitrated by abilities. Want to hack the computer? Roll Intelligence. Want to fast-talk the duke? Roll Manipulation.

Skills, I'm thinking, will take the form of something more like traits in the old draft. You'll be able to purchase a skill in, say, hacking, letting you make Intelligence rolls to hack computers at advantage. On the upside, this is simple. On the downside, it makes it easy to be really good at your chosen focus-- our hacker might have 7 Int and his skill, giving him about a 90% chance to succeed. Hmm... (Also, possibly, skills might let you use a different stat for a given use, so you could, say, roll Smarts to look for evidence)

I'm also revising my ability list slightly in order to take the change into account. I want 10 abilities to match the d10 die; this number isn't really negotiable. Unfortunately, I've only come up with 9 that I really like, and one maybe. So, playground, I ask for:
a) your opinion on the ability distribution I do have
b) suggestions for a 10th ability/new uses for my maybe
c) a 5th common use for Dex and Manipulation

Skills

Agility
Physical Coordination
1. Acrobatics
2. Jumping
3. Melee Attacks
4. Riding
5. Stealth

Awareness
Perception and insight
1. Examination
2. Perception
3. Reading People
4. Recognizing falsehood
5. Tracking

Dexterity
Fine motor skills
1. Driving
2. Lockpicking
3. Ranged Attacks
4. Sleight of Hand (includes pickpocketing)
5. ???

Manipulation
Persuasion and deception
1. Deception
2. Disguise
3. Persuasion
4. Provocation
5. ???

Physique
Physical strength and toughness
1. Athletics
2. Exerting force (lifting, pushing, and breaking)
3. Fortitude Saves
4. Physical Health
5. Wrestling

Presence
Personal magnetism
1. Intimidation
2. Knowing People
3. Leadership
4. Making friends
5. Social Health

Smarts
Knowledge and technical skill
1. Computers
2. Crafting
3. Knowledge
4. Medicine
5. Science

Speed
Reactions and movement
1. Initiative
2. Movement Speed
3. Physical Defense
4. Reflex saves
5. (Attacking multiple foes)

Will
Mental strength and toughness
1. Concentration
2. Emotional Control (Social defense)
3. Magic, psionics, and similar abilities
4. Mental Health
5. Will saves

And the maybe-possibly-10th score,
Wits
Common sense and experience
1. Memory/experience
2. Streetwise
3. Survival/nature/animals?
4. Improvisation?/Try things at disadvantage?
5. ???



A brief system summary

Spoiler

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Mechanically, STaRS is a players-roll-all-the-dice system. Abilities (and, in the older drafts, skills) are ranked from 1-10. Players attempting an action roll a d10 against the relevant ability or skill, and if their roll is equal to or less than their rank, they succeed, with degrees of success based on 3's.

Difficulty is modulated via advantage (roll twice and take the best result) and disadvantage (roll twice and take the worst). Two sources of advantage or disadvantage tend to shift scale.

What a character can do is modulated via scale. Characters start at human level damage resistance, strength, and so on. Tasks may be trivial (auto-success), difficult (roll), or impossible. Powers and items can change that, so a super-hero can, say, lift a 100 pound weight as a trivial action, and a tank with a roll.

Everything's point-buy.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Also, Scale. How much scale needs to be codified is, I think, important. For most things, I'd go:

-1: easy; effortless for a normal human (ex, climb some stairs; jump over a curb)
0: practical; a reasonable challenge for a normal human (ex, climb a rough cliff with standard gear; hurdle a bench)
+1: plausible; a human could theoretically do it, but it's practically impossible (ex, climb like Altair; hurdle a fence)
+2: superhuman (climb like spiderman; jump over a low building)
+3: high superhuman (leap tall buildings in a single bound)
+4: very high superhuman (cover multiple miles in a single jump)
+5: **** you, I do it (jump to the moon)

For damage, the really important one, I'd think something like

-1: a nerf dart
0: a punch
+1: standard antipersonal weapons (guns, swords, etc)
+2: antivehicle weapons (heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, etc)
+3: anti-armor weaponry (rocket launchers, tank shells, etc)
+4: heavy artillery (artillery, bombs, etc)
+5: **** you, you're dead (nukes)

[Grod_The_Giant]

OK. Went through the character sheets of 4 RPGs (D&D 3.5, M&M 3e, Exalted 2e, and Dresden Files), trying to match things up to my 9-10 abilities. Left over were:

• Forgery
• Profession?
• Survival
• maybe handle animal?
• some aspects of burglary
• Resources
• Survival
• Wits
• Survival
• “bureaucracy”
• Linguistics?
• maybe Sail?

Of those, the nature-type stuff (survival, handle animal, etc) seem like the most important missing thing. "Surviving in the wild" really doesn't seem like an intelligence thing, somehow, or a physical thing, and it's definitely not a mental thing. Putting it awareness feels weird, though an argument could be made. Works with "wits," though, maybe.

I dunno. Anyone have thoughts or comments?