This isn''t new, but very few people like to go away from the old standard 5 or 6 stats... Again, the reasons being this system both works, and is familiar to most role players, so there''s no need to change it. However, here''s some idea/examples:

Amber DRP uses four stats, "Strength" (purely physical), "Warfare" (combat and any other skill such as playing chess), "Psyche" (Mind power for psychic attacks, not intelligencve), and "Endurance" (both physical and mental). While that may seem extremely unbalanced towards physical attributes, it works well with the rest of the system, and with the storyline of Amber.

Another system (I can''t remember where it was that I saw this) was a bit more metaphysical: it used only "Mind", "Body", "Soul" and "Spirit" for all calculations. "Mind" was not only intelligence and wisdom type stuff, but also for psychic abilities, "Body" was everything physical, including appearance. "Soul" was mostly personality and leadership ability, but also things like persuasion and I think some magic power calculations. "Spirit" was used mostly for religious and death related problems, but also as a basic "fudge factor" or luck.

Actually wait-- that plus Phosphorous''s jest reminds me-- there''s a system called "Fudge" that uses a very similar system of "Mind", "Body", "Soul" and a "Fudge Factor". In addition, it only uses Superb, Great, Good, Fair, Mediocre, Poor, and Terrible instead of real numbers. (can be found/downloaded at http://www.fudgerpg.com) I remember liking this system because it provided a basic framework for any genre RPG, where the GM is given almost total control... They even give rules for both dice, and diceless play.

But... as I''ve said before (and agreeing with Inmate''s post) since here we''re talking about computer games, why try to reduce the number of stats? The system should stat out every aspect of the game to detailed, granular, (and I always favored skill-trees) statistics since it can keep track of and do all of the calculations that pen-and-paper players would get sick of doing it. Personally, I also advocate HIDING all of these stats from the player, but that''s not what many players want so I may never get my way. ;-)

-Desco-

ok, how about matching the display of the stats to a graphical display (well, we might not be there now, but we will there on models manipulation some day, why not start now? ), so, if you are advanced on your right arm, you would see a strong arm ... altough mind wouldnt have such a represensation ...

I think we discussed the hiding the stats before. IMO: The stats are part of the RPG experience. "Hah! I beat you with only 11 Right Arm Vigor!" However, a low Precision alternative might just be what the player wants. I know myself that RPGs where you can gain a point here and there, but the cap is up in the thousands (Star Ocean Second Story comes to mind), you sorta lose the whole stat importance. Great, Sword with 1500 ATK Power, what point is the amulet that gives you 15 ATK, it disappears in the randomness anyways. So, my conclusion is that having stats/skills rank from No talent (0) to full talent (Lv.9) is probably the way to go.

Back to the subject of stats, lets assume we''re discussing an MMORPG here. How aboud we get a skill tree, and the class structure just initilizes the player''s tree. A fighter would start with SWORD SKILL Lv.1, while a acolyte gets MAGIC SKILL Lv.1. And then branch from there, other skills are easier or harder to get based on whats already been acquired, and then Active Commands enable with the new Skills and skill levels.

I am not talking about forcing no stats display, but instead complementing it with a graphical display (more if it is a mmorpg, since numbers would get to the client anyway, and some boring hackers would waster their time just to get those numbers on their hacked version of the client ..., is amazing how much hackers like to loose their time ), then give the user the option to turn the numbers off, I would do it, since I would get more into the game that way ... (let the numbers to the machine ...).

Now limiting from 0 to 9 makes it easier to have the graphical display, and I also agree that it will make changes more important, it would be like: wowwwwwwwwwwww, I got 1 on strenght !!!! (imagine that you actually can graphically see the difference )

no stats is important. without stats, newer player have problem in keep his character balanced.