@Lotherio said in Attributes or No?:
My two cents of preference, I'm good with attributes + abilities/skills. I do like the preference to choose if needed whether strength is helping intimidation by breaking something or charisma by mad-dogging and talking.
My favorite things when WEG d6 came out was the 'you have every skill in this category at the base attribute level' which made a lot of sense. Instead of taking tons of skills, you bought the skills that where above and beyond your natural talent/inclination.
I prefer some weight towards the trained skill over natural talent and it was always odd to me (probably from my enjoyment of WEG d6), that in some systems, the 3-4 pips 'expert' in a skill could still be less than someone with more pips in the base attribute who has no training in said skill. It just doesn't quite jive in my mind; I still play those games and enjoy them the same, but as far as preference goes, I prefer attributes that contribute in some way to skills or abilities in some way and are not just a nice stat to help with like health or something.
This is one of the reasons the system I am working on works the way it does.
You essentially Roll [Skill] dice of [Attribute] value. Sure, the higher your attribute, the higher the die can go, but the higher your Skill, the higher your minimum is.
If I am rolling 1d12, I am a super talented person who is barely trained, and my range of success is anywhere between 1-12; but if I am rolling 3d4, I am nowhere near as talented as the former, but I am much more trained, so my actual range is 3-12. Same maximum, different minimum.
Of course, with just a LITTLE more training (+1 to the Skill) the extremely talented person suddenly has 2d12, which makes their range 2-24, which is insanely better than 3d4, even if the latter has a better minimum.
To me, that represents how in fiction, very talented people achieve very good results with little training, while people who have trained all their lives are perhaps not as potentially good, but are much more consistently proficient.
At least, it works for me.