I think the trigger for designing my own system was reading through Lamentations of the Flame Princess and realizing that the attributes that you roll, actually never are used in the game. Their only purpose is to look up modifiers in a table and after that you simply use the modifiers.
This offended me in two ways. First, there are easier ways to just generate the modifiers such as rolling three fudge dice and add them together. Second, rolling under your attribute is a very clean mechanic, and before reading through the game I assumed you would want to do that.
But beyond how they are used, the attributes in by D&D doesn't make much sense to me. I decided on using four attributes, Physique (which includes strength and constitution), Dexterity, Wits (which includes intelligence, charisma and wisdom) and Willpower.
These forms a sort of a square with the attributes being divided on two axes: Phys and Dex being physical, and Wits and Will being mental, but also by Phys and Will being sort of brute force, pushing through, and Dex and Wits being more of finesse. Sort of like in Chronicles of Darkness, but simpler.
The mechanics for testing character (as opposed to player) skill will then be to roll under one of these four attributes on a d20. This can be used as saves (i.e. a second chance), or for situations where there just isn't any good way to reason it out.
The standard way to implement warring difficulties for this system would be to have various bonuses and/or penalties to your roll or stat. But I don't like that. It seems to get to finicky. To much math. Now some simple addition and subtraction isn't hard, but it is a tax on mental resources that I would prefer to spend elsewhere. Also, a +1 on a d20 roll is just to little to care about. I guess one counter argument is that I don't have to have a scale of 1 to 20, I could reduce it to 1 to 10, and have a +1 bonus mean twice as much.
And that is actually a good argument. I have to say, how to do rolls is a subject I'm not 100% about. It might change. But what I'm currently leaning towards is to use advantage and disadvantage. I hear this mechanic comes from D&D 5, but I haven't actually read those rules so they may or may not be the same as what I'm thinking about. What I mean is that with advantage you roll two dice and choice the best, with disadvantage you roll two dice, and the GM chooses the one that is worst for you. For me I would add that you could have double or even triple (dis)advantage as well. Although after that I think simply having actions auto succeed/fail is better. And of course a disadvantage and an advantage cancels each other out.
I think this system has a number of advantages. The bonuses and penalties are large enough that I don't have to think about how many points of bonus to give. It will practically always be just one. But it still allows for more incremental improvements of the character attributes. Another positive is that it forces me as a GM to tally up all the bonuses and penalties before the roll. (I think I have a tendency to just wing it afterwards, which makes me susceptible to anchoring effects.)
It has some negative points as well. The effect of an advantage becomes bigger the higher attributes you have. And vice versa with disadvantages. If someone reaches 20 in an attribute, they can do anything, no matter the difficulty. And if you have a bunch of effects giving advantage, and a bunch giving disadvantage, there is going to be some counting anyhow. It might also be confusing to have many dices be bad sometimes and good sometimes.
I think I will have to test it out to see how it works.
Another point where I want to question the D&D norm is on the mean value of the attributes. Rolling 3d6 creates values with an average of 10.5, straight on the middle of the range from 1 to 20. This has two effects. First an average character has 50% to succeed at an action of normal difficulty. That might intuitively seem correct, but it is really arbitrary. Also, if you ,like LotFP, never actually roll under the attribute, this point is void. The second effect is that there is just as much space devoted to being worse than average as to being better than average. This sounds really weird for a game about slowly gaining power and working yourself up in society. And in practice you see this. If you look at the rolls actually made in LotFP (saves and skills) you start of with less than 50% chance to succeed.
Actually this is a combination of two issues, both what should the average success chans for a skill roll be for the average citizen of the game world, and how powerful should starting player characters be. I think there is a tendency to view starting player characters as somewhat average for the world, as that is the the kind of beings you see most of the time, even if that is not intended by the game. I don't for example think Arneson imagined that every cleric in Blackmore could cause miracles to happen, it just so happen that player characters who are clerics are some rather exceptional clerics. And likewise, that player characters on average has strength 10.5 shouldn't be read as implying that the average human has strength 10.5. Or at least that isn't necessarily so.
So the average starting values will be less than 10. I'm thinking somewhere around 5-7. So take that value (perhaps 6?) and add a number (4?) of fudge dice, and you get a nice normal distribution of values stretching from 2 to 10. This will leave people plenty of space to raise the attributes without hitting the godlike levels of 20.
Also I will not have separate save or skill values. Four attributes is enough dammit.
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