Quick-and-dirty "elemental" system

[Kindling]

This is a system I came up with for running a kind of quick-and-dirty, rules-light game, hopefully in any genre... The core stats correspond to the classical elements which is a purely aesthetic choice.

Earth represents endurance and constitution - a measure of the character's physical toughness, pain threshold, and the strength of their immune system

Air represents dexterity and knowledge - on the one hand their agility and basic manual dexterity, on the other the level of their learning and general knowledge

Fire represents strength and speed - essentially the combat stat, this is the other half of the character's physical capability not covered by Earth; the sprinter to Earth's marathon runner

Water represents courage and charisma - essentially a combination of the character's willpower and force of personality

The core, and only, mechanic is that in order to succeed in a task, the player rolls 2d6 and tries to roll equal to or less than their score in the relevant element. The DM decides a modifier based on the difficulty or ease of the task which is then added or subtracted from the elemental score they are using for the purposes of the task. Four or five in either direction is recommended as the maximum modifier, for extremely difficult or easy tasks.

For example Tim the Necromancer is trying to decipher an ancient tome. Air, as it measures Tim's knowledge as well as his dexterity, is the appropriate element for the task, and he has an Air score of 9. If he rolled a 9 or less, he would succeed at the task.
However, the DM decides that the tome is particularly hard to understand, as it is written in an arcane tongue and the ink has faded over the centuries, so he applies a -3 modifier to Tim's Air for the purposes of the task.
Tim now needs to roll a 6 or less on his 2d6 in order to successfully decipher the writings.

In character creation, the four elements start at a base score of 3, and are capped at 10. Each character has 20 point to spend on both the elements and on training. Elemental scores are purchased at a 1 for 1 price - as in one character creation point buys one point in any element.

Training can be in anything the character chooses, they simply have to name the skill-set (although such skill-sets should not be too broad) they then spend character creation points to purchase a level of training in that area from the following list

Novice - 2 points
Amateur - 3 points
Adept - 4 points
Professional - 5 points
Master - 9 points
Guru - 13 points

This training allow the character to add a certain positive bonus to the base elemental score they are using in a task if the task is covered by the skill-set they are trained in. The bonuses for the different levels of training are listed below

Novice +1
Amateur +2
Adept +3
Professional +4
Master +5
Guru +8

So, as another example, John the Barbarian is trying to behead a snake demon. Fire, as it measures both his strength and speed, is the element he will use. He has a Fire score of 8, so normally, DM difficulty modifier aside, he would have to roll an 8 or less. However, John has adept level training in melee combat, giving him a +3 bonus for tasks that relate to melee combat. This adds to John's Fire score of 8 meaning that he has to roll an 11 or less to succeed, difficulty modifier notwithstanding.

Character advancement as such, in terms of XP or similar, does not exist in this system, but characters can increase their training or train in new skill-sets by spending time in-game learning and practising. Below is the amount of time a character would have to spend intensively training to achieve each level of training in a skill set - obviously the training can be less intensive, and interspersed with other activities, it should just take longer relative to how much the focus on the training is reduced, as decided by the DM

Novice - 2 weeks
Amateur - 2 months
Adept - 6 months
Professional - 1 year
Master - 3 years
Guru - 10 years

So that's pretty much it... I know I haven't exactly laid it out beautifully, and it's hardly a fantastic system, but I thought it would work well as a rough-and-ready, rules-light system, maybe for quick-play scenarios and suchlike. Any feedback or criticism would be welcome, but mainly I just felt like sharing :)

[Llum]

The only thing that stuck out to me was how the different levels (Novice, Amateur, etc...) get more and more cost effective (better cost to bonus ratio) from Novice-->Professional but Master the ratio drops right back down again (to about what it was at Novice) and slowly goes up a tiny bit at Master again, but nowhere near where it was for Adept or Professional.

Basically what I'm saying is getting Master or Guru is a massive waste.

[Kindling]

Good point, but thinking about it I quite like that - it represents, in away, the flaws in over-specialisation... I'll ponder some more and maybe change it, maybe not.