Base Stats For a Monster Genre Game

[Ninja D!]

Alright, so I've been wanting to design a system for a monster genre (Pokemon, Digimon, Monster Rancher, ect) game. I want to have base stats and then other things be derived from there. First, here is what I wrote down as first notes when I started thinking about it :

Physical Endurance -- physically dealing with being overworked; taking physical damage; injuries; death from physical trauma
Mental Endurance -- stress; overtired; resist fear; taking psychic damage

Will -- (mental) willfulness; resist fear; resist compulsion
Agility -- (physical) physical reaction speed; dodging; starting a fight

Physical Power -- physical strength; dealing physical damage
Mental Power -- intelligence; cleverness; dealing psychic damage

For reference, Pokemon uses :

HP
Attack
Defense
Special Attack
Special Defense
Speed

And Monster Rancher uses :

Power
Intelligence
Defense
Skill (or Accuracy, in a couple of the games)
Speed
Life

Now I would like to go more general so it doesn't always have to be 100% about combat and I could include an adventuring aspect eventually. I had considered having baseline stats like 'Strength' and 'Intelligence' that can't be changed and have the above stats be derived from those somehow but I think it may be better to just have a cap to how high a stat can be raised for each monster, based upon their species with a small margin of randomness to it for to account for individuality.

Really, I'm just rolling ideas around at the moment. Feedback would be appreciated, as would entirely different ideas that I haven't thought of. Also, the system that I have in mind is fairly complex and I don't expect this to run as a normal tabletop game. I was thinking I would make it for IRC or play-by-post or possibly eventually a simple computer game. What I mean is, it would take too long to do this math live, but once I have playtested things to a point I'm happy with, I will be coding something to automate the process.

[sparkletwist]

I would recommend thinking through what kinds of tasks you want to have happen in the game and what kind of math will go behind the resolution of those tasks, and then choose your stats appropriately. Don't think too hard about the stats as such-- start with the math you're going to use, see what variables need to be plugged in, and what stats you need should grow from there.

I'm aware that you said you didn't want to make the game 100% about combat but I'll use combat as an example because it's fairly simple. Do you want hitting and damage to be connected (like d20 strength) or disconnected (like systems that use dexerity to hit and strength to determine damage)? Do you want hitting and evasion to be connected or disconnected, for that matter? Should all damage go directly to HP, or should there be a "soak" stat that mitigates some damage? And, relatedly, should HP be fixed, or determined by a stat? The answers to these questions determine your stats.

The stats you've already suggested lead me to believe you've gone with a combined attack/defense stat, a damage-dealing stat, and some sort of HP/soak stat, and the physical and mental spheres each have their own set of stats. This is a perfectly viable system, so, unless you don't like it, or your formulas don't work out to be balanced, you might be mostly done with combat. You could always go on to connect other skills to each of these stats and, for balance, ensure each one gets skills of equivalent usefulness, probably.

[Ninja D!]

I think I want to have attack based on a stat but modified by a skill or something along those lines. The same stat will apply to different things and the "skills" will basically be what you've trained your monster to do with their natural ability. That's part of why I was considering having natural stats that can't be changed and then running monsters regularly through the same drill will make them better at doing certain things.

As for the math, I wanted which monster attacks first in a fight to be based both on their agility or speed and their brainpower or coordination or whatever. That sort of thing. That's where I was looking at having sort of sub stats derived from the main stats. Things like an abstract turn order would also be influenced each round by who acted last, amount of stress their under, and any number of other variables.

As for HP, I was considering not having it in the normal sense. Whenever a monster takes damage, it would make a check against its toughness or something like that to determine if it would yield or not. The more driven or loyal the monster is, it might also be willing to push itself further in that way. Massive damage, however, could cause short term injuries in the battle that would make them more likely to give up, more long term injuries, or even kill the monster (you send a puppy in to fight a dragon, that puppy isn't going to walk out of the ring).

[Ninja D!]

Right now, I'm moving forward with these base attributes. I'll develop the system around them.

[Xeviat]

Those base attributes sound just fine. I, too, was looking at putting something like this together. Working for you would probably lead to something being done sooner.

Looking at your ideas for mechanics, it sounds like a simple d20, especially Mutants and Masterminds, would work very well as a baseline; it uses toughness checks for damage rather than hp, for instance.

Just please stick with 4th Generation+ mechanics for typed damage; in early generations, whether an attack was special or physical was based on its type, which lead to some strange things, where as newer generations had the nature of the attack determined by the attack itself. So a blast of fire would be special, but a fire bite or punch would be physical.