complete revision of stats

[Derakon]

Vanilla has a very strong D&D influence throughout, and that extends to its stat system. This is nice and intuitive for people who are familiar with that system (which is a lot of people), and who thus know automatically that INT is the mage stat and WIS is the priest stat. I could easily imagine them being confused when they fire up a new mage and discover that they have practically no spellpoints, or a new priest and be unable to mumble their way through a prayer. So if we do end up revamping the stats, I also recommend that we rename them, to avoid invoking pre-existing connotations.

Also if we want to rework the stats, I would tend to favor transparency and simplicity of impact as much as possible. Make each stat do only one or two things, but make those things be important. Here's my suggestions for stats:

STR: prowess, carrying capacity
DEX: finesse, hit chance
CON: hitpoints (already the God-King of stats; no need to put more stuff here to make it more powerful)
INT: spell failure rate, number of learnable spells
WIS: mana pool, saving throw

Nuke CHA altogether. Don't even bother replacing it with anything. Stealth already works well as-is and making it a boostable stat would have significant game balance implications. CHA functionally has almost no impact on the game already; at worst you end up paying 6k more for stat potions from the BM for a bit. So we can just axe it, have a simpler system, and not worry about having to rebalance everything. Regarding the specific suggestions in this thread, IMO having CHA influence range is unintuitively weird, and applying status ailments to monsters is either completely debilitating or completely pointless with very little middle ground -- so you end up with a stat that is either vestigial or a gamebreaker. That sounds tricky to balance to me.

Everything else should derive from your class, race, level, and equipment. Trap detection/evasion? Class skill(s), rogues are better than everyone else. Devices? Class skill, mages are better at it than everyone else. We get the same desired result (certain classes being better at certain skills than others) while keeping our algorithms simple and transparent. Win-win.