Combining the two;

You, our dagger wielding friend find yourself upon a battlefield, trusty beloved dagger in hand and opponent bearing down upon you. Alas, the unthinkable. The opponent lands a forceful blow and your beloved dagger falls from hand and of reach. Your opponent approaches, seeking to deal the final blow and end your assistance. You look about your person and notice that whilst your dagger is out of reach and would require you to scramble, there is a mace well within reach. Do you chance the scramble for trusty dagger, or take up mace in hope to deal telling blow?

You grab the mace. It "feels strange" in your hands. Strange in a good way. Maybe lighter than other maces you have held and it almost seems to have a glow about it. "This must be something good", you find yourself thinking.

You swing the mace up in time to block what should have been the final blow. There's an explosion of sparks. Scrambling to your feet you find your opponent standing paralyzed stiff like as a marble statue. A swing of the mace caves-in the left side of his helm so that it meets the right side...

The dagger that has been at your side for so long is placed in your backpack. Maybe you can find a place to store it well at home...

[/quote]

I don't think you understand one thing -- AD&D had to use explicit attributes to cover up for things that could not be shown on a character. You couldn't simply let the machine deal with some of the statistical stuff, you had to make it explicit because there was no other way. So you'd end up with a charisma attribute that would multiply with a diceroll to find out if you were a fast enough talker to talk your way past a Whiterun guard. His attribute -your attribute, plus a diceroll and you find out if you got past the guard. But that doesn't make sense when you're doing the same thing on the computer. You have that chance to show rather than tell. Your program is probably doing all of the dicerolling and status-keeping to decide whether or not you can fast-talk the guard, but what you see is a CONVERSATION, perhaps even one with a few options (each with a hidden success/failure multiplier) that allows the player to engage in the act of role-playing a conversation rather than throwing dice and imagining that you've just fast-talked a guard. You could say the same of lockpicking -- if done properly, the skill of the PC should make the act of lockpicking easier or harder, but instead of making it obvious that you're rolling a die (even in a computer system) you make the player interact with a lock. The status is still there, it's just not something you can look up in the system to say "My guy has an agilty of 50", you have to observe how skilled he is in the environment. If you can't pick the lock, you lack the stats to do so. If you can't fast-talk a guard, you lack the stats to do so.

But the thing about those obvious stat checks is that they take you directly out of the character. When you can look up the charisma quotient, what it does is remind you that you're playing a game, not playing a role. When the animation shows you hitting a monster, but the diceroll says you miss, and thus you miss, it reminds you right there that you aren't playing the character, you're playing the game. Metagaming is an old Akaviri term for "not being in the game world" -- if you're thinking about how to make the machine give you the status to have uberpowers, you aren't playing the game, you're playing the internal spreadsheet. Excel is a boring game.

I never ment to suggest to follow all the rules to the letter but the spirt of the thing. ANYWAY, I'm not sure what you mean by your charisma comment. (IF YOU DON'T BREAK UP YOUR BLOCK STYLE PARAGRAPHS I CAN'T READ PAST A COUPLE OF SENTENCES, eyesite).

Charima isn't a measure of your appearence but your influence, which has been weakly replaced by the speech skill, (with b/s price drop perks).

In your last paragraph, why are you talking about dice rolls? Random events and percentaged odds can be performed by the puter. I really don't see what your getting at.

Typically people who enjoy real RPG's, are above average in intelligence and creativity, so if your in this catagory, then your damn well assuming I'm not. Don't be so fundamental. I'm pecking away with a PS3 controller, and hate typing even if I wasn't.