I'm sorry, I didn't realize I had stepped into bizarro world where people liked having irrelevant numbers cluttering things up. Do you people also collect belly button lint?
Lemme grab a bunch of obvious should not exist stats and explain this to you apparently very dense people:
Strength/Dexterity/Attack/Defense/Dodge/Accuracy
Intelligence/Spell Mastery
Constitution/Hit Points
Let's start with the basic fundamental concept that is being missed with all of these. When you are using a hidden function with multiple inputs to determine some actual value used by the engine, and only letting the player increase the value of one of the raw inputs, you are doing something very dumb, not something very clever. That's called needless abstraction. It violates the most critical rule of gaming: do not tell player dumb lies.
Constitution means hit points. It's the raw input, hit points are the output. Being able to modify both is dumb. Being able to access both is dumb. Maybe constitution is also used as a save check in a few random spells, and knowing what kind of spaghetti design this series is famous for it's probably also used in a few other completely unrelated things. That's not interesting or creative, that's needless microscoping and messy design. You have mundane armor, you have magical armor. Encapsulate and be done.
Intelligence and Spell Mastery? Same freaking thing. Spell mastery is the better name because it explains what the thing does, but you are still better off gating spells by level up point assignment than by a raw input that's been pressed into too many tasks. Neither should exist. But if one has to exist, spell mastery is the better one.
Strength, Dexterity, Attack, Defense, Dodge. These are all different ways of saying two things: attack and defense, how much can I hurt something, and how much can I avoid being hurt. Strength and dexterity are obviously bad (see Con and Hit points above). Defense and dodge are also silly, but for a slightly different reason. You've already got an accuracy stat, lord knows why but you do.* In which case, dodge and accuracy are redundant stats. Either everything has bad accuracy and dodge is mostly irrelevant (bad bad bad terrible way of doing things), or everything has perfect accuracy and dodge is what reduces it (which is great with a clicky skill system, but not so much with a +1 skill system where it can be stacked until stupid). In which case you don't need accuracy because the default state of all units is hitting.
So of ten things, I see a use for five: hit points, spell mastery, attack, defense, dodge.
If I was actually in charge, I'd reduce it to three (attack, defense, hit points), two of which would be entirely dependent on gear, and determine the rest by a Diablo style skill system. Well, minus all the irrelevant +3% increase shit which was always dumb, but the basic idea of "this is an active skill that does X" and "this is a passive skill that does Y" and "pick one thing that looks neat on level up" was always good so plus all that. So instead of a dodge skill, you'd press a button on your unit and for the next two turns it'd avoid half of all incoming attacks or some such. Active is interesting, passive is not. One requires the player to think, the other just requires the player to stack bonus gear.
Which gets me round to my final point. Needless numbers and loads of silly gear are not the hallmarks of a great game. They aren't what makes a game intelligent. They don't require an intelligent player. They just require a player capable of putting up with boredom long enough to accumulate just enough gear to put their character in question over the edge beyond which other units are simply not capable of hitting/touching/hurting it. And as any statistician will tell you, a simpler formula with only significant variables is a far more elegant, useful and predictive tool than a kitchen sink formula with every possible input under the sun.
*You should never waste player time by having them miss randomly. Missing because they personally didn't aim well with their mouse? Awesome. Missing because the enemy did something to prevent/dodge/avoid the hit? Awesome! Missing because the RNG hates you? Frustrating beyond belief, because it means a wasted animation and usually around six seconds of time. That doesn't seem like much, until you realize that ten misses is a minute, and a hundred misses is ten minutes. How much of your life do you want to spend waiting on random chance miss animations, hmm? More generally, failure conditions where the player can fail simply because Computer Say No are dumb.
