Alternate Arkham Horror-type stat system?

I hat sliders In AH. Take a look at Eldritch Horror

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What are you actually looking for : Nb of stats? Any set between 2 to 9 stats could be OK. Here are some examples:

2: Body, Mind
3: Physical, Mental, Social
4: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Cunning,
5: See Eldritch
6: See Arkham

Just make sure that each stats are used in average the same number of times.

Are you looking for type of rolls?

There are basically roll vs a TN and versus another roll. The TN can be set by the difficulty of the obstacle or it can be roll vs your own skill.

Are you looking for a type of dice roll?

You need to determine how many variables will influence the dice system. Some system like roll 1D +X only allow the use of 1 variable to the system. But other system like Arkham which is Roll X D, Where Y dice are greater than Z, then you have 3 variables in the system.

Why not have a pool of energy (willpower or other) that refills once a while and that allows you to spend in order to get a reroll or increase your stats temporarily.

In a dungeon quest variant of mine, I made a nice twist with the determination token. In the original rules, each time you failed a roll, you got a determination token to try again on your next roll. In my variant, you kept those tokens and you could gain tokens as EXP for defeating monsters.

Now when you failed a roll, you could spend these tokens to increase your stat temprarily and succeed. But somettimes the roll is way too far ahead and it would cost too much points. So it' just better to fail your roll, get an extra point and try again later.

You could have a will power poll to increase your roll or your stat after the roll in order to pass the check. So players has to decide if they want to spend their points now or wait for later. Or does it worth it to spend a lot of points to pass this check. So there is a sort of evaluation of the consequences and management of resources.

Simple, Roll 1D20, below your stat to succeed. A typical D&D roll. In that case, the event does not inflence the roll. If you have a stat of 15, then you have 75% chance of success what ever the event. Still, D&D introduce modifiers as an event variable.

If stats are static with no power up options, then you need to give players choice elsewhere. So for example, a bit like in Elder Sign where they could chose their mission by evaluating which mission they think they could succeed.

But if they need to face random event, since they cannot chose their challenge, then they are stuck with the result of luck without any decisions possible.

I do suggest you let players have some decision, it's up to you to decide where those decisions will take place.

That works well in RPG, because you ask players to be creative and find an alternate solution to a problem that they excel better at.

But in a board game, if you offer multiple options against an obstacle, you get stuck with an obvious choice. If for example for a character:

Choice A requires you to roll 3 or less on 1 D 6
Choice B requires you to roll 5 or less on 1D6

Then the player will chose B all the time. Other players might chose differently if they have different stats.

One mechanics similar that I have again used in the Dungeon quest variant is that during a challenge, you roll 2 dice of different colors where the colors match 2 of your character stats.

You compare the rolls against your character stats, and each roll < stat is a success. Making it possible to roll between 0 an 2 success per roll.

Now the twist is that characters had 4 stats, and 2 of them are tested each time. But the probability to face a challenge where boths stats are bad are pretty limited. Most of the time, one of the challenged stat will be better than the other. Giving characters a chance to score a hit each roll.

So the character somehow has 2 ways to deal with it since he is challenged for 2 different attributes. And according to the stat configuration, some characters will be better and will rarely be defenseless. It's a neat mechanic I intend to reuse for all my adventure games.

Sounds good.

And Larianna. Yes indeed. There would have to be something else at to make using alternate skills "harder" other than a less probable die roll. like a resource cost

Your idea reminds me of the old version of dungeon quest. When a monster was encountered, you had the choice to:

Attack
Retreat
Wait and see

Each choice lead to different results according to the cards. But since there was multiple cards of the same events, you could not predict what was the best choice (since the outcome is not shown to the player)

So you could have the same event in 2 or 3 copies with a set of actions and a different outcome according to the action chosen. Draw the cards, ask what the player wants to do like in a "The reader is the hero book" and resolve the outcome.

I liked the plan a plan b version. They both seemed similar to me and like relevant contextualizations of my abstract idea to your particular game.