Alright, now that I've spoiled all your hopes and dreams by making this thread with nothing in it, it's time to get down to the actual details.
Character creation is always the place I'm inclined to start in any project, because basically everything else in a game is nothing more than arbitrating the interactions between the elements of the characters involved.
For starters of course, we keep the WoW attributes: Strength, Stamina, Agility, Intellect, Spirit. I'll break these down in a second as to what they describe both in and out of combat and what skills fall under them, but I want to stop for a moment and consider ahead of time one of the key parts of WoW's gameplay: Loot.
In WoW, we have stats that are just near arbitrary numbers of a potentially infinite range, and formulas that then take those numbers and derive substats from them like attack power, critical chance, hitpoints, etc. Most gear then adds to these stats, thus subsequently raising an derived values (some gear also adds directly to the derived values, but we'll ignore those for the sake of simplicity, as I intend for few of these to remain).
But in D6, we have a bit of a problem with doing this, because while it is true that D6 stats can also become infinitely large, there are practical limits to how big those dice pools can get before it becomes potentially annoying and slows down gameplay. Rolling 20-30D every time you have to make a melee attack or cast a spell could get old fast. Which means gear bonuses would have to be pretty much around +1d or 2d tops, and even then, a full set of magic stuff could add up to a hell of a lot depending on how many gear types we keep.
So making gear that adds die code directly has very practical limits on how much the gear can improve over time, and getting newer, better gear is one of the key parts of a game intended to emulate some of the WoW experience. While I would obviously like to tone things down a bit to allow for an expanded focus on non-combat gameplay in the Warcraft universe, I'm not comfortable consigning gear to the status of marginal bonuses.
So we have to trick the system here. We need a way to add to the stats, without adding to the stats, as it were. So we have two options here: We take stat bonuses from gear as a flat add to all rolls, separate but added to the die code of a stat. So a piece of gear that had, say, +4 Strength, it just means add 4 to any Strength rolls. But this only works if we use the standard D6 rolling method of adding up dice plus pips for a total, and this bumps up against one of my other intents: simplifying combat and damage numbers.
See, I intend to keep hit points, it wouldn't be WoW without them, but what I want to avoid is excessive escalation of the numbers, which is actually one of my pet peeves even within the original game, but also for practical reasons of reducing the amount of necessary math in play.
So we turn the system on it's head a bit, and use Legend-style die rolls, looking for successes, but then we count those successes as damage against a hit point total. We keep the usual combat system mostly as is, we just up the number of hits it takes to eliminate a player a bit. We keep the actual numbers down at a lower point, can get away without escalating hitpoints, the math of the roll itself is quicker, and so forth. But while we could still keep the previously considered approach of flat bonuses to stat rolls and just make them bonus successes, unless we reign them in just as much as we would if we were adding die codes, we quickly wind up with a system where the actual die roll part of things matters so little as to be pointless.
And then I hit upon another possibility, and it borrows, oddly enough, from a concept I didn't actually like in the game: "Ratings". I mentioned above, but basically how these work is as an additional seperation layer between the actual end effect desired, and the numbers that effect is derived from. How it works is much like stats themselves, an arbitrary number, but one that is then put through a simple formula to get the effect in play. For example, my lvl 80 Death Knight has a critical strike rating stat affected by both gear and base stats, and for every ~46 points of that stat, his chance to get a critical strike goes up 1%.
This all sounds terribly convoluted, and the way it's implemented in game, it really is, but in concept it's not actually that much different than D&D's stat vs. actual bonus set up. The only difference in the original calculation is that interim values between the mark still have an effect, so if I only have 23 rating from a piece of gear or something, I still get 0.5% to my chance to crit, where as in D&D, if I have an odd number in my stat, it's mostly worthless until I get that next point and my bonus actually increases.
So we borrow this idea, but bringing it back closer to the D&D mold from whence it came. We flip around our usual assumptions of the system, and we make the die code the derived value, and the base stat a number, that at a given threshold adds another die to the die code, the part we actually roll when we want to do stuff. I had thought of even basing the progression here directly on the amount of character points needed to move from one die to the next, but then realized such a thing would be needlessly complicated in the context of a game where these derivations will have to be performed every time someone finds a new piece of gear, and while a table lookup would speed it up a bit, I think setting the mark for each new code at a simple arbitrary point, say 3 just for argument's sake, would be much easier.
however, after considering this solution, and generally liking it for the room it gives one to play around with gear numbers and stat bonuses, it also leaves me to reconsider my supposedly clever notion about using the Legend mechanic, because going with Classic dice + pips gives me a wider range of derived values without too harshly increasing the effect between them, and that means I can set the threshhold for each new die code lower, thus reducing the amount of "empty points" that don't result in an increase in actual capability. One of my goals here in adapting the game is that I would like to cut as many of these "empty points" situations out of the game as possible, there will be no "dead levels" for instance, and no burning 5 points on a talent before it actually generates enough of an effect to be worth it.
So, maybe my clever idea wasn't so clever after all, and we're better putting up with a little extra addition, and sticking with Classic. It will also cut down on what I was starting to foresee as some potentially inconsistent die usages later (rolling for initial HP, for example).
So, wrapping this up to an end result, let's write some draft rules for stats:
There are five stats in WoWD6:
Strength: Your character's raw physical strength, affects physical skills that rely on brute force, melee damage and ability with heavy melee weapons
Stamina: Your character's endurance and physical energy, affects you hit points and regeneration thereof, ability to resist diseases and other physical effects, and physical skills that rely on one's ability to perform for long periods or resist pain
Agility: Your character's coordination and physical dexterity, affects physical skills based on gross motor skills, skill and damage with ranged and light melee weapons
Intellect: Your characters reasoning and analytical skills and force of mind, affects mental skills that rely on knowledge and logic, damage and skill with arcane spells, most trade skills
Spirit: Your character's innate mental will and charisma, affects social skills and skills involving mental willpower, base mana points and regeneration thereof, healing spell effect
To generate a character's initial stats, distribute 100 points, with no stat being lower than 12, or higher than 30. No stat may ever go lower than 3.
In addition, each stat has a die code. For every 3 points in a stat, the die code goes up one pip, starting from 1D. A handy reference table for this follows (which I really hope the forum doesn't break):
Base Stat Die Code
3-5 1D
6-8 1D+1
9-11 1D+2
12-14 2D
15-17 2D+1
18-20 2D+2
21-23 3D
24-26 3D+1
27-29 3D+2
30-32 4D
33-35 4D+1
36-38 4D+2
39-41 5D
42-44 5D+1
45-47 5D+2
48-50 6D
51-53 6D+1
54-56 6D+2
57-59 7D
61-62 7D+1
63-65 7D+2