Pendarin

I apologize in advance that I haven't been able to get through all 16 pages of the thread. I was looking at the character sheet screen shot--looks great, by the way--and this thought occurred to me. Why show the attribute #s at all, or, at least, why are they given such prominence? The attributes themselves are meaningless, aren't they? What actually affects the power of a PC is the effects applied by the modifiers calculated from the attributes. Meaning, I don't really give a poop that my Might is 13, but I do care that my Damage and Healing is 26% better than baseline. There might be something to be said of the "feel" of having attributes because they're so classic to RPG games, table-top or screen. But in such a modern gaming environment, I wonder if it wouldn't be better to render item descriptions, spell or other effect descriptions, and character sheet directly in terms of, for example, the Damage and Healing % improvement the effect causes versus the +# of Might it has. Let's say I have an item, Bob's Nosepick. Let's say it has -1 Int. And for the sake of argument and simplicity, let's say per 1 Int = 5% "Duration and Area of Effect". The item description, even if you didn't equip it, would not say: -1 Int but would instead say (and each player would see a different result here, depending on their other equipment/stats): 70% Duration and Area of Effect (-5%) (-1 Int) The goal here being that as you're browsing items, effects, and other things, you're seeing the direct translation of that item, effect, or whatever on your character's power, saving you the step of pulling out the calculator to see what's better than what.