As a run-of-the-mill Veeky Forums autist I've been looking at the homebrew system threads and thinking about existing systems...What purpose do attributes serve in a game design sense?
Context: D&D has Str/Dex/Con/Int/Wis/Cha; Exalted has Str/Dex/Sta Cha/Man/App Per/Int/Wit; Numenera has Str/Spd/Int; etc
In all systems having only one stat gate your ability to hit or not makes it automatically next to (if not actually) the most valuable stat. Even saying you make it more fairly distributed (say Str gates melee accuracy and Dex ranged, for instance) Attributes are almost never such that they can be part of someone's "build," you don't get to have fun with your attribute allocation usually, it seems, because your class demands specific priorities.
There are some off-class tropes that pop up now and again (high-Int fighter being the most famous) but the attitude of "this is what you have and you have to deal with it" seems like a sub-optimal way to design a system.
Numenera each class has a basic spread of stats with additional points to allocate on top of that, which I think redeems attributes a bit - your warrior will always have pretty good physical stats, it's up to you if you go hard on that or bring up Int to be the highest. Numenera's attribute system in general though is significantly different so it's hard to draw other comparisons.
tl;dr What's the purpose of attributes in TTRPGs, can we do without them via some other system (class-determined attributes?), is there a way to make them more fun and give people a chance to actually create their own "builds" etc?