D&D 5E [Homebrew] − Rethinking the Ability Scores

[Yaarel]

I like the number five ability scores. But at the moment, I am leaning toward four. Intelligence with its Knowledge skills seems stubbornly less helpful, for D&D mechanics. Better to merge it with another ability. Maybe the following.

• Charisma (Will, Empathy, Charm, Intimidation)
• Athletics (Reflex, Speed, Jump, Climb, Balance, Melee Weapons)
• Perception (Senses, Intuition, Knowledge, Deception, Cautious Precision, Sharpshooter Weapons)
• Size (Fortitude, Hit Points, Stamina, Long Reach, Heavy Equipment, Heavy Damage)

These four seem more balanced with each other.

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

I like the way that FFG's Star Wars gamkes did attributes.

Three groups, each with two attributes. The first attribute measures your raw power, the tangible resources you can bring to bear on a situation. The second measures your skill in manipulating the world around you.

Physical: Brawn, Agility.
Mental: Intellect, Cunning.
Social: Willpower, Cunning.

Brawn is your physical strength and resilience, your resistance to disease and fatigue and similar. It covers what D&D uses STR and CON for, as well as Hit Points. Melee weapons use Brawn.
Agility is your ability to manipulate physical objects in the world and your ability to manipulate your own body. It covers what D&D uses DEX for. Ranged weapons use Agility, as does driving and piloting.

Intellect is your raw mental power, your memory, your ability to store and recall information and to make long-term plans.
Cunning is your mental dexterity, deviousness, and is a measure of your experience. It covers making deductions and observations. Picking locks is a Cunning skill because a devious mind is more important than good manual dexterity.

Willpower is your social strength and toughness, your sense of self and identity, your centredness. It measures your ability to remain functioning despite stress and distraction, and your ability to resist peer pressure.
Presence is your external face, the mask you wear for the world. It measures your ability to read people and social situations, and your ability to manipulate those people and situations. Initiative is based on Cool, since who goes first is a social interaction.

As an aside, in D&D I could see using CHA for initiative instead of DEX, as a measure of how well you are reading all of the other combatants, as well as how well you can mask your own actions from them.

 

[Yaarel]

@Greenstone.Walker

I like the way FFG reduces the abilities, here down to three. But then dividing them back up to make six seems problematic.

D&D has been using six abilities for 5 editions, and almost that many decades. The six abilities have never worked. Ever. They have always been wildly unequal in value. And muddled. They need rethinking.

For example, FFG Intellect=D&D Intelligence: ‘raw mental power, your memory, your ability to store and recall information and to make long-term plans’. The problem is, this almost never happens in the game. When was the last time anyone rolled an Intelligence check to see if they could ‘make a plan’? It is a mechanically useless definition that has no place in gaming mechanics. Consider how often a person makes a Intelligence saves? Rare. And even these can be better explained using an ability other than Intelligence. Consider the ‘knowledge’ skills, being little more than asking the DM for a hint, which the DM might need to refuse to answer or be forced to divulge regardless of any roll. The D&D Intelligence ability is the opposite of intelligent gaming design.

Similarly, where Agility=Dexterity, it is both overpowered and confused. People who are good at shooting a crossbow lack correlation with people who can jump out of a Fireball explosion. People who can leap away are Athletic, with high athletics ratings. People who can sharpshoot a crossbow are Perceptive. In reallife science, the difference is between fine motor skills (cautious precision, relating to knitting) versus gross motor skills (body coordination, relating to gymnastics). Dexterity should never apply to dodge. Athletes dodge, not speed-typists.

 

[Yaarel]

Mulling the foursome abilities: Charisma, Athletics, Perception, and Size.

Perception (including sensory perceptiveness and cautious precision, as well as intellect and intuition) becomes responsible for sharpshooting. Where D&D Intelligence merges into Perception with Stealth and Sharpshooting, it becomes a comprehensive useful ability in gaming mechanics that happen often. At the same time, the overpowered D&D Dexterity is now gone, split between Athletics and Perception.

D&D uses Wisdom Perception and Intelligence Investigation redundantly. But now the single ability, Perception, covers everything.

D&D uses Dexterity Grappling and Strength Grappling redundantly. But now the single ability, Athletics covers everything.

Relatedly, D&D uses Dexterity finesse weapon and Strength melee weapon redundantly. But now the single ability, Athletics covers everything.

 

[Wulffolk]

Very interesting discussion, gentlemen. In skimming this thread I have seen many of my own concerns and ideas touched upon. I have done my own share of self-indulgent game design and wishful thinking throughout the decades.

In the end i have come to accept that there are only 4 paths:
1 - Accept D&D with all of it's flaws, ignore the shaky foundation that is built upon, and house-rule the hell out of it until you can look past the flaws and have fun with what is left. At least you can still benefit from D&D's name-recognition to gather a group, and will have new game content sporadically published.
2 - Play another system that more closely matches your preferences, but have to draw your players from a much smaller pool of die-hard players that share your niche interests.
3 - Write your own system, recruit players by convincing them of the merits of your system, and be 100% responsible for all the content that your game will ever see.
4 - Play D&D by the rules as written, which I find almost impossible to do.


Once you start down the path of re-writing the Ability scores, or Classes, or Hit Points and Armor Class, or the magic system, then you are no longer playing D&D. You lose all of the benefits that come from it's popularity, name-recognition, and published material. Still might be worth the effort, but it could also be a colossal time-sink with very little pay-off.

 

[Xeviat]

If you’re looking for things to still be D&D, I’d want to keep six ability scores but turning them into 3 pairs of Physical/Mental/Social would be really nice. This would have a double effect of getting rid of Constitution as a stand-alone score (no one wants a low Con, everyone wants a high Con, it’s a non-choice). I’d play it, but it would certainly turn people off.


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[Yaarel]

Physical
• Athletics (jump, climb, balance, reflex, speed, dodge, tumble, grapple, melee weapons)
≈ Strength, while agile
• Size (hit points, stamina, carrying capacity, long reach, heavy weapons)
≈ Constitution, while Tiny Pixie has low and Huge Ogre has high

Mental
• Perception (physical senses, rational intuition, investigation, knowledge, deception)
≈ Intelligence, while aware
• Precision (cautious sensitive motion, stealth, disabling trap, crafting, sharpshoot weapons)
≈ Dexterity, while methodical

Social
• Charisma (social skills, charm, intimidation, empathy, artistic beauty, psychic interaction)
≈ Charisma, while emotionally insightful
• Willpower (will save, mental resilience, soul, sense of self, psychic size)
≈ Wisdom, while mentally tough



Thoughts about the above experiment ...

The above hexad seems the closest possible to the D&D tradition while being about equally useful and minimizing overlapping redundancies.

I am happy with the Physical Athletics/Size and Mental Perception/Precision arrangement. It even seems possible to assign the combat bonuses to each of the four.

Physical
• Athletics: attack bonus to melee/thrown weapons
• Size: damage bonus to melee/thrown weapons

Mental
• Perception: attack bonus to sharpshooter/sneak weapons
• Precision: damage bonus to sharpshooter/sneak weapons



There are two Social abilities. Willpower is soul and mental size, and Charisma is mental interactivity. It is impossible to be charismatic without also being emotionally intelligent and sensitive, so Charisma necessarily includes empathy and emotional insight. This also helps toward making the two aspects about equally useful. Willpower gets all mental saves. Persuasion gets all social checks.

Note that Mental Perception gets the Deception checks to forge, disguise, and bluff because you have to know what you are talking about to create a convincing forgery or disguise, or illusion.

The fact that the attack bonus and damage bonus can split up into different abilities helps prevent any particular ability from becoming too overpowered.

It might make sense to make the two Social abilities responsible for all magic? In this sense, magic means being in an interactive personal relationship with the phenomena of the cosmos.

Charisma in the sense of psychic interactivity gets the attack bonus (or spell DC) for spells. Willpower in the sense of psychic weightiness gets the damage bonus (or spell effect boosts) for spells.

Social
• Charisma: bonus to spell attack/DC
• Willpower: bonus to spell damage/effect



That said, Illusion magic needs Perception (sensory detail) and Precision (crafting of exact duplicate). Similarly, other kinds of magic may benefit from the nonsocial abilities, even tho magic itself is Social.

 

[mellored]

IMO, I would just drop ability scores altogether.

Everyone get's half their proficiency modifier to all their rolls (attack, skill, saving throws). This scales everyone from +2 to +6.
Normal proficiency is replaced by double proficiency. (+4 to +12)
Expertise is replaced by triple proficiency. (+6 to +18)

Also, proficiency modifier to weapon damage (1d8+2 to 1d8+6), the DC's are 8+double proficiency (12 to 20), and each race get's a skill expertise in place of their +stat.

This still keeps everything in range, from +2 to +18 and simplifies the game a lot.

 

[Yaarel]

IMO, I would just drop ability scores altogether.

Everyone get's half their proficiency modifier to all their rolls (attack, skill, saving throws). This scales everyone from +2 to +6.
Normal proficiency is replaced by double proficiency. (+4 to +12)
Expertise is replaced by triple proficiency. (+6 to +18)

Also, proficiency modifier to weapon damage (1d8+2 to 1d8+6), the DC's are 8+double proficiency (12 to 20), and everyone get's an extra skill.

This still keeps everything in range, from +2 to +18 and simplifies the game a lot.

The reason why I like abilities is, they are a good mechanic to represent a *cluster* of skills that a person tends to be good at, even without training. In other words, giftedness, talent. Some people are just stronger than other people, even without athletic training, and so on. Genetic disposition, personality type, or so on.

In the context of D&D, abilities in the sense of inborn talent, can help the Nonhuman races *feel* different from each other, at least a little bit.

 

[mellored]

The reason why I like abilities is, they are a good mechanic to represent a *cluster* of skills that a person tends to be good at, even without training. In other words, giftedness, talent. Some people are just stronger than other people, even without athletic training, and so on. Genetic disposition, personality type, or so on.

In the context of D&D, abilities in the sense of inborn talent, can help the Nonhuman races *feel* different from each other, at least a little bit.

Clustering skills is fine. But that doesn't need to apply to attack rolls or spell DC's.

And non-human races still have things that make them feel different. Half-orcs still have brutal crits, wood elves still move faster, halflings are lucky, ect... Those make things "feel" a lot different more than +1 to hit.
And you can replace a +2 Str with athletics proficiency. Maybe even expertise...

Hmm... Yea, racial expertise makes sense. Replaces the +stats. All dwarves get endurance, wood elves get stealth, high elves get arcana, ect...