D&D 5E D&D Next playtest post mortem by Mike Mearls and Rodney Thompson. From seven years ago.

[Charlaquin]

Think about this for a second. The world's strongest man, according to D&D, should be an excellent dart player. After all, thrown weapons use Strength, not Dexterity.

Thrown melee weapons use the same ability as they would when used in melee, which means strength if it lacks the finesse property, or strength or dexterity if it does have the finesse property. The game has only one ranged weapon with the thrown property, the dart, and it has finesse as well, so it can also be used with strength. However, the D&D dart is more like a fletched javelin than a dart board dart. I think the latter would probably not really qualify as a weapon - maybe ammunition for a blowgun at best. That said, I think this argument makes a good case for such darts not having the finesse property if they were a weapon.

I agree with you that the believability argument is weak. But the idea that thrown weapons always use strength in 5e is a misconception.

 

[Minigiant]

This thread has taken a serious tangent...
Charisma, Wisdom, or Intelligence fighters. We have subclasses that accomplish this with some hefty caveats, Hexblade being the most notable for Charisma. So it already can be done in 5E, but typically it is to allow a spellcaster to be at least somewhat proficient in physical combat. So you have Pact of the Blade/Hexblade or Bladesong to enable Intelligence. These ability swaps come with some penalties. Only certain weapon types are allowed or the swap is only for a limited amount of time or times per day. The problem is not switching the attribute, but all the junk that goes along with it. Dexterity didn't become the god-stat out of nowhere. There are a lot of knock-on effects that come with consolidating stats for classes. Saving throws, armor class, and skills all have a say in what attributes are favored.
My preference for a charismatic fighter or intelligent strategist would be adding a kicker to a regular fighter. The ability to add charisma to damage one attack per round like a minor sneak attack. Additional maneuvers to gain advantage or position enemies to result in a multi-round setup for a big payoff. Make the mental stat add-on not the root of power.

The tangent is based on the idea that the postmortem and surveys said that people wanted combat simplicity and one of the designer's goals was not to design with their own personal biases.

However the designers allowed the casters to both be combat complex and have Ability score combat flexibility.
Whereas warriors and rogues were made combat simple and little has been done to bring flexibility to martial ability scores.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The tangent is based on the idea that the postmortem and surveys said that people wanted combat simplicity and one of the designer's goals was not to design with their own personal biases.

However the designers allowed the casters to both be combat complex and have Ability score combat flexibility.
Whereas warriors and rogues were made combat simple and little has been done to bring flexibility to martial ability scores.

Indeed, it seems that the whole game was built backwards, if that was supposed to be the goal.

The two rock-bottom simple combat options, Berserker Barbarian and Champion Fighter, are....poor, shall we say. The former pays dearly to use its fundamental feature and doesn't really get anything to compensate for that. The latter critically (heh) depends on getting lots and lots of combat rounds per day--as in, as close to the maximum stated amount as possible--which doesn't happen in real life.

Meanwhile, all other non-spellcasting classes are relatively complex in combat, while having literally almost nothing whatsoever to do out of combat other than "petition the DM and pray for a favorable ruling" and "check equipment list." So if you don't want to be a spellcaster, you choices are "something that doesn't keep up in combat and has no options out of combat" or "something that's finicky in combat and has no options out of combat."

Alternatively, you can be a spellcaster! ...where there's literally only one option that is somewhat low-complexity while in an actual combat (Warlock). Everything else rides pretty high on the combat complexity scale, other than maybe Paladin. Now, these options can totally do all sorts of stuff in the world outside of combat, in fact they're practically overloaded with tools for addressing that stuff if it catches their fancy.

So...you can be a spellcaster and be somewhere between slightly and severely complicated in combat, and actually feature-rich and complex outside of combat...or you can be a non-spellcaster and be somewhere between dirt-simple and low-performance or moderately effective but moderately complex in combat, and almost totally feature-deficient outside of combat unless you use spells (looking at you, Totem Barbarian and Eldritch Knight.)

It's like they heard the lesson, and articulated it, and then chucked it out the window and did what they wanted to do anyway.

(And, because the odds are literally 100% that someone will say something about this: Skills don't count. Everyone gets skills. That's not a feature provided by the Fighter class. It just straight-up isn't, and I guarantee you won't convince me otherwise. Way too many people have tried, none have succeeded.)

 

[Minigiant]

(And, because the odds are literally 100% that someone will say something about this: Skills don't count. Everyone gets skills. That's not a feature provided by the Fighter class. It just straight-up isn't, and I guarantee you won't convince me otherwise. Way too many people have tried, none have succeeded.)

Especially if you look at the other thread popular right now.

People are calling for checks with DCs so high, only people with expertise and max stats can regularly make it.

A good bodybuilder making a difficult check 35% of the time doesn't match with the idea of a simple system. Maybe the ranger autosucceding at 10 things in their favorite terrain was the goal?

 

[Sulicius]

To the discussion on strength and weight, I don’t think any of this adds to the game.

D&D 5e isn’t designed to keep track of much more than carrying capacity, and even that is an abstraction that I can’t imagine most tables make use of.

D&D is an abstraction. It is not a good simulation of reality. Most efforts to make D&D more real will bog down the game and take away from the fantasy.

HP, spell slots, dice rolls and even character sheets are all things we agree to use to give some parameters to what we can and cannot do in the game, or how successful we are at them.

The designers appear to have built the game this way, which means that it was their design goal to keep things simple. They had a hard “wall” of simplicity that very few mechanics were able to pass by, as stated in the talks.

Why then focus on trying to figure out how strength works? Is a spider with STR1 1/10th as strong as a villager? Don’t do the math and just play the game. It’s more fun.

 

[Iosue]

I think there's something of a moving goalposts effect here as far as the intelligence or charisma based fighter. I mean, the question isn't about size per se. Yes, there are a lot of highly-skilled, yet physically small fighters. Those fighters all uniformly extremely physical fit, and stronger than us Normal Humans. Their ability to defeat larger, even more physically strong opponents would be reflected in D&D by their level, not their ability scores.

Even in the case of RDJ's Sherlock Holmes, he defeats his boxing opponent by being quicker than him, on top of his own physically impressive attributes (he breaks ribs with his punches). So I don't quite buy that type of character can't be made in D&D. (RDJ's Sherlock Holmes is definitely a Rogue with the Tavern Brawler feat and possibly a level in Fighter.)

All that said, the People's Elbow is 100% a Charisma-based attack.

 

[MockingBird]

On the whole strong person vs the intelligent person. From my personal experience in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I was 120 lbs and fairly decent (won some tournaments in my weight division). Techniques and fight IQ will only get you so far when matched against a less experienced stronger heavy opponent. Sometimes muscle trumps technique and IQ as aggravating as that is.

 

[Oofta]

I'm not even talking about swapping Int for another ability score. But making Intelligence useful to a warrior at all.

But some people are talking about swapping any ability they want in for strength. That's why it's difficult to have these discussions. On the other hand, intelligence can be useful to a fighter based on skill proficiencies.

If you want it to be useful in combat I could see it adding some bonus, but then you get balance and complexity issues. Not a bad idea I'm just not sure what it would look like. Seems like you'd need a whole set of strength (or dex?) + int or wis or cha modifications. How far does it need to go and which classes would get the benefits? Go back to having feats that require a minimum X [ability score] that primarily benefits martial characters?

 

[Gammadoodler]

To the discussion on strength and weight, I don’t think any of this adds to the game.

D&D 5e isn’t designed to keep track of much more than carrying capacity, and even that is an abstraction that I can’t imagine most tables make use of.

D&D is an abstraction. It is not a good simulation of reality. Most efforts to make D&D more real will bog down the game and take away from the fantasy.

HP, spell slots, dice rolls and even character sheets are all things we agree to use to give some parameters to what we can and cannot do in the game, or how successful we are at them.

The designers appear to have built the game this way, which means that it was their design goal to keep things simple. They had a hard “wall” of simplicity that very few mechanics were able to pass by, as stated in the talks.

Why then focus on trying to figure out how strength works? Is a spider with STR1 1/10th as strong as a villager? Don’t do the math and just play the game. It’s more fun.

What is our rubric for "adding to the game"?

I ask because things like Programmed Illusion, Leomund's Secret Chest, and Wall of (pick out of a list of a million materials..if you don't see it yet, we're working on it) spells all exist in this strange mishmash of near uselessness and/or redundance in the designers' "simple" game.

The reason folks do the math, is because the math has been provided and articulated and often this math is weaponized against the characters for whom the math is most relevant.

And heres the thing..

The designers did not need to provide the math

As you said, there is basically zero use case for it. But if it's going to be there, it may as well make sense.

 

[Gammadoodler]

On the whole strong person vs the intelligent person. From my personal experience in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I was 120 lbs and fairly decent (won some tournaments in my weight division). Techniques and fight IQ will only get you so far when matched against a less experienced stronger heavy opponent. Sometimes muscle trumps technique and IQ as aggravating as that is.

Sure. Sometimes that's how it is, and sometimes it isn't. Sounds like a d20 roll to me.