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I get what you're saying, but my poll doesn't actually have a middle option. "Other" is explicitly removed from the ranking metric (Yes, Partially, Not Really, No). It's "None of the Above." But if you ever put together a poll with "rank the options - 1-5 stars)," you'll see a LOT of 3's.

5e characters also usually have high enough “low scores” that if a player puts a 10 in INT it’s hard to say, “Sorry Bob, someone with average intelligence wouldn’t think of that,” without the risk of insulting one of your friends.

And, Marketing 101: never provide an odd number of options on a scale of responses. Because most people are indecisive or want to be seen as reasonable and will pick the middle one. 🤔

That’s why there’s an “Other - please explain” option. 😈 But I’m equally cool with “Partially, please explain.” There’s only so much complexity you can build into a 2-line poll answer. 😜

As a point of interest, my fiancée, who didn’t vote in this poll, said that she tends to play characters much like herself, and finds it hard to do otherwise, so she specifically makes sure her character’s mental stats (at least nominally) reflect that. In other words, since she’s pretty smart...

grumble Typed it up and everything, and then it didn’t post. Just a sec.

Many people use “it’s just marketing” to dismiss something because they think it’s dirty, being locked in a mindset that the only “right way” to do game design is to operate from an “If you build it, they will come” mentality. So it comes off as incredibly dismissive of the parts of Shadowdark...

Prompted by another thread, I thought it would be interesting to take the temperature of the community on this one. Because I’m willing to bet there’s variation.

RPGs are “balanced” around 3 pillars of play: Combat, Exploration and Social. The theory is that you can make up for being less effective in combat by being more effective in the other parts of the game. If you let characters dump all their points into combat effectiveness, you need to be VERY...

My point is, if someone is ignoring everything but the mechanical impacts of having a 7 INT fighter by “roleplaying” a smart character, they’re meta-gaming. If you are roleplaying a low INT character as Sherlock Holmes, you’re not roleplaying, you’re acting. Stat emulation is part of...

If you want to keep picking pockets and dealing with locks and traps separate, “thievery” wouldn’t be a great choice. I like combining them, but not everyone does. In the 19th-century, it was lumped into the group of skills called “roguery.” Two other terms you might consider are “Sleight of...

I’ve honestly tried paring it down as much as possible, and I think my personal list (cribbed from Savage Worlds, but slightly modified) runs just under 2 dozen, including one for spellcasting and separate ones for shooting and fighting. Here it is: Academics Athletics* Bluff Common Knowledge*...

SWADE absorbs most of them with a single “Repair” skill, which might also be called “mechanics,” because it covers everything except electronics and software. Herbalism could be rolled into either “Science,” “Survival,” or “Occult,” depending on the setting. I’ll have to see what Savage...

Separately, I loathe wound systems that are frankensteined back into a functional adventuring system by healing magic. A 1 or 2 hp character is a dead man walking. Period. I don’t like doing that to my players.

As a system, the attraction of hit points is that they’re a combination of luck and fatigue that provides a little bit of plot armor for characters facing dangerous situations. If the pool is too small, we have a problem. If the pool is too big, combat either feels like a slog, or we crank up...

Doesn’t sound like it’s for me. I’d feel the need to take notes about whether this skill was due to speed, and this one was due to strength, and this one was due to training, and so the PC is all of the above. Or they’re inexplicably slow/weak when doing something else. It’s basically even...

My experience is that systems like this lend themselves to abuse unless the GM keeps copious notes. “You say it was all training Mr. Wayne? I see. How exactly did you, a normal human, train yourself to be able to bench press a truck?” 🤨

It's not just "marketing," and the presentation has a lot to do with it. Those "popular YouTube channels" promoted it because it clearly speaks to their aesthetic and how they actually play D&D-adjacent games. That's true of Professor Dungeon Master, Baron de Rop and Hank, all of whom share a...

Also: "Disguise Kit," "Forgery Kit,""Herbalism Kit," "Poisoner's Kit" and "Navigator's tools." Granted, PCs needing the ability to use one or two of these is sorta campaign-specific, but the rest all feel pretty relevant to adventuring. So again, the tool/skill divide makes no sense to me...

LOL. I was using the word "actual" sarcastically because it drives me crazy that WotC shoves a bunch of skills into tool proficiencies supposedly because they're things that are "less important" to adventurers. Except that the tool list also includes "Thieves' Tools," so I have no understanding...