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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mondobone" data-source="post: 6770778" data-attributes="member: 6805319">Intelligence previously governed the number of skills you had, which was comparatively hugely important.  Now a fighter has 4 skills.  Same as every other class except Rogue and Bard, who have one or two extra (or a total of like 11 if you're a half elf Lore bard, but that's an outlier).  That was its primary use, and it was a great use, because it really showcased the difference between high and low int without weird "Well your brilliant plan doesn't actually work." checks.  A low int fighter couldn't do hardly anything but hit people, which was absolutely iconic.  An average to above average fighter, though, had a nice smattering of skills that they could act with, which was also pretty telling and made for some smooth roleplaying.  Now, an intelligent fighter, instead of being able to show off all the things it can do, has like...a +1 to recall random knowledge?Now it has saves and knowledge checks (and roleplaying), which is something it had before, and something every other stat also has.  You now have to cover with roleplaying something that came naturally before.  Instead of one's intelligence being clear and represented by their abilities, you literally have to act like the stat is relevant to the situation.  It has "nothing" relative to other stats, which actually have significant gameplay effects on top of roleplaying and saves and checks.I realize that charisma and wisdom are in a similar place when we're talking about fighters, but those stats also apply to more classes as primaries.  Wisdom is used by clerics, rangers, and druids.  Charisma is used by paladins, bards, and sorcerers.  Intelligence is used by wizards.  That's it.And the whole bit on 3.5 was just me saying that we don't have to keep something around because it's been here for 40 years.  Hyperbole was perfectly reasonable in that case, as the conversation didn't rely on specifics.I think in most cases assigning stats to maximize your PCs overlaps with supporting your character theme perfectly.  The 15/8 array isn't the same as an 18/6 from 3.5.  Things were flattened, on purpose, and that means that 15/8 is actually fairly average for a specialist adventurer. If we're still talking fighter, they have pretty good, though far from legendary physical stats, and average middling mental stats with no particular negatives (or if you want to consider 10 average rather than 8, only very minor penalties due to their focus). I can imagine 14/10 if you wanted to be less min/maxed, but that's obviously not actually a huge shift from 15/8 to begin with and still illustrates my point just fine.Now, in some cases, like the fighter or wizard, your stats are actually specific enough that even if you were optimizing you'd probably have some spare points to toss at your less important stats, but if you move into any of the hybrid classes that becomes less of an option.  They tried to cut down on the MADness of paladins, for example, but because they also reduced the number of attribute points you can get to begin with, even the 15/8 array might leave you feeling fatigued and drained.  So even when an intelligent fighter is reasonable, trying to put points into intelligence on a paladin or ranger is going to be especially crippling to anyone who isn't a pure roleplayer (at which point you could find better games than D&D to play with).In short, though, even cases where 15/8 isn't what you go with, you probably don't land too far from it.As to the second point, I'm not really sure what you're talking about.  Dumping your off stats in 5e doesn't hurt basically at all, ever.  The difference between a fighter with 8 int and a fighter who really splurges for 14 int is a 3 point shift on a d20 for rolls that may come up rarely or not at all.  Even if we factor in some life threatening saving throws, you can't do much.  Bumping your int up to 14 might help on a specific saving throw, pushing you just over a threshold, but if you went that route, your wisdom and charisma saves would still be really low, and if you tried to distribute things evenly, then we're back to only being at a single point, making them still rather weak.  Your primary statistics, however, are very different by comparison.  Because numbers in 3.5 were so high, going from 18 strength to 16, or even 14, ultimately wasn't especially crippling.  When you're level 20 and you have a to hit bonus in the range of +40 or something, the +1 or 2 from character creation just isn't very applicable.  In that scenario, saying "Hey, I bump my int up to 12 or 14 because it's cheap." is very reasonable, especially since it provided more rewards back then.  In 5e, on the other hand, the absolute maximum bonus to hit you can get is, I think, +14, and that's with your appropriate stat maxed out at 20, which now requires two feats, minimum.  With off stats being less useful and primary stats being hard to come by, it really incentivizes min/maxing in a way that even roleplayers would be like "Yeah, my character's not all that intelligent."  I'm not sure how you can take away from this that the opposite is true.</blockquote>

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