Level Up (A5E) A5e is Backwards Compatible with O5e. What if it wasn’t?

[Morrus]

True. But you guys were trying to keep everything compatible and at least outwardly similar.

Ah, similar and compatible are two different things!

 

[Faolyn]

Ah, similar and compatible are two different things!

Oh, yeah, definitely. You guys managed to do both. Your least similar classes are the ranger (no spells) warlock (spell points), but they are otherwise fully compatible with the o5e versions. I can use the o5e archetypes with them, if I wanted to. My "wish list" bard, though, would be very dissimilar and probably wouldn't be compatible. Don't get me wrong, though--I really like the LU bard.

 

[Jacob Vardy]

Link a creature's ability to speak to its Charisma rather than its Intelligence. All the other communication skills tend to be associated with CHA rather than INT - intimidation, performance, persuasion, et cetera... And as far as i recall in both of the MM books creatures that can not speak have and INT of 4 or below.

Use Charisma to determine the number of languages known. Bump dogs, corvids, parrots, primates up to an INT of 7-8. And you could do interesting things with telepathic creatures. Like ghosts having a high CHA and low INT, being incredibly persuasive despite speaking gibberish. Or mind flayers being really unpersuasive because they are low CHA and while high INT.

 

[xiphumor]

Link a creature's ability to speak to its Charisma rather than its Intelligence. All the other communication skills tend to be associated with CHA rather than INT - intimidation, performance, persuasion, et cetera... And as far as i recall in both of the MM books creatures that can not speak have and INT of 4 or below.

Use Charisma to determine the number of languages known. Bump dogs, corvids, parrots, primates up to an INT of 7-8. And you could do interesting things with telepathic creatures. Like ghosts having a high CHA and low INT, being incredibly persuasive despite speaking gibberish. Or mind flayers being really unpersuasive because they are low CHA and while high INT.

This isn’t actually a rule, and there’s nothing stopping anyone from doing what you described with ghosts or mindflayers, but I disagree about the rest. First, real creatures give us a benchmark for what ability scores mean. Chimps are generally estimated to have toddler-level intelligence, which puts their “IQ” so to speak at 20-25. The average adult has an IQ of 100, and one standard deviation is about 15 points. This gives a solid sliding scale for expressing character intelligence.

10 (+0) = 100, average
9 (-1) = 80, slightly lower than expected
8 (-1) = 60, mild mental disability
7 (-) = 40, moderate mental disability
6 (-2) = 20, severe mental disability, chimp/toddler-like

Bumping up creatures like chimps and dolphins to 7-8 makes the gaps between scores that much higher, and doesn’t allow us to express the normal human range of intelligence very well. While I think some creatures should have different ability scores based on their real-life counterparts, I don’t think the standard should be changes this way.

Likewise, I disagree with CHA granting more languages known, both because it’s less true-to-life and because INT is already the weakest ability score, and we don’t need to be taking things away from it.