D&D 5E Ability score damage

[Blue]

One of the ideas with a useful concept and but an inelegant mechanic in earlier editions was ability score damage. Poison, spells or abilities that could, for example, make you weaker or dull your mind by reducing your strength or intelligence respectively. But havign to recalculate bonuses already baked into other calculations (skill rolls, to-hit & damage, etc.) was a colossal pain as well as slowing down play.

I was reading a house rules thread here and came across [MENTION=6912978]Yes[/MENTION]'s alternate exhaustion rule, which had a fairly elegant and quick solution on how to do this for the various abilities: Don't recalculate, just have an Impaired condition for each ability score and you take disadvantage on all checks, attack rolls and saves.

The biggest problem is that it doesn't adjust static bonuses. A wizard with an Impaired Intelligence will have penalties on Arcana checks and spell attack rolls, but their DC is still the same. A fighter might have penalties on to-hit, but still the same damage modifier. How would you get around that if you wanted to use this method of ability score damage, such as in monster or spell design?

 

[jgsugden]

Treat is like we treat disadvantage on passive perception: -5 penalty. A wizard with a DC of 18 for their spells would see it drop to 13.

 

[Yes]

Since you mentionned me (thank you for you kind words ^^), I would say: thinking about how to go the extra length to penalize a player on the things his class is most good at is a bit overkill. A Wizard with disadvantage on most of his attack rolls, intelligence checks and saves will already lose half of his power, if not more. I wouldn't go as far as to reduce his spell DC, because, who knows, maybe the creature they're up against next already has good saves against all his spells requiring a saving throw. Maybe the player doesn't even have any relevant saving throws spell regarding the situation. Most of those spells are already very situational. So, I'd just leave it.

Same thing for halving the damage of a strength impaired warrior. A warrior who doesn't hit doesn't do any damage. I feel like the damage reduction is already comprised in the condition.