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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5896536" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think whether this is cool, or just silly, is going to depend heavily on how the choice of stat, and the description by which it is incorporated, colours not just the making of the check, but its resolution.For example, if you use your INT to pick the lock (by recalling your reading of the Guide to All Things Mechanical) or to attack (by lining up the perfect angle), how does that change the resolution of, and consequences of, success or failure? If the answer is "It doesn't", then the system is probably not going to work.One boring way to colour resolution is just to change DCs - I know from experience, for example, that doing mechanical work with little or no manual skills, and only an intellectual grasp of the matter, isn't as effective as having someone do it who is deft and practiced. But this just opens the door to mathematical optimisation once again, which (I thought) is something that we're trying to downplay in favour of engagement with the fiction.Does lining up a shot using geometric principles take more time? Work better with a crossbow than a bow (because you don't need to use your own strength to hold a crossbow taut)? Make it impossible to hit a moving target (because the geometry keeps changing, and tracking a moving target requires hand-eye co-ordination which is DEX, not INT)?This is roughly how I try to do it in 4e, but the "edge" tends to be more fictional than mechanical (because of how the DC setting rules work) - for example, if you want the soldiers in the border fort to come on board with your madcap scheme, you need to send the fighter and not the sorcerer to talk to them, because only the fighter understands fighter-y things and can impress the soldiers with his/her grasp of them.Or maybe its lower DC Diplomacy for the fighter, higher DC Bluff for the sorcerer - and the consequences of failure are therefore signficantly different: if the fighter fails then the soldiers are sceptical that it can be done; if the sorcerer fails then the soldiers are angry at being made fools of.Anyway, there are certainly multiple viable paths, I think. But the designers will have to put more effort than any previous edition of D&D has done into explaining how the mechanics are meant to be used, and exactly how the processes of framing the circumstances of the check, permitting the check and then resolving its consequences are all to be undertaken.</blockquote>

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