All 18s, All The Time

[Flipguarder]

heh funny story... I made a half-elf bard and ended up thinking the only real gameplay problem with your idea is they get way too high skill checks, and their NADs scale too well.

Also I made a fun combo with MC wizard and paragon path to the spiral tower.

Took the half-elf feat to make the encounter power an atwill.
Took blade opportunity and heavy blade opporunist. Chose frigid blade from the swordmage.
Took combat virtuoso.

Voila! +2 to opportunity attacks in which my bard uses charisma and a longsword to cast frigid blade and lower the targets speed by 9.

 

[Asmor]

The other option, Asmor, is to throw all ability scores out the window and then adjust the rest of the game down 4. That might be somewhat more convoluted, though.

As you say, that would be far too much effort and would basically amount to the same effect. This way, you use the same monsters, the same tools, the same encounters, the same adventures... It's the same game, just with ability scores "virtually" removed.

 

[Rawhide]

Even ignoring roleplaying concerns, my group would find all-18s less fun for character design. One of the things a couple of my players lvoe to do is look for combinations of race/class/feat/weapon options that let them use the same one or stats for as many things as possible. Those are often very memorable characters, and I'd hate to lose that.

Also, my groups often do 1 18, then even out other stats as much as possible, or 3 18s and everything else in the toilet., this makes for characters that play differently for both roleplay and game mechanical reasons, and I'd hate to lose that too.

 

[77IM]

Here's a compromise between these two ideas:

I think everyone should start with 18s in every ability.

I usually allow players to pick their own stats for their characters and have told my players repeatedly that straight 18's would be fine.

Everybody gets 18s in their primary abilities (attack/damage), and 16s in their secondary abilities (other ones used by class powers or features), and can select any value they want for the rest of their abilities, up to a max of 16. Then apply racial mods. At levels where ability scores increase, you get +1 to everything. Details regarding multiclass and hybrid characters are left as an exercise for the reader.

Net effect:

1. Attack/damage and secondary effects are better balanced between all characters because they are set to a specific amount. You can't have Noob McRoleplay show up with a starlock with 14s in Con and Cha and wonder why he is not dealing as much hurt as everybody else. In fact the only way to screw it up is to take a race that doesn't get any bonuses to those (like, playing a tiefling fighter) but there are other house rules floating around to address that.

2. Tertiary abilities, which really hardly matter, can be as high or low as the role-playing concept requires. If someone puts all 16s, they might wind up with defenses a few points higher, or better skills overall, than someone who puts all 10s. But those few points don't matter nearly as much as the primary and secondary abilities.


I still like Crothian's method the best, I just thought I'd throw this one out there as a compromise.

-- 77IM

 

[keterys]

If you do that, you may want to roll back some of the in-class fixes for ability score disparities like the monk and barbarian's +1/tier to AC or Fort.

 

[JoeNotCharles]

I like this idea, but what I would do is let people generate an array of scores (by point buy, or roll, or however the DM wants - and probably using a different point buy system to give lower scores and more variance) to be used ONLY for skills and feat prereqs. All other uses of ability scores count as 18. (Or I might make Init and defenses still dependant on the chosen ability scores to, to keep some variance there.) And I would probably go through the class-specific feats and add some more prereqs (since I believe right now it's just assumed anyone taking a Fighter feat has high Strength) so that there would still be an incentive for classes to take above-average values in their primary scores...

That way you can still have characters with varying levels of skill, and it's unlikely for (for example) a Fighter to be able to take feats for ALL weapon types, just the one with some synergy with their abilities, but the attack rolls and power bonuses don't dominate any more.

 

[Old Gumphrey]

Ok, first, props for having the stones to post such a radical idea.

That said, I played around with this in the character builder for a while, trying several classes and builds. Here is what I noticed in my playing:

-healing surge quantity and value is very high, as is HP in general; the Goliath Earthstrength Warden was off the damn charts
-all characters are at least passably good at all skills
-defense values are utterly awesome; your bad save is comparable to (and sometimes better than) a normal character's good save
-chainmail and scale are invalid; only plate armor is strictly better than light armor
-a lot of class features become mostly useless, or slightly overpowered (barbarian agility, earthstrength Con bonus to AC, etc.)
-secondary effects are VERY good; dwarf wizards are now thunderwaving people 25 feet at level 1, while maintaining a delicious +4 attack bonus
-the amount of feats available for choice is staggering. Seriously, any time or effort you save in avoiding ability score selection is easily tripled spending time on looking at feat choices and combinations.

That last point is the rub for me. I could stomach all the rest of it, but one of your main reasons for the switch is invalidated straight away. You save time in one area, only to increase it in another.

That said, it's STILL not a bad variant. I'd definitely play in a game using it.

 

[77IM]

-the amount of feats available for choice is staggering. Seriously, any time or effort you save in avoiding ability score selection is easily tripled spending time on looking at feat choices and combinations.

That last point is the rub for me. I could stomach all the rest of it, but one of your main reasons for the switch is invalidated straight away. You save time in one area, only to increase it in another.

This assumes that a computer is helpfully filtering feats for you. Us grognards who use the book to select feats need to look at each feat ... and then double-check that we have sufficient ability scores to use it. (And really, what sucks worse than saying "Wow, Armor Specialization (Scale) is perfect for my character concept! But... oh... there's no way I can get my Dex that high without totally hobbling my build... *sigh*". This is why I hate ability prereqs in general.) Having low ability scores doesn't speed this up unless you have all the feat prerequisites memorized and can do the filtering in your head.

So for book-users the all-18s system may make feat choice faster and more fun.

-- 77IM

 

[Flipguarder]

How possibly can qualifying for dozens more feats than before quicken anybody's ability to choose feats?

Your situation simply is exaggerated by the 18s idea. Unless your people don't care that much about min/maxing. In which case why do they have a hard time selecting feats anyway?

 

[DMingNicholas]

You might be better off eliminating feat prereqs and house-ruling the two stat classes than going an all 18 method. HP, surge values and all defenses will go up. Additionally, all the secondary bonuses and lesser used attacks with improve. Everyone will be decent at all skills. Essentially your party will be unstoppable. Your simplifying change comes with too much baggage to really make things easier.