Attribute scores don't make sense

[Byronic]

I applaud anything that allows variety and choice. LET people make bad characters. I've played in groups where some people made choices that were sub optimum as well as really good and we ALL had fun. Hell, I even play a sub optimum character sometimes just for fun.

Let people have their choices.

 

[Holy Bovine]

I really couldn't disagree more with the OP. I like ability scores ranging from 3-18ish and always have. I find it hard to believe that stat generation is so onerous as to screw up a character from the get go.

And stats do help you roleplay. My 5 Int half orc paladin was a laugh riot with his 'divine inspiration' explaining all his clever ideas ('The big guy upstairs says we should look under the flagstones')

 

[Grazzt]

I really couldn't disagree more with the OP. I like ability scores ranging from 3-18ish and always have. I find it hard to believe that stat generation is so onerous as to screw up a character from the get go.

Agreed. Can't be that hard to roll 4d6, drop lowest, or assign points to scores can it?

And stats do help you roleplay. My 5 Int half orc paladin was a laugh riot with his 'divine inspiration' explaining all his clever ideas ('The big guy upstairs says we should look under the flagstones')

And agreed here too.

 

[darkwing]

One of the most important uses of stats in 4e is to qualify for feats. All feat stat requirements are odd.

It's not unusual to see a 4e character with an odd score in one or more stats just for the purpose of gaining feats.

Exactly. It's as if they made feat requirements odd *because* odd stat scores were worthless otherwise.

This is the more important point though:

To make a good character, you have to make good attribute selections. To make good attribute selections, you have to read the *entire* feat section and *all* of a classes powers and paragon paths (including potential mult-classes), not just the feats and powers that are immediately available to level 1 characters. You have to choose your attributes at the start of your career for "choices" that may come 10 or 20 levels later. Never mind what you learn in those 20 levels. You'll never be able to change what your starting attributes were. You have to *know* what you want way before you should have to.

And it's not as easy as spending a few +1s as you level up. The nature of "increasing cost" point buy means that a player that started with one stat "too high" and spent +1s raising the lower stats will *always* be worse off than a player that started with just the right stats and was able to spend all of their +1s on their "expensive" stats. This kind of stress and complexity shouldn't fall on players during character creation.

 

[Zimri]

so in this new paradigm where only the bonus matters would you disallow rolling stats all together, or would 4d6 drop the lowest become roll 1d4 6 times arrange to taste ? or maybe roll 1d6 -2 six times so you have the potential of +4 and -1 ?

 

[lutecius]

This is one thing I wish they had changed, but don't think this particular sacred cow is going anywhere.
What bothers me is not the 3-18 attributes vs modifires redundancy, although I'd rather have just modifiers.
I don't like these attributes because:

1 - They're not equally useful, and yet some classes are too dependent on them (even more so in 4e) which creates balance issues, and makes some multiclassing choices a lot worse than others.

2 - I don't get what some of them are supposed to represent or why they affect some abilities in particular.
Wisdom used to overlap with both Int and Cha. It represented some kind of will power, perception, and knowledge in particular fields like healing.
The distinction is a bit clearer now that Wis is mostly reduced to perception skills, but besides its name and history, I'm not sure why it should be the cleric's core attribute or a prerequisite for feats like Expanded Spellbook.

And now Charisma has become the new catchall attribute. Tieflings with "centuries of other races' distrust and outright hatred", "in a world that often fears and resents them" get a bonus to Diplomacy?
Goblins are described as short, dirty and ill-tempered cowards but they get a bonus to Diplomacy and Intimidate?
They should have done what they did for Eladrin Will and just said something like "such race gets a bonus for such skills, classes or pacts".

Mixing up attributes for defences and some class attacks may make them more useful individually, but it blurs the lines even more as to what they represent.
Int adds to reflex? Wisdom (as in "perception","sense danger and get a read on other people") I could see, but "learning and reasoning" not so much.
For previous editions, I was in the "Dex should affect melee attacks" camp. Now that any attribute can contribute to attacks, depending on the class, I am not sure what the point of attributes is.

 

[jeff0]

shameless plug

Other attribute problems aside, this thread gave me an idea for 4e-specific house rule that differentiates between even and odd ability scores:

http://http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?p=4289885

 

[Gloombunny]

The thing about sacred cows that some people aren't grasping is that you don't kill them JUST BECAUSE they're sacred.

Sometimes cows are sacred for a good reason.

Well, obviously. But the people in favor of killing this one have put forward reasons which we, at least, think are good ones.

D&D would not be D&D without attributes. Period. That really is one of the big thresholds.

So what you're saying is that while sometimes cows are sacred for a good reason, this isn't one of those times and this particular sacred cow has no reason for existing other than sacredcowness? I agree!

 

[Henry]

You can change the attribute system when you take the d6's from my cold, dead fingers.

Taking away the numbers for STR, DEX, etc. and just using the raw modifiers a la True20 is the point at which I hop on the "It's not D&D" express myself. It's the first step for creating a character, the gauge by which I determine what my PC is good at, and to remove it one might as well remove classes and levels and hit points. At least, that's my take on it.

 

[Henry]

so in this new paradigm where only the bonus matters would you disallow rolling stats all together, or would 4d6 drop the lowest become roll 1d4 6 times arrange to taste ? or maybe roll 1d6 -2 six times so you have the potential of +4 and -1 ?

It would probably be similar to True20 -- in that game you have 7 "points" to put into your 6 scores, and you can get an extra point by lowering one score from a start of zero to -1. If I remember it right.