Dexterity & Agility - are we missing something?

[dystmesis]

How about this:

Strength
Perception
Endurance
Charisma
Intelligence
Agility
Luck!

 

[Li Shenron]

I think you can distill any of the six ability scores into a hundred different components. At some point you have to sya "OK, it's fine to generalise". The INT/WIS division is arbitrary, as is the STR/CON difference (endurance is a facet of strength and not even slightly related to your ability to resist a cold); and I don't dare to delve into the minefield that is CHA.

The game isn't about simulating reality numerically; it's about a a [short] list of arbitrary scores which roughly define a character. In themselves, they're hardly enough (why not a stat for appearance?), but they work for the purpose for which they're designed.

It's simplistic, but it works. Realism would require a hundred different stats. but we ant a playable game, not a reality simulator.

Exactly.

I liked discussions of these sort once, but nowadays I find them of little use. Because there is really no reason why you should divide things in 6 rather than 2 rather than 12 rather than 100 rather than 20...

The 3.0 skill system had a purpose (not the only purpose): to create a second-tier distinction of abilities, underneath the one of the 6 abilities. About 40 skills were created, which represent specialized uses of the 6 abilities, and that was a good choice of numbers 6 -> 40.

Early products from 3rd party added lots of new skills into the fray, partially misunderstanding skills for additional abilities like feats. The discussion concentrated on skills alone, not in relation to ability scores, and was polluted by the usual tendency of every gamer to make characters more powerful rather than less powerful: so the original usefulness inbalances between skills were "fixed" by suggesting merging of less-useful skills (same result could have been achieved by splitting the best ones, but no one wants a weaker PC).

Because there is really no reason to have a specific number of skills if you look at them in a vacuum, and every number is ok, but it feels better for you PC to get more abilities for the same price, many if not actually MOST of the gaming groups have lowered the skill list progressively more. At some point, if you never stop, you eventually end up with 6 skills... equivalent to the 6 ability scores!

Then at the same time some (but in this case, it's not widespread) some groups feel the need to differentiate between more than 6 different ability. Note that you could actually do the opposite here too: there is no reason why you couldn't just have 2 ability scores, "Body" and "Mind".

Personally I think this reveals that there is always a drive for differentiating, because differentiating allows for more combinations i.e. more diversity between characters. The opposite drive is simplificating, for the sake of making the game easier. There is no true point in between, you just need to make your choice. But I think it's important to see that ability scores and skills together achieve something greater than individually: because when you want a "dexterous" PC and an "agile" PC, you can already have them, just by balancing them differently between Dex and different skills.