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Message: <blockquote data-quote="radferth" data-source="post: 298653" data-attributes="member: 5791">How many abilities?If you are talking about house rules or designing a new system, one can have as many or as few abilities as one wants.  I remember back in my youth playing The Fantasy Trip (and FRPG by Steve Jackson that was a much simpler forerunner of Gurps).  You had 3 abilites: strength, dexterity, and intelligence.  Certainly not realistic, but it got the job done.  If I were going to go for extremely detailed or customizable abilities scores, I split dexterity into at least 3 abilities: agility, coordination, and reflexes.  I could even see a place for a fourth stat of manual dexterity.Now when it comes to D&D, I think that 6 stats is pretty good, and any splitting up would not be worth the effort (ymmv).  The 3rd ed. system actually has a built-in mechanism for dealing with characters who are good in only one aspect of one the abilities: the feat system.  Want to play a character who has fast reflexes, but it not particulary agile; buy the lightning reflexes and/or improved initiative feat.  Want to play a character who is not resistant to poison or disease but can run a marathon, buy endurence and/or running.If there is some particular ability dicotomy (or tricotomy) that is sticking in you craw, I have a couple ways to address it:1) Make up a new feat that grants a bonus is the appropriate situation.2) Allow characters to choose one aspect of any given ability at which they excel.  They then get an addition +1 to all rolls that that aspect of the abilty affects, but -1 to all unrelated rolls with that ability.  (e.g. a character with 14 dex is defined as agile.  He now gets a +3 to all dex rolls related to agility, but only +1 to dex rolls not related to agility).This last one is a house rule that I would not care to use (too much work, among other reasons).  But it allows customized abilites without making major changes to the system.</blockquote>

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