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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ParanoydStyle" data-source="post: 7632741" data-attributes="member: 6984451">I see we're thinking along the same lines, but I don't necessarily object to the implementation of all three of those abilities/attributes equally.Intelligence is probably the one I could make the strongest case for staying the way it is. It is true that playing a smarter character won't make a player make smarter decisions, but to me that paradox is specifically the problem with Wisdom, not Intelligence. If something 'should' occur to a high-Int character that simply isn't occurring to the player, I would say that it's within the DM's mandate to either present that option to the high-Int character straight out, or at least allow for an Int roll. And on the other side of things, I think that playing a characters less intelligent than yourself is a fun roleplaying challenge. You might think of an optimal or clever way to approach the situation, but it's good roleplaying to think "well, my character only has Int 10, so would he/she necessarily have come up with something that clever?" and then "pull" your intellectual "punches" accordingly. I think Charisma also works fairly well. It's a paradox that people talk about a lot, in the context of asking players to roleplay out what their character says when making a Persuasion check or whatever, and that screwing over people playing very Charismatic characters that are not good with words in real life. To me, a better solution than that is to be mindful about applying bonuses, penalties, advantage and/or disadvantage on the basis of roleplaying to rolls made by a very Charismatic character. A character with Charisma 16 should never fail a Charisma check automatically because their player could not think of something to say. Likewise, a character with Charisma 8 should only very rarely succeed a Charisma check automatically because they knew the exact right thing to say. That said, I do approve of applying bonuses/penalties to a role on the basis of roleplaying, and it's my (probably somewhat controversial) opinion that players with no interest in participating in detail in "social combat" should not play characters with exceptionally high Charisma.When we talk about "Wisdom", we are entirely in agreement. I have long favored the idea of replacing Wisdom with something like Willpower, and games that do so (such as Shadowrun, HERO System, etcetera). Wisdom, to me, connotes common sense and decision making ability. These are precisely the player attributes that the game is designed to test. On the one hand, putting those qualities into a stat compromises the most important skill-based aspect of the game, and on the other hand, there is no way a high Wisdom score can confer good common sense onto a player character whose player is intent on doing something dumb: the best a DM can do is allow for a Wisdom check to reconsider such a dumb course of action, but often players are quite intent on having their characters do the dumb thing anyway (often, but not always, because it is what the character would do). So yes, Wisdom as a character attribute has never exactly made sense to me because player "Wisdom" and good decision making is so crucial to how the game is played.That "charge up" mechanic is really cool. Reminds me of Final Fantasy Tactics which is virtually always a good thing. Strictly speaking in terms of action economy, I think it would probably "feel" better for a spell that takes twice as long to cast being more like 2.5x as powerful as opposed to 2X as powerful, because players generally don't like to spend their turn doing "nothing", even if it's clearly in service of doing something powerful the next turn, but I'd have to experiment with it more to know for real.</blockquote>

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