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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7795027" data-attributes="member: 4937">You certainly could reduce the number of ability scores, but based on my experience with other systems you'd just be moving the granularity around to other parts of the system.Take the problem of making Charisma = Will. A moment's thought will convince you that there are people who are very likable and personable - even vivacious - who lack the element of the mind that corresponds will power, self-control, self-denial, delayed gratification, and the ability to stand up for themselves. So if you combine Charisma and the concept of Will, you'll find yourself needing to produce granularity somewhere else. You might find that you need to add a defect system to the game such that a person can be 'Weak Willed' as a modifier to their charisma bonus with respect to the Will. Or if you remove CON, you might really need space for a 'Tough' advantage to account for person's that are harder to kill than their strength alone might suggest.Whenever you consolidate ability scores, what you are always doing is moving your granularity from ability scores to your skill system. My strong suspicion is that if you consolidated ability scores enough to remove two of them, you'd find yourself needing to add 2-4 skills to the system to account for the reduced granularity. For example, you might find that if you remove CON, you really need an Endurance skill to represent strong but not tough (an out of shape ex football player with a beer belly) or tough but not strong (a female triathlete that is all lean and lanky). There is also a certain amount of this that feels like you've spent most of your time playing D&D and are just encountering other concepts, so that a Fantasy Heartbreaker is in the offing. While D&D's big six are by far the most influential ways of looking at a character, the more systems you play the more you'll see concepts and granularity broken off in different ways. Some systems have a Luck ability score, which varies from the trivial to being more of a god stat than Dexterity. Some systems break Dexterity in to Agility and motor Dexterity, for the old grandma that can out knit anyone but has a hard time getting out of her chair. D&D with the introduction of the Sorcerer has tended to see Charisma as tied to magical prowess, but other systems have Magic as a separate ability score so that you can have magical adepts that aren't particularly likeable or good with crowds. Some systems make Size or Body it's own thing, so that the persons size has a direct mechanical impact in the system and can be usefully calculated from. Some systems break charisma down further into things like Chutzpah, Leadership, Magneticism, Appearance, and so on and so forth. Others break Intelligence down further by separating academic or Technical knowledge from Cunning or Moxie. And if you don't do something like that, then you either have to make those distinctions skills or declare that the distinctions aren't really important. Ultimately, the decision to add or remove ability scores from a system has less to do with whether a system works, than it is a reflection about what the designer really cares about in terms of verisimilitude and character conception.</blockquote>

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