Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Falling Icicle" data-source="post: 5802684" data-attributes="member: 17077">I would like to see a cap of 18 +/- racial modifiers. There could be other ways of raising your stats above the limit to reach demigod-like levels of prowess, such as magic items, wish spells, and the like. Having a cap on your "natural" ability score would serve to make such things more precious and amazing.As for what good can come of capping it, I can think of primarily two things. First, it prevents players from min-maxing their stats to extremes. In 3rd and 4th edition, it is simply assumed that you will pump up your primary class stat(s) as high as possible. A wizard would be idiotic, for example, to not increase his Intelligence every chance he gets. By having a cap, you can make a more well-rounded character and not be "punished" for doing so. Your wizard might increase his low Strength or Charisma as he advances, and doing so would no longer be foolish. Likewise, you could make a wizard with a 14 Int at character creation and not be screwed over for doing so, since you will have the opportunity to catch up later. In a capless system, you will never catch up, ever. The result is that people can make a wider variety of viable characters, and can worry more about what they'd like their character to be for roleplaying reasons rather than being forced to follow the same cookie-cutter mold in order to be effective.Second, and most importantly, the more players are allowed to put into a single stat, the more the gap widens between that stat and their other stats (and the lower stats of their opponents). This is particularly important in a system where every ability score is used to make saving throws. Imagine a wizard with an Int in the high 20s or even 30s, using that stat to set the save DC on a spell that targets Cha or Str or some other ability score that the target only had at 10 and has never increased with level. He will have little chance at all to succeed at the saving throw due to that huge difference in scores. Having a cap prevents such massive differences from accumulating. This was a particularly big problem in 4e, and resulted in what were, IMO, ridiculous feats that let players use different stats for attack rolls, and so forth. Why? Because the designers recognized this issue and made a band-aid fix for it in the form of feats. In a system with ability score caps, such things are unnecessary.</blockquote>

Verification