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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 5115485" data-attributes="member: 51942">Abstractly: because diverging bonuses unbalance the game.In practice, you see this with defense scores of all PC's  (the weakest NAD scales terribly).  It's also noticeable with skills, initiative, and to some extent, healing surges.  Some racial attacks and other minor details are similarly affected.  I don't see a good alternative fix:  others have suggested just raising 3 scores, but that doesn't really work well: it only fixes defenses (not skills + init), and it only works for classes that don't have aligned primary/secondary stats.  Worse; it exposes the same weaknesses (namely a way to get around prerequisites).So the question arrises how to boost weak defenses and skills in such a way that the boost isn't abusable; you shouldn't be able to take the benefit and redirect it to a strong score.  Feats are a poor choice; for example, a PC might choose to concentrate on magic items to negate a bunch of Will-related effects but boost the strongest defense instead.Skill divergence makes skill challenges harder to run; with the vast span of skill bonuses, you're quite likely to have a DC that's impossible for some or or an auto-success for others.  Defense divergence makes combat encounters harder to plan.  Basically, any attack vs. almost any NAD at the moment has to be fairly trivial or rather rare - otherwise it's a recipe for a TPK.  That, however, is not fun, and also not balanced (in the sense that encounters with similar XP budgets with attacks vs. NADs are generally stronger than those with attacks vs. AC).  As far as I can tell, NAD's should generally be 2-3 points lower than AC - right now, the difference is generally twice that, on average - if not at first level, then soon thereafter.On alternative would be to remove ability score scaling entirely - that's just as good - but that's more problematic in that it requires even more fixes for attacks & damage, and it fundamentally changes rider effects which typically depend on the secondary stat - which in turn completely changes how well some classes+builds work.  So, a less drastic rule is the one I'm proposing: raise all ability scores identically.  For some, that may mean you get extra flexibility (an extra multiclass, or a power with a different secondary score) - but that's a smaller impact than completely changing secondary score scaling.</blockquote>

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