D&D General Hypothetical: D&D without ability scores (or bonuses)

[Twiggly the Gnome]

Not sure why this..

Skills
Animal Handling
Arcana
Charisma
Constitution
Deception
Dexterity
History
Intelligence
Intimidation
Medicine
Nature
Perception
Performance
Religion
Sleight of Hand
Stealth
Strength
Survival
Wisdom

... would be not-D&D.

 

[Marc17]

Seems removing the ability scores and bonuses would make the PCs a little bit less powerful and even less differentiated from each other, just to make the game trivially less complicated. Would I play it? There are few games I wouldn't play at least once, but I don't see such a change being a net positive for the game and would probably hurt my chance of ever playing it twice.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Just coming in orthogonal, but I think of D&D as a vibe. It's a mashup of Critical Role, Stranger Things, the six funny and 1 (or 3) "normal - aka Monopoly" dice, Baldur's Gate 3, settings, nostalgia, and ALL the various ways people roleplay where they do a tavern scene or a locked door scene or a fight a dragon scene or chase through dungeon corridors scene or mystically attune to a wondrous item scene or figure out a trap or... or... or...

Personally, I call all the OSRs D&D's, wherein D&D isn't a proper noun, it's a common noun, capital D's notwithstanding. (I include both the retro-clones like OSRIC as well as the NSR stuff like Cairn, Dolmenwood, et al. Even Stonetop I'd consider a D&D - although it's way out on the edge).

So coming back to the OP - yeah, I'd call it D&D still if you didn't have the 6 stats. But boy it had really better hit the vibe right with everything else, or it's a different thing.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Seems removing the ability scores and bonuses would make the PCs a little bit less powerful and even less differentiated from each other, just to make the game trivially less complicated. Would I play it? There are few games I wouldn't play at least once, but I don't see such a change being a net positive for the game and would probably hurt my chance of ever playing it twice.

If one removes the 6 abilities, I would imagine monsters would lose them too. i.e. your less powerful comment would apply to monsters as well.
If they did not then some sort of other measurement would be required on behalf of the PCs.

 

[Tigris]

The question was inspired by multiple threads in which people were talking about the balance inherent in rolling for stats versus point buy, or how very good luck or bad luck had impacts on whether a character was fun to play, etc... It occurred to me that if you just eliminated Ability Scores entirely, you could eliminate those potential problems and arguments as well.

You can just remove the long outdated rolling for scores, like most d&d clone games and most D&D players nowadays do, if thats the concern.


If everyone is using a GOOD standard array (like in 13th age) or fixed stat increases like in pf2 then this old bad gamedesign element (which made the whole game a lot more luck dependant) is easily removed.