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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 4173441" data-attributes="member: 8158">From what you've seen of 4e so far, would it surprise you to see some racial trait, feat, or other resource that just let a character shill some other ability score for healing surges? And would you be OK with that?Swing one weapon and use your 10 Str for attack and damage, swing another and your lowballed Str doesn't affect attack and damage because you're using your maxed-out 20 Con instead? What discernable reason for such inconsistency is there other than to promote dump-statting? It's a ham-handed design.So instead, the 4e solution, to use the term loosely, is that you'll see lots of characters with three ability scores set at 8, but one of them won't necessarily be Charisma. It might be an axe warrior with an 8 Str, 8 Int, and 8 Wis instead. What exactly is the improvement there? And what have you seen that gives you the impression that Charisma will fare any better in 4e anyway? Which 4e classes use Cha? Paladins? Warlocks? Face-man rogues? That all sounds vaguely familiar.   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Except that the former adventuring party is a sham. That 4e party isn't really any more interesting--they just poured their points in a prefabricated mold cast for them by the game designers. What could be more dull than that? If any of them have a decent Cha, it's not because they want to be more diverse than the "malformed troll" that's a combat god. It's because they're substituting Cha for Str as the basis of their brute force damage-dealing. On top of all that, their deficiencies exist on paper only, because their dump stats don't really make them deficient in any meaningful way--otherwise they wouldn't dump the stat. I sure hope WotC is holding some cards up their sleeves, because the design strategy I'm seeing is strictly cosmetic. It's a clumsy, reckless short cut that entirely misses the point of encouraging any kind of meaningful diversity (indeed, it strips away some of the diversity 3.5 offered). The numbers on the character sheet are moved around, but everything that's bad about dump-statting has been magnified. To me, it just looks like a cheap, inelegant shell game. It's a real obstacle to my buy-in of 4e.</blockquote>

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