Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Don Durito" data-source="post: 7837156" data-attributes="member: 6687260">I've seen a lot of talking about how to avoid dump stats.The two biggest dump stats in 5E seem to be Strength and Intelligence.  It seems players mostly either need these to be high or they don't feel they're worth investing in.I've seen suggestions for how to make these abilities generally more useful and some of them are good ones but it seems like only half of the pictureGenerally players dump some abilities in order to max others - because the benefit of maxing abilities is so strong (and because as a general principle of role-playing games strengthening your niche is generally more rewarding than spreading yourself around.)So it seems to me if we want to reward players for investing in off stats, or at least make it more reliable - than abilities need to offer diminishing returns as they grow higher (In theory the point buy system does this - but as it doesn't interface with racial mods or ASIs it doesn't really work).One way to do this would be to change the ability score modifiers.  Like so:<table style='width: 100%'><tr><td>Ability</td><td>11</td><td>12</td><td>13</td><td>14</td><td>15</td><td>16</td><td>17</td><td>18</td><td>19</td><td>20</td></tr><tr><td>Modifier</td><td>+1</td><td>+2</td><td>+2</td><td>+3</td><td>+3</td><td>+3</td><td>+4</td><td>+4</td><td>+4</td><td>+5</td></tr></table>This loses the easy to remember progression currently, but makes it much more rewarding to spread abilities around.  If you want to play a smart Fighter, a 14 is not so much as a crippling invesment as a 16.  Likewise if you need a secondary ability such as a Paladin with Charisma, than a 14 may be enough, reducing the pressure to dump Intelligence.  Similiarly a Dex fighter may feel it worthwhile to keep Strength up to be good at Athletics and a Strength Bard is now a much better option.  A lot of fun but difficult multiclass options such as Barbarian/Monk become less difficult.This makes it a lot easier for players to shore up their bad saves.  It would also broadly make PCs stronger - but around the lower end rather than at the higher end - the biggest boost would be to bad saves (and that would still be small)Of course this would make PCs a lot more similiar as they would tend to converge more around the middle - but then that's the downside of removing dump stats I guess.Skills choices would likely be less constrained by class.I'm not sure I'd actually do this - this is more by way of thought experiment to see what it would look like.Thoughts?</blockquote>

Verification