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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3968641" data-attributes="member: 2067">I think ability scores will represent a sort of continuum for various types of conditions.For instance, in 3e, a poison did Dexterity damage, which snowballed through a hundred different bonuses.In 4e, perhaps you acquire "poison points." When these equal half your Dexterity, you are reduced to only taking partial actions. When they equal or exceed your Dexterity, you are paralyzed.Similarly, think about the "social encounters" system. To make these more like combat, perhaps your Charisma checks need to beat the other character's Intelligence (Int working kind of like a Social AC), and then you score points that, once they equal the enemy's Wisdom, the enemy gets persuaded to your point (or maybe they beat Wisdom to get points that work against Int?)Either way, the idea of "ability damage" is still kept, only it doesn't directly change your ability scores, so the character suffering from those poison points can still fire a bow just fine, and the person being persuaded isn't any more vulnerable to a Charm spell. It limits the effects to one or two specific things.This is the most obvious purpose I can see for them. They work on the same 1-20 continuum that the d20 works on, after all, with 10 being roughly average. Using them as DC's for checks and as ways to track various gradual conditions should be pretty useful.</blockquote>