I think the 6 ability scores are one of the traditions that work, although dex in the current iteration is far too good. I guess if we got rid of con people would have a reason to invest in strength.
And these are exactly the
good questions to be asking: both "is the fundamental concept we use functional?" (where the answer generally seems to be "yes") and "is the current
implementation of that concept free of fixable issues?" (where you and I agree the answer is "absolutely not.")
I would absolutely welcome an edition playtest that honestly, seriously asked the question: "How
should the six stats work? Can we change them in a way that makes them effective?" It's why, for example, I very much appreciated that 4e included a Con-based skill: Survival (which 5e moved over to
Wisdom for some reason). Because, as it stands, we have two ultra-uber stats (Dex and Wis) and one or two that kinda fall behind (Int and sometimes Str), with the other two being incredibly variable in value. Dexterity and Wisdom either need to be toned down, having some of their features forked out into other stats, or the other stats need to be treated in a way somewhat similar to Charisma, where it
normally doesn't do a whole lot, but specific contexts (like Hexblade) allow Charisma to do things it normally can't.
I could absolutely see, for example, giving Monk or Barbarian bonuses or features that relate to their Con modifier, for example (since the latter already has a way to use Con for AC). Swapping Survival back to using Con, and finding other small ways to address its limits, would help a lot. Similarly, baking in new uses for Strength (e.g. making Intimidate key off the better of Cha or Str--sometimes words are what threatens, and sometimes muscle is what threatens) would help shore up its relatively weak position, as would switching back to the "3 saves" model but incorporating the 4e innovation of counting the best of two stats (in this case, Str or Con goes to Fortitude, Int or Dex goes to Reflex, and Wis or Cha goes to Will). Under those lights, it becomes more reasonable to have, for example, a low-Con Fighter with high Strength and Intelligence, as they use their battle acumen as an active defense, rather than being too quick to hit.
I guess I was just trying to point out that I don't envy the developers because there will always be compromises. One person's tradition that makes the game what it is will be another person's sacred cow.
Unfortunately, yes, this is true. You can please some of the people all of the time, but honestly I'm not even sure if it's possible to please all of the people
some of the time, let alone all the time. Whatever choices you make, someone will be upset. Perhaps that's why they decided to go ahead with big changes in 4e. If someone's gonna be upset literally no matter WHAT you do, might as well try to address as many issues as possible, yeah?
(I personally still think that presentation was 75% or more of the problem with 4e, and that if it had had another year in the tank, preferably spent ironing out remaining wrinkles, writing better adventures than the
naughty word-awful early ones, and producing books that preserved the "old parchment" look and feel possibly with some tweaks to how powers are presented, a lot fewer people would have balked. But that's speculative.)
Bonus tradition I like: the relative lack of gunpowder. Which is really odd considering the technology level required for things like plate armor, I think it makes the game more fantastical.
Oh yeah, being only incredibly loosely related to
actual European anything is A Thing for this whole genre, not just D&D. People today think, for example, of King Arthur as someone who would've worn full-body, gleaming, polished steel plate armor....even though he lived about 800-900 years too early for that. By the time plate armor started to appear on the scene (early-mid 1400s), cannons had been used in sieges both offensively and defensively in Europe for some 50-75 years,
minimum, and we have artistic depictions of "handgonnes" as early as 1326 (with the possibility that a now-lost
actual "handgonne" was found dating to 1322, almost a full century before full-body steel plate armor came into practice.) And within another century or so, you started having
knights with guns, often called "cuirassiers," like the following image from Wikipedia:
I am of course sure you know all this, given you mentioned it in the first place, just throwing it out there for folks who might not know yet. Our constructed "medieval Europe" fantasyland is just as fictitious and ahistorical as the implied setting of things like the Seven Voyages of Sinbad or
Journey to the West, a fictive amalgam of a dozen different elements, many of which never coexisted, or excluding elements that pre-date elements one emphatically wishes to include. It's part of why I get so very
annoyed when people make arguments like "Monk doesn't belong! It's not European!" Because
we already aren't actually playing in Europe, we're playing in a fictional space that takes bits and pieces from over a
thousand years of European and nearby nations' histories and sutures them together willy-nilly regardless of historicity, the sequence of events IRL, or any semblance of effort to create a stable economy or agricultural base or the like.
Hence why I said, earlier, that an aesthetic tradition really can't be argued with--but it also shouldn't be argued
as though it were rooted in objectivity either.
De gustibus non disputandum est: "of taste there can be no argument," but that swings both ways, taste doesn't rise to the level of argument, nor do arguments hold water against it. They play on different fields.
