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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Oofta" data-source="post: 8635912" data-attributes="member: 6801845">It's funny.  When people talk about systems that are "better" than the 6 ability scores, you get a bunch of different answers.  Problem is, most of them are contradictory and I don't think there's a great way to model a person's abilities in the first place.  Modelling always requires compromise, no set of numbers that are practical are going to be that good.When it comes to physical attributes, in a broad sense strength and dexterity make sense.  A lot of times that weight lifter won't have the manual dexterity of that kid that can restack a set of cups in 30 milliseconds.  The kid that can stack cups faster seems humanly possible (it's actually slightly under 5 seconds, you can see it <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyyscuIq56I" target="_blank">here</a>) won't be able to lift a fraction of what the weight lifter can.  Same with intelligence and wisdom, my brother-in-law is truly brilliant but has absolutely no common sense.On the other hand, the attributes fall apart at the detailed level.  It's like how Newtonian physics works reasonably well most of the time in our day to day lives, but then that Einstein fellow came along and upset the apple cart.  If you model acrobatics in D&D, all you need is dexterity, but gymnasts are actually quite strong, just a different application of that strength than that weight lifter.So I agree, and disagree, with Snarf on this one.  Are there different systems for representing a character?  Of course.  Are they better?  Well ... I'm not so convinced.  A half dozen attributes is easy to grasp and envision.  Any system that gets up to even a dozen would probably be too much, to accurately represent reality with any granularity would like require a few dozen, if not hundreds. It wouldn't be workable.</blockquote>

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