What if we removed Abilities? [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

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Grod_The_Giant

2016-03-22, 01:49 PM

No, wait, wait, hear me out here. Put down those pitchforks! I just...

<bloodstains and torn papers; writing resumes in a different hand>

The more I look at 5e, the more I feel like ability scores are a detriment to the game. Because of Bounded Accuracy, the bonus from your ability modifier is critical to hitting the expected number, even more than in past editions. In past editions level-based bonuses were much higher and magic items much more common (to say nothing of x-stat-to-y-bonus abilities), letting you get away with unconventional stat distributions. Not so anymore. Not when literally half your bonus is coming from your ability (Want to use a polearm without being strong? Too bad!) To say nothing of the consequences of primary ability scores (Want to play an oblivious cleric? Tough-- your Perception is as good as the Fighter who took a Proficiency.)

It's also, frankly, an unnecessary bit of math. 5e has a pretty binary system: you're either good at a thing (Proficiency) or not (no Proficiency), with a side case of "okay-by-default" in the case of abilities your character requires. Why not go the rest of the way? I see little harm and many benefits:
No more stat-based roleplaying dilemmas-- play your foolish Cleric or foppish Barbarian without having to choose between mechanically weakening yourself and ignoring what your stats say about your personality.

More freedom to be good at the things you want to be good at, even if they lie in unrelated ability scores.
No more boring, homogenous stat distributions
More freedom to choose races by concept instead of by what gives you the necessary stat bonuses.
No more worrying about "necessary stat bonuses" at all, really-- all the scaling will be done automatically.

Here's my thoughts on how to implement it:
Increase Proficiency to twice the existing value, plus one*.
Use half your Proficiency whenever an ability calls for an Ability Modifier, such as the Monk's Unarmored AC or a Warlock's Agonizing Blast.
At first level, pick one save, two skills or tools, and three weapons; add half your Proficiency to checks or attacks made using them.

And a few more fiddly bits:
When calculating hit points, treat your Con as if it were the die's average roll minus one-- +5 for a d12, +4 for a d10, and so on, down to +2 for a d6.
Ability Increases no longer exist. Instead, gain one new proficiency or two new half-proficiencies at every level you'd normally gain an ASI.
If you want to use feats, grant them at ECL 1, 7, and 14.
Expertise adds half your Proficiency again to the skill; Jack of All Trades turns all skills into half-proficiencies and upgrades any half-proficiencies into full ones.

That's pretty much the long and short of it. Character performance will simultaneously be more and less uniform-- they'll be equally good at things they care about equal amounts, but have more freedom with it. What do people think? (If your only thought is "this is a terrible idea because it's not D&D tradition," let's assume that I know that and move on)

When compared to a conventional character with a maxed-out Ability, said formula, on average, yields a bonus 0.5 higher. From levels 1-12 it's almost always identical. 1/2 level+5 (rounding up) also works well and gives a smoother curve, though the average is ever so slightly higher (a full +1 above the default). Half proficiency, in both cases, has a similar average difference compared to said maxed Ability.

RickAllison

2016-03-22, 01:53 PM

That's pretty much the long and short of it. Character performance will simultaneously be more and less uniform-- they'll be equally good at things they care about equal amounts, but have more freedom with it. What do people think? (If your only thought is "this is a terrible idea because it's not D&D tradition," let's assume that I know that and move on)

Damn you and your entirely reasonable disclaimers! How dare you preclude my griping about a system change that does nothing to improve upon the idea!

pwykersotz

2016-03-22, 02:12 PM

Tanarii

2016-03-22, 02:26 PM

The bonuses and penalties in 1e, 2e, and BECMI were minor or non-existent unless you had exceptional scores. Which means low odds, or using a variant ability score rolling method.

(NWPs were an exception. They were highly attribute dependent.)

It was 3e that introduced the "tradition" or ability scores having a quite large impact throughout the game, not just on "skills"

Edit: one other point:
Bounded accuracy makes having high ability scores less important. Not more. It's entire possible to play a character with all 14s for ability scores for their entire career. Don't let optimizers fool you with the idea that it's only worth making a check if you have a maximized attribute to go with it.

JumboWheat01

2016-03-22, 02:30 PM

Zman

2016-03-22, 02:34 PM

Interesting concept.

So, your hulking fighter and my feeble Wizard want to arm wrestle. We each roll a D20 and compare the result. Nothing else matters. Unless the Fighter was forced to pick Athletics and it was determined that would apply.

Your nimble rogue and my clumbsy cleric want to play darts, or better yet a game of ring toss. We simply roll d20s and compare the result.

See where I'm going with this?

The bonuses and penalties in 1e, 2e, and BECMI were minor or non-existent unless you had exceptional scores. Which means low odds, or using a variant ability score rolling method.

(NWPs were an exception. They were highly attribute dependent.)

It was 3e that introduced the "tradition" or ability scores having a quite large impact throughout the game, not just on "skills"

Edit: one other point:
Bounded accuracy makes having high ability scores less important. Not more. It's entire possible to play a character with all 14s for ability scores for their entire career. Don't let optimizers fool you with the idea that it's only worth making a check if you have a maximized attribute to go with it.

I agree with most of this.

Aetol

2016-03-22, 02:46 PM

The Elder Scrolls V: Skryim did away with the attribute scores (similar to D&D Ability Scores) as well. It was... all right, but it felt like something was missing to me. Sure, the freedom of doing as I pleased and not being hindered by the scores was cool, but it didn't feel quite as satisfying.

While it is an interesting attempt, I don't think I'll ever play without ability scores in D&D.

It's completely different. D&D is a classes-and-stats system, while Skyrim is a skills-and-perks system. The previous Elder Scrolls were a mix of the two.

A TTRPG close to Skyrim's system, while certainly interesting, would be nothing like D&D.

OldTrees1

2016-03-22, 03:03 PM

Talent vs Training
Strong animal? Talent
Athletic monk? Training
Athletic Strongman? Talent & Training
Me? Nada

Your "only proficiency" system overlooks this granularity by refluffing the 1st and excluding the 3rd(well technically the math means you are excluding the 1st and 2nd and refluffing the 3rd).

Senses vs Judgement
Foolish Scout? Senses
Nearsighted Judge? Judgement
Me? Senses & Judgement
Nearsighted fool? Nada

The existing system, presuming the characters above were operating on talent, excludes the 1st and 2nd.

So the existing system and your replacement system are both thematically limiting to an undesirable degree.

Grod_The_Giant

2016-03-22, 03:06 PM

I've felt this way for a while, but I just haven't wanted to go though the effort of enacting the change.

Moreover, ability scores provide something valuable for roleplay, and certain players would have difficulties abandoning then entirely. It's nice to have a quantification system of some sort to base your actions off of. If ability scores were removed, I would recommend putting something in that replaced them, not mechanically, but fluff-wise for the roleplay pillar.
Eh... I've played games like Fate that didn't have Ability scores and they're not that hard to do without. 5e's most of the way there already, with Personality Traits, Ideals, Bonds and Flaws-- basically Aspects by another name and without mechanical impact.

Bounded accuracy makes having high ability scores less important. Not more. It's entire possible to play a character with all 14s for ability scores for their entire career. Don't let optimizers fool you with the idea that it's only worth making a check if you have a maximized attribute to go with it.
Oh, sure. The extra +2-3 is a relatively small percentage compared to the die.

Interesting concept.

So, your hulking fighter and my feeble Wizard want to arm wrestle. We each roll a D20 and compare the result. Nothing else matters. Unless the Fighter was forced to pick Athletics and it was determined that would apply.

Your nimble rogue and my clumbsy cleric want to play darts, or better yet a game of ring toss. We simply roll d20s and compare the result.

See where I'm going with this?
You'd have to go back to not calling for unmodified ability checks, like in the previous few additions. For the former it's an Athletics check; the latter might be attack rolls (in which case yeah, both are capable combatants) or Sleight of Hand. You might need to write a few more skills, but a quick glance doesn't reveal much in the way of glaring absences. (Also to be pedantic I'll point out that the "good" character only has a ~20%-30% advantage in the existing system; there's not much consistency if you constantly call for checks there either)

Might be worth adding a "weakness," though. Pick a skill or save and always have Disadvantage in exchange for another half-proficiency?

Steampunkette

2016-03-22, 03:13 PM

So a nimble rogue and a hulking fighter both have Athletics. They need to bend the bars of a prison cell. The nimble rogue took Athletics for climbing into second story windows to steal stuff, but can bend the bars just as well as the musclebound fighter who took Athletics to be a big musclebound fighter since there's no strength score.

Carrying Capacity is also left out. And what do you do about the Str requirements on Armors? How do you differentiate different types of saving throws? If you go Fort/Ref/Will couldn't you just use those three "Stats" for ability checks to represent physical power, dexterity, and mental prowess wine you're basically replacing six stats with three?

It's not a terrible idea to drop stats. But it definitely requires more work to change the system to accept it, and some way to better differentiate abilities between classes and concepts so that players can reinforce their ideas about their characters.

Otherwise the halfling rogue can bend the bars of the jail cell just as well as the dragonborn fighter.

Theodoxus

2016-03-22, 03:33 PM

KorvinStarmast

2016-03-22, 03:45 PM

The more I look at 5e, the more I feel like ability scores are a detriment to the game. Because of Bounded Accuracy, the bonus from your ability modifier is critical to hitting the expected number, even more than in past editions.
Not seeing it.

Proficiency (as in choosing to have or not have proficiency) plays as significant role, if not moreso, depending upon
character level,
ability modifier,
class (some classes get extra bonuses to checks, like Bards and Rogues).

If I have a Wisdom of 14, and have achieved the Char level of 17 ... but no proficiency in Perception, I have a plus two to my perception roll.
If I have proficiency, I have a +8.
If I added three ASI's to wisdom, I get +5. If I am also proficient, I get a +11.
With some of the boosts to skills from Rogue and Bard, the numbers keep going up. (It's not for nothing that Rogue and Bards get called Skill Monkey ...)

Hrugner

2016-03-22, 03:45 PM

I think something like capping stat bonuses to your proficiency bonus would be a bit cleaner fit. You end up with your max starting to attack being +4 +2 which is plenty, and it lets you take better advantage of the stat bonus on leveling choices. You also have a bit of time before you want to be the max stat character allowing you some better over time growth. It become less advantageous to dump stats for mechanics reasons as well.

bardo

2016-03-22, 03:49 PM

I agree ability scores carry too much weight compared to experience, but I suspect the problem comes from an over-simplified formula that is applied throughout the books: bonus = ability score bonus + proficiency bonus.

Considering all the PCs in the party are roughly the same level, they'd all have the same proficiency bonus pretty much all of the time. So variance comes down to just what's your ability score bonus. Some select classes get to break out of the pattern with expertise, but not all classes, and that's just for skills. The above formula is applied to much more than just skills.

Instead of getting rid of ability scores, how about getting rid of the flat same-for-all proficiency bonus? Maybe turn it into a pool of proficiency points that players can distribute. There would have to be diminishing returns, of course, or fighters will put all their proficiency points into to-hit and nothing else, but we'd see much more variance.

Bardo.

mephnick

2016-03-22, 04:02 PM

Otherwise the halfling rogue can bend the bars of the jail cell just as well as the dragonborn fighter.

Yeah, I think for the system to work you'd have to split the current skills up into more specific skills again like previous editions did and offer more proficiency. That way I could be proficient in tumbling and climbing, but not grappling and lifting.

But then you start getting into huge skill lists and where does it stop?

Knaight

2016-03-22, 04:18 PM

Yeah, I think for the system to work you'd have to split the current skills up into more specific skills again like previous editions did and offer more proficiency. That way I could be proficient in tumbling and climbing, but not grappling and lifting.

An alternative to this would be to simply move the ability scores into the skill list, at least to some extent. The biggest issue is more the direct use of the ability scores than anything, in that you get both checks (things like a strength check to bend those bars) and saves (things like a con check to shrug off a poison). The checks can be handled easily enough by moving the stats directly into the skills (maybe with some renaming), but the saves are a bit trickier. There's also the need to have something that affects damage and HP somehow, as those are currently stat based and nowhere near the skill system.

So, there's some redesigning, but the core idea should be pretty functional.

Grod_The_Giant

2016-03-22, 04:27 PM

Lack of attributes for differentiation aside (and nicely pointed out by a lot above) I don't get your math.

You want to double the current Proficiency bonus, and add 1 - so levels 1-4 would be +5, 5 would by +7... etc.

Then, anything you use proficiency for, you halve the amount - always an odd number... so, that sucks for one. For two, why the doubling, then the halving? Why not just keep the proficiency as listed?

At this point, might as well go back to 3.5 with saves and BAB... then your fighter would have a better chance at BBLG than the rogue who's only 75% as good at doing it...

I'm not against the removal of attributes, but it does need a lot of revision of what you've started. And at least a fluff version of them. My players would rebel if they couldn't go around asking what the Charisma of the barmaid is... to hit on (if 17+) or scoff at (if 8-).
Maybe I wasn't clear enough, sorry. You use the doubled value on any check you're Proficient in; you use the half value for things like AC and class features that depend specifically on your Ability Modifier.

Proficiency (as in choosing to have or not have proficiency) plays as significant role, if not moreso, depending upon
character level,
ability modifier,
class (some classes get extra bonuses to checks, like Bards and Rogues
It actually lags behind a maxed-out ability score until 17th level; leaving Expertise aside, your training is pretty consistently less important than your talent. It takes my paranoid rogue (who doesn't have a good Wisdom score because there are only so many points to go around) 5 levels to be as good at perception as the absent-minded cleric was at level 1.

I agree ability scores carry too much weight compared to experience, but I suspect the problem comes from an over-simplified formula that is applied throughout the books: bonus = ability score bonus + proficiency bonus.
The simplification was part of the appeal, though. (Also, I think the problem is that Proficiency is too low, but that's a whole different argument)

Yeah, I think for the system to work you'd have to split the current skills up into more specific skills again like previous editions did and offer more proficiency. That way I could be proficient in tumbling and climbing, but not grappling and lifting.

But then you start getting into huge skill lists and where does it stop?
Meh, 5e has 18 skills and they have pretty good coverage-- especially when you add in the more open-ended tools. For instance, the only real complaint I'm seeing is that Athletics covers both mobility and raw strength (which it kind of already did-- see Grappling). For reference, Fate is a skill-only game with 18 default skills to cover everything, and that includes combat.

An alternative to this would be to simply move the ability scores into the skill list, at least to some extent. The biggest issue is more the direct use of the ability scores than anything, in that you get both checks (things like a strength check to bend those bars) and saves (things like a con check to shrug off a poison). The checks can be handled easily enough by moving the stats directly into the skills (maybe with some renaming), but the saves are a bit trickier. There's also the need to have something that affects damage and HP somehow, as those are currently stat based and nowhere near the skill system.

So, there's some redesigning, but the core idea should be pretty functional.
Eh, that's a good point. I didn't put quite enough thought into saves, one supposes. You could leave them as just a set of six alternate options; you could also merge them down into Skills.

Str/Con can become Physique, and leave Athletics to cover mobility alone.
Dex can be subsumed by Acrobatics.
Int can be subsumed by Investigate
Wis and Cha can become Will

Damage would add the half-prof bonus, like other Ability Modifier things. Con-to-HP got slaved to HD size--the bigger the die the bigger your effective Con score.

bid

2016-03-22, 04:58 PM

When calculating hit points, treat your Con as if it were the die's average roll minus one-- +5 for a d12, +4 for a d10, and so on, down to +2 for a d6.
Doesn't that make fixed value the same as max hp?

KorvinStarmast

2016-03-22, 04:59 PM

It actually lags behind a maxed-out ability score until 17th level; leaving Expertise aside, your training is pretty consistently less important than your talent. It takes my paranoid rogue (who doesn't have a good Wisdom score because there are only so many points to go around) 5 levels to be as good at perception as the absent-minded cleric was at level 1. The example is irrelevant, and cherry picked. Why, for example, do you choose to characterize the cleric as absent minded? Arbitrary? Leaving Expertise aside rather chokes the Rogue, by the way.

This game is built to be played by a team. One PC is not going to be "the best" at everything. D&D game model: a team of people with varying talents and skills take on risks and challenges.

Is your complaint that there are too many different skills, and that this narrows what a character be good at? Your reference to Fate and its total numbers leans that way.

If that is part of your concern, I admit that I've scratched my head a few times at the distinctions made.

Vogonjeltz

2016-03-22, 05:10 PM

The more I look at 5e, the more I feel like ability scores are a detriment to the game. Because of Bounded Accuracy, the bonus from your ability modifier is critical to hitting the expected number, even more than in past editions. In past editions level-based bonuses were much higher and magic items much more common (to say nothing of x-stat-to-y-bonus abilities), letting you get away with unconventional stat distributions.

I tend to disagree. Past editions had such huge bonus bounding that having poor stats led to immense discrepencies sometimes insurmountable by the die roll, leading to an 'always better' scenario. It's not interesting to have a contest where only one side can ever win.

Not so anymore. Not when literally half your bonus is coming from your ability (Want to use a polearm without being strong? Too bad!) To say nothing of the consequences of primary ability scores (Want to play an oblivious cleric? Tough-- your Perception is as good as the Fighter who took a Proficiency.)

Well, it's one thing to notice things, it's entirely another to put two and two together and get four. The oblivious Cleric is one who may have noticed several clues in a situation Wisdom (perception), but lacks the Intelligence (Investigation) to recognize that those clues add up to mean that the King has been replaced by a Simulacrum controlled by the court Wizard.

Especially insofar as personality traits go, any drawbacks can easily be roleplayed by the player, they don't need to be mechanically enforced for that reason alone.

It's also, frankly, an unnecessary bit of math. 5e has a pretty binary system: you're either good at a thing (Proficiency) or not (no Proficiency), with a side case of "okay-by-default" in the case of abilities your character requires. Why not go the rest of the way? I see little harm and many benefits:
No more stat-based roleplaying dilemmas-- play your foolish Cleric or foppish Barbarian without having to choose between mechanically weakening yourself and ignoring what your stats say about your personality.
•More freedom to be good at the things you want to be good at, even if they lie in unrelated ability scores.
•No more boring, homogenous stat distributions
•More freedom to choose races by concept instead of by what gives you the necessary stat bonuses.
•No more worrying about "necessary stat bonuses" at all, really-- all the scaling will be done automatically.

Here's my thoughts on how to implement it:
•Increase Proficiency to twice the existing value, plus one*.
•Use half your Proficiency whenever an ability calls for an Ability Modifier, such as the Monk's Unarmored AC or a Warlock's Agonizing Blast.
•At first level, pick one save, two skills or tools, and three weapons; add half your Proficiency to checks or attacks made using them.

And a few more fiddly bits:•When calculating hit points, treat your Con as if it were the die's average roll minus one-- +5 for a d12, +4 for a d10, and so on, down to +2 for a d6.
•Ability Increases no longer exist. Instead, gain one new proficiency or two new half-proficiencies at every level you'd normally gain an ASI.
•If you want to use feats, grant them at ECL 1, 7, and 14.
•Expertise adds half your Proficiency again to the skill; Jack of All Trades turns all skills into half-proficiencies and upgrades any half-proficiencies into full ones.

More bookkeeping than the current system; which cuts against the claim that it would be less unnecessary math.
It also reduces the variety of things one can be good or bad at if every ability is essentially the same this would be not dissimilar to giving every character all 20s in all stats.

I appreciate the out of the box thinking, but I don't think it achieves the desired effect.

Sigreid

2016-03-22, 05:56 PM

My issue with this is the same as it is with standard array or point buy. I like variation in characters. With this, I don't see any.

Grod_The_Giant

2016-03-22, 06:13 PM

Doesn't that make fixed value the same as max hp?
No? It's more like die roll + average roll per level.

The example is irrelevant, and cherry picked. Why, for example, do you choose to characterize the cleric as absent minded? Arbitrary? Leaving Expertise aside rather chokes the Rogue, by the way.
The example isn't important; the point is that the character who decided to be good at something (ie, chooses it as a proficient skill) is about as good as the character who has no interest in that thing but is mechanically required to gain an equivalent bonus (ie, has a good ability score).

This game is built to be played by a team. One PC is not going to be "the best" at everything. D&D game model: a team of people with varying talents and skills take on risks and challenges.
That's irrelevant to anything I said. My proposal would also lead to a party full of people contributing different skills; they'd be contributing more different skills because there wouldn't be as much incidental half-coverage.

Is your complaint that there are too many different skills, and that this narrows what a character be good at? Your reference to Fate and its total numbers leans that way.
No, I think it's a pretty good set of skills. This isn't really a complaint so much as a thought exercise. Something I thought about trying to fall asleep last night.

I tend to disagree. Past editions had such huge bonus bounding that having poor stats led to immense discrepencies sometimes insurmountable by the die roll, leading to an 'always better' scenario. It's not interesting to have a contest where only one side can ever win.
That's another argument (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?480171-The-ol-5e-problem-how-to-deal-with-Small-bonuses).

Especially insofar as personality traits go, any drawbacks can easily be roleplayed by the player, they don't need to be mechanically enforced for that reason alone.
Some people argue otherwise. It's also bad when you roleplay on, say, being kind of distracted by contemplating the spiritual, and then consistently do well on perception checks.

More bookkeeping than the current system; which cuts against the claim that it would be less unnecessary math.
It also reduces the variety of things one can be good or bad at if every ability is essentially the same this would be not dissimilar to giving every character all 20s in all stats.

My issue with this is the same as it is with standard array or point buy. I like variation in characters. With this, I don't see any.
Hmm, some miscommunication here, I think. Overall, the change proposed would switch from a skill-and-ability system to a purely skill-based on. It would fold together and abstract the training/talent divide. You're good at the X skills you picked; you're not good at other things.

Take an example-- a level 1 human urchin Ranger.

As an Urchin, he's proficient with disguise kits, thieve's tools, Sleight of Hand and Stealth.
As a Ranger, he gains proficiency in assorted weapons, Str and Dex saves, and Nature, Perception, and Survival.
For his half-proficiencies, he picks Athletics and Acrobatics-- he's got some natural talent, but hasn't really practiced.

As a first level character, he has three options when it comes to bonuses: +5, +2, or +0. For weapon attacks and all the choices above but Athletics and Acrobatics, his bonus is +5. For the latter two skills, AC, and damage rolls, it's +2. For everything else, it's +0. He gains max HP for d10+4=14 HP

The level 1 Sage Wizard, on the other hand, has a +5 bonus to spell attacks and save DCs, a handful of weapon attacks, Int and Wis saves, and Arcana, History, Religion and Medicine. He picks Nature and Insight for his half-proficiencies; for those, AC, and damage rolls, his bonus is +2. For everything else it's +0. He also gains max HP for d6+2=8 HP.

Does that make more sense? They're equally good at the things they're good at, but they're good at completely different things.

Tanarii

2016-03-22, 06:49 PM

Oh, sure. The extra +2-3 is a relatively small percentage compared to the die.Can't disagree. I didn't notice it was you who was posting this. And as you say, that aspect falls more under the discussion in the previous thread.

I can't say this is a BAD idea, mechanically. It wouldn't even need much adjustment for skills. Just double proficiency bonuses, and remove ability score bonuses.

The main downside would be there would be no way to differentiate natural talent / raw ability between any two given characters. However, there are ways to address that:
1) Keep ability scores for ability checks only. They don't apply to skill checks.
2) Adapt the idea of ability score proficiency from the DMG. Specifically, you could adapt as follows: each character to choose one ability score appropriate to his Class, and one to his Background. When they make a ability check (but not a skill check) for those ability scores, they add 1x their proficiency bonus.
3) Adapt the idea of background proficiency: If the player can justify why their character should get 1x proficiency bonus to a given ability check (but not skill checks) based on their established character background etc, grant the bonus.
4) There is no mechanical difference in natural talent / raw ability. Players don't get a bonus to any ability checks, or get 1x proficiency bonus to all ability checks.
5) There is no mechanical difference in natural talent / raw ability. Ability score checks don't exist. Anything that needs to be adjudicated will be done by DM-fiat.

Combined with double proficiency score for skill checks, one of those should cover your bases.

Edit: Obviously a skill check with no proficiency is just an ability check. I'm using 'ability checks' here to specifically mean things that aren't covered by skill checks at all. For things covered by skill checks, a player would get no bonus unless proficient.

Sigreid

2016-03-22, 07:10 PM

Hmm, some miscommunication here, I think. Overall, the change proposed would switch from a skill-and-ability system to a purely skill-based on. It would fold together and abstract the training/talent divide. You're good at the X skills you picked; you're not good at other things.

Take an example-- a level 1 human urchin Ranger.

As an Urchin, he's proficient with disguise kits, thieve's tools, Sleight of Hand and Stealth.
As a Ranger, he gains proficiency in assorted weapons, Str and Dex saves, and Nature, Perception, and Survival.
For his half-proficiencies, he picks Athletics and Acrobatics-- he's got some natural talent, but hasn't really practiced.

As a first level character, he has three options when it comes to bonuses: +5, +2, or +0. For weapon attacks and all the choices above but Athletics and Acrobatics, his bonus is +5. For the latter two skills, AC, and damage rolls, it's +2. For everything else, it's +0. He gains max HP for d10+4=14 HP

The level 1 Sage Wizard, on the other hand, has a +5 bonus to spell attacks and save DCs, a handful of weapon attacks, Int and Wis saves, and Arcana, History, Religion and Medicine. He picks Nature and Insight for his half-proficiencies; for those, AC, and damage rolls, his bonus is +2. For everything else it's +0. He also gains max HP for d6+2=8 HP.

Does that make more sense? They're equally good at the things they're good at, but they're good at completely different things.

You communicated fine. I just like a lot of variation. It's just my preference, but I like that two characters who pursued the exactly the same options may have differences in their actual abilities within those options. It's too cookie cutter for my tastes. I'm aware that many people on this forum believe that the game benefits when characters are mathematically equal.

greenstone

2016-03-22, 07:16 PM

Maybe turn it into a pool of proficiency points that players can distribute.

Isn't that what Ability Score Improvements are?

Knaight

2016-03-22, 09:14 PM

My issue with this is the same as it is with standard array or point buy. I like variation in characters. With this, I don't see any.

On the other hand, detaching skills from stats makes it way more viable to have characters who are good at things outside their class preferred stats. You can have your reasonably athletic wizards, your fighters who have a background in lore, etc. You can also have characters who don't have the typical stats (assuming you still embed their functions somewhere), but still work reasonably well; opening up a whole bunch of archetypes that the system previously fought. It also helps detach some of the more nonsensical attribute-skill connections; suddenly the bookish cleric isn't going to be more perceptive than the fighter who had a background as a military scout. Initiative (which is another edge case that needs to be handled) suddenly doesn't have to be tied to physical dexterity, allowing for dexterous characters to not select it because they aren't necessarily particularly decisive, while less dexterous characters who are can take it.

There's a decreased granularity, in that for any given level there are 3 sets of numbers instead of up to 12 (though in practice most attribute arrays will produce closer to 8); which is traded for being able to represent more characters viably. Plus, the granularity difference is smaller than it seems, as for skills assigned to a particular attribute there are now 3 instead of 2. Expertise bumps this around, but it has essentially the same effect regardless.

bid

2016-03-22, 10:36 PM

No? It's more like die roll + average roll per level.
Sorry if I wasn't clear but aren't you saying wizard would get HD + 2 = 4 + 2 = 6 with fixed rolls?
So every level you get 6-12 hp depending on class, the same value you'd get at level 1 without a Con mod.

djreynolds

2016-03-23, 04:06 AM

You could allow people to just pick abilities, 3 out of the 6 and they have proficiency bonus to those. I'm a fighter and I'm proficient in strength, wisdom, and intelligence. No score, you just add your proficiency modifier to those rolls. And the rest you do not. Perhaps the fighter gets advantage with certain weapons he chooses. Wizards roll with advantage for spells and arcana. Clerics get religion. You pick so many skills to have advantage and /or proficiency with

At least this way level and experience counts more. And then perhaps every so often you can choose another ability to have proficiency in.

1-4 you start with two proficient abilities and 2 skills
4-8 you have 3
8-12 you have 4

Hrugner

2016-03-23, 06:28 AM

Kurald Galain

2016-03-23, 06:47 AM

More freedom to be good at the things you want to be good at, even if they lie in unrelated ability scores.
No more boring, homogenous stat distributions
More freedom to choose races by concept instead of by what gives you the necessary stat bonuses.
No more worrying about "necessary stat bonuses" at all, really-- all the scaling will be done automatically.

I think this is a great idea. We have way too many posts in this forum along the lines of "I would like to play <concept> but if I do I can't get my ability to 20 quickly enough".

KorvinStarmast

2016-03-23, 07:21 AM

I think this is a great idea. We have way too many posts in this forum along the lines of "I would like to play <concept> but if I do I can't get my ability to 20 quickly enough". Is that an issue with the player or the game?

Knaight

2016-03-23, 09:32 AM

I'm not sure stripping player capability of all in world narrative explanation is going to be worth whatever benefit this change is supposed to bring. Sure, you open up some weird personality options, but your characters don't really need a connection between character and ability at all. You want to play a nearly blind imbecile who is a crack shot archer with a bunch of knowledge proficiencies? No problem, we got you covered.

You're not stripping PC capability of all in world narrative explanation, as the in world narrative explanation would be the description of the character that leads you to pick the sets of skills (plus whatever the replacement systems for ability functions turn out to be) in the first place. Your example is a bit of an outlier that's not particularly likely to actually see play, but honestly, the character could work. We've got someone who's vision pretty much comes down to multicolored blurs, but who can generally supplement with hearing and who has an impeccable sense of how to shoot for timing and distance, with the blurriness being what contributes to their misses - which, this being 5e, there will still be plenty of. The character also has a knack for rote memorization, and has learned a lot of raw information; they're just really terrible at piecing information together on their own.

I know people who fit in both of these categories, although the nearly blind crack shot generally wears glasses - even without them though, if he has a sense of the terrain (say by having moved through it) he can place shots pretty well. As for the second category, think back to school - I'd be extremely surprised if you didn't know at least one person who generally did very well on things like memorization based tests, while flailing about horribly whenever they had to actually think about anything (academic or not).

Kurald Galain

2016-03-23, 09:45 AM

Is that an issue with the player or the game?

The presentation, I'd say. The rulebook seems to suggest that every tiny bonus is an extremely big deal (even though statistically speaking it's not) and this seems to encourage people to look for boring +1 modifiers instead of flashy cool abilities. I think that Grod's proposal would let people focus more on the latter.

Tanarii

2016-03-23, 09:49 AM

Is that an issue with the player or the game?Player. Definitely. Because 5e is built with the idea that mechanically, you don't ever have to raise your 'main' ability score to 20, and you still remain mechanically functional as a character. This is pretty clear in the PHB. 12 & 13 are describes as "decent scores" in the very first example about ability scores, ie just fine for your non-primary attribute. It's charop on various forums that push the idea that a max (or close to max) score is critical.

OTOH, it's fair to say that what 5e isn't built to do is be a perfect simulation. In fact, it's a pretty poor simulation unless make some weird assumptions about in-game reality. If you want to view the game rules in a more simulationist fashion and have them represent a specific character concept that can't be represented by the rules more accurately, you need to make some house rules here and there.

The real issue is if you're trying to make global house rules in the name of simulation, but are actually breaking simulation in the process. Removing all natural / innate variation between characters without having some replacement qualifies as doing that, give that ability checks are the de facto check to do roughly anything and everything in 5e. Not skill checks, which are just a special subset of ability checks.

IMo if your goal is better simulation via removing ability scores, you have to either replace ability checks with a plethora of new skills. Or figure out some other way to represent natural / innate differences between characters.

Grod_The_Giant

2016-03-23, 09:56 AM

I'm not sure stripping player capability of all in world narrative explanation is going to be worth whatever benefit this change is supposed to bring. Sure, you open up some weird personality options, but your characters don't really need a connection between character and ability at all. You want to play a nearly blind imbecile who is a crack shot archer with a bunch of knowledge proficiencies? No problem, we got you covered.
And more player RP options are a bad thing why?

With stats you have to tend toward benefiting the stats you have, or focusing the character around your one good stat which does sort of suck. Doing it the other way, the player is free to pick whatever is mechanically best.
People who pick mechanically superior skills will do that regardless of system; detaching abilities from skills simply means that there's no more class-based incentive to focus on certain skills-- the fighter who wants to be a warrior-scholar will be as good at scholarship as the wizard who plays a mage-scholar.

For people arguing that you need some form of raw abilities left in, perhaps you could merge that with saves. You have your six stats/saves; you're proficient with X and half-proficient with Y. When you make a save or need an untyped roll you use the stat/save; otherwise you use the appropriate skill/attack. That brings back the basic talent bit, but leaves it largely disassociated from results where training matters (ie, skills). (And for counter-complaints about things like having Int proficiency but not knowing anything about Lore... a smart guy who never studied history still won't know much history. Same for the agile archer who never practiced pick-pocketing, the socially confident guy who's nevertheless a bad liar, and so on)

Knaight

2016-03-23, 10:11 AM

IMo if your goal is better simulation via removing ability scores, you have to either replace ability checks with a plethora of new skills. Or figure out some other way to represent natural / innate differences between characters.

If the distinction between talent and training actually mattered in any respect, this might be true. It doesn't though - a given +x behaves in exactly the same way regardless of how talent and training are distributed. A +5 due to a 20 attribute and no proficiency is identical to a +5 due to an 8 attribute and +6 proficiency. There's no mechanics that do something like half the talent portion for skill checks that would be more training dependent, which would make that distinction actually matter.

If you specifically mean representing the raw ability checks for the innate differences, that wouldn't take a plethora of new skills. It would take six at absolute maximum, in that you could just take the attributes and stick them in the skill section (though, again, there are things like saves, damage, HP, etc. to take into consideration here, so a bit more finesse would be helpful). Even that wouldn't necessarily be that important though - it introduces a few edge cases for where no skill or tool is applicable, maybe it broadens a few skills a little to compensate, but it's not like there isn't already arbitrary bundling. Reaction time, gross motor skills, and fine motor skills have very little to do with each other, they still generally get stuck in Dexterity. Removing the stat effectively detaches them from each other, and while straight removal would practically necessitate an initiative skill, there's still a case to be made that the simulation gets better.

Doug Lampert

2016-03-23, 11:33 AM

If the distinction between talent and training actually mattered in any respect, this might be true. It doesn't though - a given +x behaves in exactly the same way regardless of how talent and training are distributed. A +5 due to a 20 attribute and no proficiency is identical to a +5 due to an 8 attribute and +6 proficiency. There's no mechanics that do something like half the talent portion for skill checks that would be more training dependent, which would make that distinction actually matter.

If you specifically mean representing the raw ability checks for the innate differences, that wouldn't take a plethora of new skills. It would take six at absolute maximum, in that you could just take the attributes and stick them in the skill section (though, again, there are things like saves, damage, HP, etc. to take into consideration here, so a bit more finesse would be helpful). Even that wouldn't necessarily be that important though - it introduces a few edge cases for where no skill or tool is applicable, maybe it broadens a few skills a little to compensate, but it's not like there isn't already arbitrary bundling. Reaction time, gross motor skills, and fine motor skills have very little to do with each other, they still generally get stuck in Dexterity. Removing the stat effectively detaches them from each other, and while straight removal would practically necessitate an initiative skill, there's still a case to be made that the simulation gets better.

All true.

Also, the feeble wizard that trains athletics isn't as fit as the burly fighter who trains athletics. Because the fact that the wizard HAS TRAINED athletics means he's not the feeble wizard. He's the strong, fit wizard.

D&D wizards are mostly based on some mix of Gandalf and various characters in The Dying Earth, none of whom are physically feeble.

And the fighters and barbarians are based on people like Conan, Faferd and the Grey Mouser, Aragorn, ext... None of whom are idiots.

If you want your wizard to be feeble, state that he is, roleplay it, and don't train athletics. That's not hard. All you've lost is the system actively fighting AGAINST you if you want to play a wizard who is physically fit. Like Harry Dresden, or Gandalf, or Mazirian or Turjan (dying earth), or Morollan or Aliera or Sethra (Draegaran), or....

Heck, I have far more trouble coming up with fictional feeble wizards than strong ones, and removing abilities does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to stop you from playing a feeble wizard. Nil, nada, zip. All it does is enable playing a fit wizard without needing to have your spells be weaker out of some nonsensical desire to have some sort of weird non-balance on non-core non-combat abilities.

Tanarii

2016-03-23, 11:40 AM

If you specifically mean representing the raw ability checks for the innate differences, that wouldn't take a plethora of new skills. It would take six at absolute maximum, in that you could just take the attributes and stick them in the skill section (though, again, there are things like saves, damage, HP, etc. to take into consideration here, so a bit more finesse would be helpful). Even that wouldn't necessarily be that important though - it introduces a few edge cases for where no skill or tool is applicable, maybe it broadens a few skills a little to compensate, but it's not like there isn't already arbitrary bundling. Reaction time, gross motor skills, and fine motor skills have very little to do with each other, they still generally get stuck in Dexterity. Removing the stat effectively detaches them from each other, and while straight removal would practically necessitate an initiative skill, there's still a case to be made that the simulation gets better.
I did mean this. Certainly one solution, one I actually suggested up thread, is to effectively allow proficiency in ability scores. There are a variety of ways you can implement that.

But you're still bundling everything for "Wisdom" proficiency for all the things you can do with ability score checks, you're not separating them to allow better simulation of variation within the set of things you can do with that check. You're just changing from ability scores assigned at creation & with the possiblity of improving over levels, to proficiency in psuedo-"ability scores" assigned at creation and automatically improving over levels.

Typewriter

2016-03-23, 12:38 PM

Knaight

2016-03-23, 01:35 PM

This feels like it would get very boring and generic to me. I remember playing 4E when it first came out and everyone had the same bonus to hit and the same modifiers to skills and it really sort of made things feel bland. Everything being either 'yes' or 'no' for the parties bonuses just feels bland to me. Everyone always has a +5 or a +0? You say more freedom but I don't see that either.
Nobody is suggesting having just two levels, at least a third is pretty much the minimum. There's not a meaningful decrease in the number of ability levels in use, and there's an increase in those that map to the same score.

•More freedom to be good at the things you want to be good at, even if they lie in unrelated ability scores.
-Except for now you're only good at 2 things. Out of 18-24? In the current system a fighter with a high STR has a few things he's naturally good at and can specialize in a couple of them and/or some unrelated skills. Now you pick just a couple skills that define everything your character can do?
Again, nobody is suggesting that if you use this system you have only two proficiency. Upping that number significantly is an obvious step.

•No more boring, homogenous stat distributions
Versatile stats make my character have options - an automatic +5 to some skills, +1 or anything else to others, maybe even a penalty here or there. Flavor and distinction - why replace all of that with 3 +5s? Instead of having what you call homogenous stat distributions I have a group of homogenous characters with identical bonuses.
Putting aside how characters with the same numerical bonus to different things are distinct, 3 +5s is not being suggested here. Something like distributing 12 +prof chunks with 3 ranks per skill is closer, and then the various side bonuses from classes and such stay there.

•More freedom to choose races by concept instead of by what gives you the necessary stat bonuses.
Are we getting rid of racial skill bonuses as well? Because those will just be what people use to determine what race to play as if stats are gone. And if you do get rid of them then I'd say races are all starting to feel very similar. Halflings and Half-Orcs have equal strength and nimbleness?

Stats make my character feel diverse - yes, sometimes it creates difficulties in creating specific concepts but in most of those cases I'd say the solution is to talk to the DM about it. Want to be a cleric who isn't perceptive - get disadvantage on all perception checks for some reason. I will agree that bounded accuracy and low numbers makes these differences sort of small, but I'd rather small customization than a system in which everyone has the exact same numbers for their skills. I'd play FATE if that was what I wanted.
You mean the Fate with a good 7 distinct levels of ability in use even for starting characters, which gets bumped to 9 if stunts are in use? That Fate? Because that's as many as you're likely to see in 5e. Characterizing that as everyone having the exact same numbers for their skills is nonsense.

Typewriter

2016-03-23, 02:44 PM

Nobody is suggesting having just two levels, at least a third is pretty much the minimum. There's not a meaningful decrease in the number of ability levels in use, and there's an increase in those that map to the same score.

Again, nobody is suggesting that if you use this system you have only two proficiency. Upping that number significantly is an obvious step.

From the original post:
•At first level, pick one save, two skills or tools, and three weapons; add half your Proficiency to checks or attacks made using them.

Having more than 2 would be necessary (especially if you wind up expanding from 18 to 25 or 30 skills), but the above is the reason why I focused on that. I missed some of the other stuff about increasing the amount of skill proficiencies instead of gaining stats and the like. I have an incredibly poor memory so sometimes, as I read through longer threads, I forget large amounts of them as I go along.

Putting aside how characters with the same numerical bonus to different things are distinct, 3 +5s is not being suggested here. Something like distributing 12 +prof chunks with 3 ranks per skill is closer, and then the various side bonuses from classes and such stay there.

I must have misunderstood, I thought the idea being kicked around was simply having skills be 'proficient' or 'not-proficient' which sounds incredibly dull to me. Can you explain to me in a bit better detail what you mean by that because I have no idea what "distributing 12 +prof chunks with 3 ranks per skill is closer, and then the various side bonuses from classes and such stay there" means. Is this thread about getting rid of abilities and proficiency, replacing it with a skill point sort of system? What is a 'chunk' and what are the 3 ranks? Is there any rhyme or reason to them or am I just a mishmash of random skills for no reason?

And why, again is this happening? Because adding 5 and 3 together when I roll a dice is unnecessary? Because a roleplaying system should accommodate every type of character? It feels like a whole bunch of over-complication that ultimately changes very little.

You mean the Fate with a good 7 distinct levels of ability in use even for starting characters, which gets bumped to 9 if stunts are in use? That Fate? Because that's as many as you're likely to see in 5e. Characterizing that as everyone having the exact same numbers for their skills is nonsense.

One of my players was interested in running a game and he gave me the source book and, from what I remember, you pick two 'things' and whenever you find a way to use your 'thing' you get a +2 to whatever you're doing. I thought it was Fate, but maybe I'm thinking of a different system.

Anyways, the question in the title was, "What if we removed abilities?". My response to that is that you completely break the flow of the system and are basically homebrewing a completely different system. This has nothing to do with 5E at this point. Your abilities are a representation of your characters abilities - they flow into everything you do. When you take them away you wind up with a disjointed mess. I can build a character who I say is good with greatswords because he's strong, but then turn around and have him not be strong in any other conceivable way? A roleplaying system is not obligated to facilitate any type of character you can imagine. A rules system is a framework for how the world works, and the 6 ability scores are literally the backbone of 5E. Working within that framework is half the fun of character creation in my opinion - wiping that all away feels like it undermines the entire system.

I think for me, the biggest problem I have, is that I just don't understand what this is trying to accomplish. I've never really felt constrained by this system in character creation. If I wanted to play an oblivious cleric I would roleplay an oblivious cleric. Maybe I see something but that doesn't mean I have to respond to it or even acknowledge it. Maybe I'm too invested in thinking about my shoes to even really register that I saw a dragon flying by. The original post is talking about solving problems that I don't understand but is introducing problems I do.

One thing I will say is that I've always felt that the stat system in D&D is too far removed from the rest of the system. I could see replacing it with a proficient/not-proficient sort of thing. Like, a fighter is proficient in STR and CON, Rangers are STR or DEX and WIS, stuff like that. Make it similar to the rest of the system.

Are you strong? Then you get to add your proficiency bonus to STR things. Swinging a big sword? Climbing? You get +2 from proficiency. Then you can stack that with individual proficiencies - you're good with Greatswords, but not Greataxes - you get +4 with Greatswords (proficiency from STR, proficiency from Greatsword) but only +2 with Greataxes. You're not proficient with any specific STR skills but you still get one proficiency bonus because you're proficient with STR in general.

Basically, my problem with attributes isn't that they're unnecessary or need to be removed - it's that they're mechanically disjointed from the rest of the system. Getting rid of them altogether is a major change with little mechanical benefit (opinion) where as drastically changing how the stat system works would make more sense and work better within the framework of the system.

Knaight

2016-03-23, 03:23 PM

I must have misunderstood, I thought the idea being kicked around was simply having skills be 'proficient' or 'not-proficient' which sounds incredibly dull to me. Can you explain to me in a bit better detail what you mean by that because I have no idea what "distributing 12 +prof chunks with 3 ranks per skill is closer, and then the various side bonuses from classes and such stay there" means. Is this thread about getting rid of abilities and proficiency, replacing it with a skill point sort of system? What is a 'chunk' and what are the 3 ranks? Is there any rhyme or reason to them or am I just a mishmash of random skills for no reason?
Basically, think skill points, except for instead of adding individual points you add +prof to a skill, and can do so up to twice. Proficiency stays, you keep the variation,

And why, again is this happening? Because adding 5 and 3 together when I roll a dice is unnecessary? Because a roleplaying system should accommodate every type of character? It feels like a whole bunch of over-complication that ultimately changes very little.
It effectively opens up every character who is actually good at any skill attached to an attribute that isn't tied to their class. So for instance, say you want a fighter who was a watchman or gurad, and thus has pretty good perception. In this system, you assign 2 points to perception and call it a day. In the original system, your wisdom isn't very good and as such you're just out of luck. There's a whole bunch of major archetypes like this that are currently pretty poorly supported, and this fairly simple change makes a lot of them more accessible. We're not trying to get it to accommodate space marines or the like.

As for adding 3 and 5, my point is that D&D doesn't make any real distinction between talent and training, they both go into the actual rolled number. If you had a system where you roll NdM, where N is an attribute and M is a skill, you can't really pull attributes out without revamping the core die, and penalty systems could easily affect two rolls which get the same average differently (such as by knocking down the skill die if talent matters more, or knocking down the number of dice if training matters more). The point is that we're not actually losing a training talent dichotomy because it was never really there in the first place.

One of my players was interested in running a game and he gave me the source book and, from what I remember, you pick two 'things' and whenever you find a way to use your 'thing' you get a +2 to whatever you're doing. I thought it was Fate, but maybe I'm thinking of a different system.
That is definitely not Fate, at least not with some serious house ruling, starting with the lightest incarnation of the system (there's some variance, from a minimalist one about 30 pages long, to the Dresden Files incarnation that is upwards of 700).

Anyways, the question in the title was, "What if we removed abilities?". My response to that is that you completely break the flow of the system and are basically homebrewing a completely different system. This has nothing to do with 5E at this point. Your abilities are a representation of your characters abilities - they flow into everything you do. When you take them away you wind up with a disjointed mess. I can build a character who I say is good with greatswords because he's strong, but then turn around and have him not be strong in any other conceivable way? A roleplaying system is not obligated to facilitate any type of character you can imagine. A rules system is a framework for how the world works, and the 6 ability scores are literally the backbone of 5E. Working within that framework is half the fun of character creation in my opinion - wiping that all away feels like it undermines the entire system.
It's hard to see it as home-brewing a completely different system when the classes, feats, spells, core rules mechanics, and basically the vast majority of the book stays the same. As for the problem with the disjointed mess, that's only there if you force it. Your example is basically a character who's not particularly strong but is good with a great sword because they know how to fight effectively with a great sword. That leaves that problem completely solved. It also creates space in the game for someone who is good at fighting with a melee weapon without also being freakishly strong, and for someone who is freakishly strong but not particularly good with a weapon, both of which are entirely realistic. Most soldiers are not also weight lifters and never were (which isn't to say they were likely to be weak), plenty of big strong people who can lift huge amounts of weight couldn't necessarily fight particularly well with a weapon.

Hrugner

2016-03-23, 03:33 PM

You're not stripping PC capability of all in world narrative explanation, as the in world narrative explanation would be the description of the character that leads you to pick the sets of skills (plus whatever the replacement systems for ability functions turn out to be) in the first place. Your example is a bit of an outlier that's not particularly likely to actually see play, but honestly, the character could work. We've got someone who's vision pretty much comes down to multicolored blurs, but who can generally supplement with hearing and who has an impeccable sense of how to shoot for timing and distance, with the blurriness being what contributes to their misses - which, this being 5e, there will still be plenty of. The character also has a knack for rote memorization, and has learned a lot of raw information; they're just really terrible at piecing information together on their own.

I know people who fit in both of these categories, although the nearly blind crack shot generally wears glasses - even without them though, if he has a sense of the terrain (say by having moved through it) he can place shots pretty well. As for the second category, think back to school - I'd be extremely surprised if you didn't know at least one person who generally did very well on things like memorization based tests, while flailing about horribly whenever they had to actually think about anything (academic or not).

You can manually put the narrative explanation back in, sure. There's no structure to help new players find the narrative connection on their own though. There's also no inherent observable or describable attribute that could show rather than tell what a character is capable of. The nearly blind shooter is no-more irregular and unexpected than the hawkeyed one. We have enough people annoyed about small sized martial characters, this change would spread that annoyance even further.

Regarding people I've known who could remember things but didn't understand them all that well. They also had trouble recalling the information long term, it was more a parlor trick than anything else. The people who generally learned things and retained them were more likely to forget a specific than walk back to the fact from general knowledge. I don't think knowledge proficiency could be represented accurately by rote memorization as it gives you general knowledge about things you may never have encountered.

Honestly, giving a player rote memorization as a quirk without giving them knowledge skills would be pretty fun as part of a character concept. Rattling off the name, height, weight, mating habits, regions of origin and nearest genetic ancestors while everyone's hoping to hear what sort of resistances it has would be fun.

Daishain

2016-03-23, 03:56 PM

I'd be more inclined to reduce the importance of the die roll than eliminate abilities. Oh, the system could use some tweaking, not least in terms of what each ability does and where it overlaps with others, but those stats represent something quite important, the ability to differentiate characters in terms of raw ability, not just learned skills.

Oramac

2016-03-23, 03:57 PM

I admit I haven't read the whole thread, and I think I'm generally against removing the ability scores entirely. But I have thought for a while that they are more complex than they need to be.

Instead of the 8-20 scores with math for a modifier, why not just use the modifiers baseline? Say a zero score is "average", and a -1 is "below average", while a +1 - +5 is somewhere between "above average" and "superhero-like".

So you just have a -1 to +5 scale. No math or modifiers for new players to mess with, it still applies perfectly well to attacks/saves/checks and all that, and instead of a +2 to a stat for racial bonuses, just call them all a +1. Either keep or remove the current +1 bonuses. Keeping them would mean each race is a bit more powerful, and dropping them wouldn't really make the races any less powerful.

Knaight

2016-03-23, 04:09 PM

You can manually put the narrative explanation back in, sure. There's no structure to help new players find the narrative connection on their own though. There's also no inherent observable or describable attribute that could show rather than tell what a character is capable of. The nearly blind shooter is no-more irregular and unexpected than the hawkeyed one. We have enough people annoyed about small sized martial characters, this change would spread that annoyance even further.

Maybe this just reflects a different order of character creation, but you don't have to manually put the narrative explanation back in if you start with the narrative explanation and then build the character to fit, and that also makes the nearly blind archer much more irregular, because it's less likely to come up as an archetype (in a fantasy game anyways, if this was superheros I'd expect a good half of the archers to be completely blind). Plus, there is still synergy there, as knowing that you have a target in the first place could be a perception check, at least if it's something like chasing down and ambushing someone instead of realizing that someone is shooting at you and aiming in that general direction.

Hrugner

2016-03-23, 06:11 PM

Maybe this just reflects a different order of character creation, but you don't have to manually put the narrative explanation back in if you start with the narrative explanation and then build the character to fit, and that also makes the nearly blind archer much more irregular, because it's less likely to come up as an archetype (in a fantasy game anyways, if this was superheros I'd expect a good half of the archers to be completely blind). Plus, there is still synergy there, as knowing that you have a target in the first place could be a perception check, at least if it's something like chasing down and ambushing someone instead of realizing that someone is shooting at you and aiming in that general direction.

It could be just a difference in order of creation. I certainly start with "what can this character do" then move on to what they have done to get there, why they do what they do, and how that situates them to be a potential hero in the type of story the DM wants to tell. Starting from who they are and then adding in what they do has always left me with characters who feel more like a collection of traits rather than a complete character.

Maybe if there were skill trees, or some other way that made it so character ability wasn't always deliberately placed and the cost of each choice not uniform then I could see getting rid of abilities, but making everything a disconnected check box seems pretty flat.

Tanarii

2016-03-23, 06:22 PM

Instead of the 8-20 scores with math for a modifier, why not just use the modifiers baseline? Say a zero score is "average", and a -1 is "below average", while a +1 - +5 is somewhere between "above average" and "superhero-like".
1) 3-18 is Tradition.
2) Stat generation via rolled dice. (Which is also Tradition.)
3) Multiple rolled dice produce a bell curve of results. (Which is also Tradition, but also note point buy has similarly curved results)

If you don't care for rolled attributes, per the two other threads already discussing that topic, I totally understand. But that's the "why" of why it's done this way. Basically, Tradition. :)

Edit: Personally if I was ditching scores the way you suggest, I'd probably give a standard array 6 numbers, from +0 to +5.

Grod_The_Giant

2016-03-23, 06:27 PM

From the original post:
•At first level, pick one save, two skills or tools, and three weapons; add half your Proficiency to checks or attacks made using them.
That's in addition to all your normal saves and proficiencies from race, class, and background.

And in contrast to your position, I feel like an attribute-less system (however the details are eventually worked out) removes complexity. With stat caps, the standard array, and uniform proficiency, 5e basically already says that if you're level X, your expected bonus is Y. You can choose for it to be lower, but everyone's bonuses to attack, save DC, primary skills and so on will be approximately equal even going by RAW. The exception is if the skills you want to focus on use different stats than the ones your class relies on, in which case your bonus is up to 50% lower for no good reason.

I'm really not seeing where dissociation comes in. Your character is good at exactly the things you want him to be good at. If you use a greatsword but don't have any other Strength skills, being strong probably wasn't important to you-- you're relying on skill instead.

Regarding guiding new players, I think that's a lot less of a problem then you think, especially if you use the system of Bonds and suchlike. I'm playing in a Fate* group with players with RPG experience ranging from "about a campaign" to "nil," and I don't think anyone's confused about what their characters' deal or capabilities are. "No inherent observable or describable attribute that could show rather than tell what a character is capable of?" You have a list of skills you're good at right there in front of you. You picked it yourself.

*Sorry to keep bringing it up, but it's the attribute-less game** that I (and at least some of you) most familiar with
**Well, M&M has attributes but doesn't really care about them in any meaningful way
------

To those wondering how it would work, I think you could fold the raw abilities/saves into the skill list like so:

Str and Con become Physique, representing raw strength and health. This eats Athletics' use for grappling, shoving and the like.
Dex goes purely into Acrobatics
Int doesn't really need anything; Investigate covers Int saves, and the various knowledge skills have pretty solid coverage.
Wis can become Will, which should also cover Cha saves. Not sure what else, though; maybe also resisting enemy attempts to persuade or intimidate you, though D&D has never been set up very well for that sort of thing.
Cha can simply go away; the social skills cover enough and Cha saves are already subsumed by the above Will.

Alternately, you could keep the list of saves as saves, and also use them for raw ability checks (which should be done sparingly, but then they should always be done sparingly, one supposes. I can't think of much the skill list is missing) That might be the best bet from a simplicity perspective, I suppose, though not really from an elegance one.

Tanarii

2016-03-23, 06:35 PM

To those wondering how it would work, I think you could fold the raw abilities/saves into the skill list like so:

Str and Con become Physique, representing raw strength and health. This eats Athletics' use for grappling, shoving and the like.
Dex goes purely into Acrobatics
Int doesn't really need anything; Investigate covers Int saves, and the various knowledge skills have pretty solid coverage.
Wis can become Will, which should also cover Cha saves. Not sure what else, though; maybe also resisting enemy attempts to persuade or intimidate you, though D&D has never been set up very well for that sort of thing.
Cha can simply go away; the social skills cover enough and Cha saves are already subsumed by the above Will.
I think you want to check out the PHB's chapter 7. Because you're missing, like, half the things they explicitly call out for things you can do using ability scores but not skills. Let alone DM adjudication on the fly.

Vogonjeltz

2016-03-23, 07:00 PM

That's another argument.

I only responded to the controversial claim being made, I didn't introduce it.

Some people argue otherwise. It's also bad when you roleplay on, say, being kind of distracted by contemplating the spiritual, and then consistently do well on perception checks.

When you find those people and their arguments I'd love to hear them.

In the meantime, I'd argue if the player says their character is distracted with some weighty thoughts, they simply don't get to make a perception check, which requires focus, let alone use their perception score, in the same way it's done if a character is doing something else while traveling.

So, focusing on something such that you would say you're not present = no check/no score.

Hmm, some miscommunication here, I think. Overall, the change proposed would switch from a skill-and-ability system to a purely skill-based on. It would fold together and abstract the training/talent divide. You're good at the X skills you picked; you're not good at other things.

Take an example-- a level 1 human urchin Ranger.
•As an Urchin, he's proficient with disguise kits, thieve's tools, Sleight of Hand and Stealth.
•As a Ranger, he gains proficiency in assorted weapons, Str and Dex saves, and Nature, Perception, and Survival.
•For his half-proficiencies, he picks Athletics and Acrobatics-- he's got some natural talent, but hasn't really practiced.

As a first level character, he has three options when it comes to bonuses: +5, +2, or +0. For weapon attacks and all the choices above but Athletics and Acrobatics, his bonus is +5. For the latter two skills, AC, and damage rolls, it's +2. For everything else, it's +0. He gains max HP for d10+4=14 HP

The level 1 Sage Wizard, on the other hand, has a +5 bonus to spell attacks and save DCs, a handful of weapon attacks, Int and Wis saves, and Arcana, History, Religion and Medicine. He picks Nature and Insight for his half-proficiencies; for those, AC, and damage rolls, his bonus is +2. For everything else it's +0. He also gains max HP for d6+2=8 HP.

Does that make more sense? They're equally good at the things they're good at, but they're good at completely different things.

So what happens if a character wants to have a drinking contest, Go without sleep, Survive without food or water, Hold their breath, or March or labor for hours without rest?

Everyone is equally good at these things from the Barbarian to the Wizard?

Grod_The_Giant

2016-03-23, 07:09 PM

So what happens if a character wants to have a drinking contest, Go without sleep, Survive without food or water, Hold their breath, or March or labor for hours without rest?

Everyone is equally good at these things from the Barbarian to the Wizard?
Con saves, or whatever skill is created to replace them?

-------

Overall, though, would people agree that the main consequences are:

Niche cases which might once have been covered by unmodified Ability Checks have nothing
Lack of guidance on how to roleplay your character, particularly for newbies (with "lost distinction between natural aptitude and training" as a subset of this")
Loss of modifier granularity-- different characters will have exactly the same bonuses on checks they're proficient/half-proficient with, and there's much less freedom to represent different levels of dabbling
Doesn't feel like D&D anymore

Am I missing anything? (Sorry if I'm mis-summarizing your arguments; I tried to be simple and neutral)

Tanarii

2016-03-23, 09:49 PM

Niche cases which might once have been covered by unmodified Ability Checks have nothing
I don't think they're anywhere near niche. Ability checks are anything that's not covered by a skill. Even Int, which has deduction covered by Investigation, still requires an no proficiency Int check to recall anything not covered by one of the Lore skills.

I've certainly played with DMs that tend to try and force everything into a skill category, but my overall experience is that checks that skills don't apply to are about as common as ones that they do. But YEMV.

Sigreid

2016-03-23, 10:38 PM

Con saves, or whatever skill is created to replace them?

-------

Overall, though, would people agree that the main consequences are:

Niche cases which might once have been covered by unmodified Ability Checks have nothing
Lack of guidance on how to roleplay your character, particularly for newbies (with "lost distinction between natural aptitude and training" as a subset of this")
Loss of modifier granularity-- different characters will have exactly the same bonuses on checks they're proficient/half-proficient with, and there's much less freedom to represent different levels of dabbling
Doesn't feel like D&D anymore

Am I missing anything? (Sorry if I'm mis-summarizing your arguments; I tried to be simple and neutral)

You missed lack of any mechanical variation between two characters built on the same principles. Granted, that only seems to matter to me and a few others on the forum, but it would be more than enough for me to skip an edition.

Hrugner

2016-03-23, 11:54 PM

Hrugner

2016-03-23, 11:55 PM

Con saves, or whatever skill is created to replace them?

-------

Overall, though, would people agree that the main consequences are:

Niche cases which might once have been covered by unmodified Ability Checks have nothing
Lack of guidance on how to roleplay your character, particularly for newbies (with "lost distinction between natural aptitude and training" as a subset of this")
Loss of modifier granularity-- different characters will have exactly the same bonuses on checks they're proficient/half-proficient with, and there's much less freedom to represent different levels of dabbling
Doesn't feel like D&D anymore

Am I missing anything? (Sorry if I'm mis-summarizing your arguments; I tried to be simple and neutral)

That seems about right. A more robust background system could fill the spot left by the lack of attributes I'd think.

Grod_The_Giant

2016-03-24, 09:01 AM

You missed lack of any mechanical variation between two characters built on the same principles. Granted, that only seems to matter to me and a few others on the forum, but it would be more than enough for me to skip an edition.

I think that's covered under modifier granularity.
Yup. There's not really a way to represent very slight differences in capability due to different ability scores.

I don't think they're anywhere near niche. Ability checks are anything that's not covered by a skill. Even Int, which has deduction covered by Investigation, still requires an no proficiency Int check to recall anything not covered by one of the Lore skills.
Let's actually look at the examples...

Force open a stuck, locked, or barred door, Break free of bonds, Push through a tunnel that is too small, Hang on to a wagon while being dragged behind it, Tip over a statue, Keep a boulder from rolling-- That's all pretty raw strength. Athletics gets used for that sort of thing in combat-- shoves and grapples-- so that doesn't seem unreasonable. A new skill might not be inappropriate, though.
Control a heavily laden cart on a steep descent, Steer a chariot around a tight turn-- The former could fall under the same category, or both could be covered under the "Vehicles" tool.
Pick a lock, Disable a trap-- Thieves' Tools.
Securely tie up a prisoner-- That one's a bit tricky, I suppose; Use Rope is one of those things that sort of doesn't fit into other categories but is usually way too narrow to stand alone.
Wriggle free of bonds-- Acrobatics; we see the same thing with grapples.
Play a stringed instrument-- Performance
Craft a small or detailed object-- Appropriate crafting tools
Hold your breath, March or labor for hours without rest, Go without sleep, Survive without food or water, Quaff an entire stein of ale in one go-- Those all sound like Con saves, as previously mentioned
Communicate with a creature without using words-- Persuasion (how good you are at communicating) vs Insight (how good you are at understanding) seems fair
Estimate the value of a precious item-- History or tools might be appropriate, I suppose
Pull together a disguise to pass as a city guard-- Disguise kit
Forge a document-- Deception
Recall lore about a craft or trade-- History or the appropriate tools
Win a game of skill-- Gaming tools
Get a gut feeling about what course of action to follow--
Discern whether a seemingly dead or living creature is undead-- Perception or Insight
Find the best person to talk to for news, rumors, and gossip-- Persuasion often winds up covering Gather Information in other games, so...
Blend into a crowd to get the sense of key topics of conversation-- Insight

Of all the examples of "raw" ability checks the book gives, the only one that I couldn't place with a few seconds of thought was Use Rope (and I guess the raw Str ones, if you reject Athletics as raw Str)

[QUOTE=Hrugner;20578851]That seems about right. A more robust background system could fill the spot left by the lack of attributes I'd think.
Hmm. Agreed. How about each background gets treated as a sort of broad half-proficiency that you can use for relevant checks, like how tools work? The granted skills and tools are the main skills you learned, and the half-prof is everything else.

Morty

2016-03-24, 09:34 AM

I think removing ability scores is a very good idea, in the general sense. I've argued for it in the past. In a system like D&D, they're largely superfluous. But I'm not sure if removing them from 5e as it's written is worth the trouble. It could have been designed that way easily enough (if WotC's only priority hadn't been reactionary backtracking from controversy), but modifying the existing rules would lead to a lot of on-the-spot accounting for things that are missing, and potentially confusing players.

Segev

2016-03-24, 10:15 AM

I actually think this would have been closer to a workable idea in 3e and 4e, where stats were almost never called out directly in a roll and were usually a factor in calculating some other statistic (e.g. saves). 4e, in particular, did a lot of "use the higher of two stats in this calculation," which could have been reasonably replaced by a static value (possibly 0, if DCs or opposing roll values were similarly adjusted).

In 5e, the expansion of the number of saves to six actually ironically REDUCES the number of values to track, because the stats ARE the saves, now. I think the stats, too, provide a variance in competence that is necessary, which is lost in the proposed system of using Proficiencies alone.

5e has even done some things to make odd stats matter again; feats often give +1 to a stat, making an odd stat something that can still "improve" (based on its bonus) at ASI even if you take a feat, and I believe feat prereqs still (as in 3e) use odd stat values rather than even ones. Even stats are still more efficient, overall, of course, but there's reason to have a stat value that isn't even. Though why bonuses and penalties are offset by 10 is still mostly a legacy thing.

Typewriter

2016-03-24, 11:11 AM

Basically, think skill points, except for instead of adding individual points you add +prof to a skill, and can do so up to twice. Proficiency stays, you keep the variation,

It still seems pretty odd to me, but I get that I suppose. It still feels like it's not accomplishing much because instead of having good stat + proficiency you're just going to have proficiency + proficiency - you're going to wind up in the same place. With skills you don't double in you're going to wind up with just proficiency - just like you were proficient with a skill that you don't have a good relative attribute in.

It effectively opens up every character who is actually good at any skill attached to an attribute that isn't tied to their class. So for instance, say you want a fighter who was a watchman or gurad, and thus has pretty good perception. In this system, you assign 2 points to perception and call it a day. In the original system, your wisdom isn't very good and as such you're just out of luck. There's a whole bunch of major archetypes like this that are currently pretty poorly supported, and this fairly simple change makes a lot of them more accessible. We're not trying to get it to accommodate space marines or the like.

Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like not everyone is supposed to be the best at everything they want to be best in. Building a character within the confines of the rules is what defines him. A watchman with proficiency in perception is a better guard than a commoner without proficiency in the skill. Both of them pale in comparison to a wise character that's a guard. Or you can be a variant human who takes the feat that gives you +5 to passive perception and now the human watchman is as good of a guard, if not better, than the wise character.

Backgrounds are there to flesh out your characters skills in ways that make them different from generic NPCs. Being good in something doesn't have to mean you have the highest possible bonus in everything you want to do - that sounds incredibly boring to me - building a character with limitations is what makes characters distinct.

Something else - this system is built upon DM rulings, more so than other systems. If I had a player that came to me and said, "My character is very smart but not very wise, but he's sort of OCD and notices everything - can we do something about that?" I would say, "Sure, you can use INT on perception checks". Concepts that don't work within the confines of the rules should be spoken to the DM about - not require a complete re-write of the system.

As for adding 3 and 5, my point is that D&D doesn't make any real distinction between talent and training, they both go into the actual rolled number. If you had a system where you roll NdM, where N is an attribute and M is a skill, you can't really pull attributes out without revamping the core die, and penalty systems could easily affect two rolls which get the same average differently (such as by knocking down the skill die if talent matters more, or knocking down the number of dice if training matters more). The point is that we're not actually losing a training talent dichotomy because it was never really there in the first place.

Small numbers matter in this system. You say there's no distinction and yes - rolls do create an element of randomness that sort of eliminates, but that's going to be a problem as long as you're rolling a twenty sided dice and adding numbers smaller than your target DC. It feels like you're saying that because the numbers don't have enough impact stats need to go away and I don't understand that correlation.

That is definitely not Fate, at least not with some serious house ruling, starting with the lightest incarnation of the system (there's some variance, from a minimalist one about 30 pages long, to the Dresden Files incarnation that is upwards of 700).

My apologies then, whatever it was, was a 'small' blue book with pictures of Gorilla people and cybernetic people and the like on it. Most of the system seemed to revolve around players creating and defining two 'skills' that they could use in as many ways as they could creatively think about.

It's hard to see it as home-brewing a completely different system when the classes, feats, spells, core rules mechanics, and basically the vast majority of the book stays the same. As for the problem with the disjointed mess, that's only there if you force it. Your example is basically a character who's not particularly strong but is good with a great sword because they know how to fight effectively with a great sword. That leaves that problem completely solved. It also creates space in the game for someone who is good at fighting with a melee weapon without also being freakishly strong, and for someone who is freakishly strong but not particularly good with a weapon, both of which are entirely realistic. Most soldiers are not also weight lifters and never were (which isn't to say they were likely to be weak), plenty of big strong people who can lift huge amounts of weight couldn't necessarily fight particularly well with a weapon.

Most 'soldiers' in D&D probably have 10s in all stats. Not everyone is a PC with a 20 and an 18. The rules are an abstraction of who a character is and what they can do - if you want to completely erase the whole 'what a character is' (AKA the stats) then why use this system at all? That's why I say it's homebrew - you're replacing a stat driven system with a skill based system.

Lots of feats have stat bonuses, leveling grats stat bonuses, the entire MM would have to be re-written, races are losing what makes them distinct, class bonuses are being replaced. Probably more but that's what comes to mind over the course of 5 seconds.

Abilities are literally the spine of this system - nearly everything you do flows from those 6 numbers in one way or another. Getting rid of them isn't just a quick and easy houserule or modification to an existing system, it's completely changing the core mechanic of this system in a way that will require massive amounts of re-writes, balance changes, and adjudications.

That's in addition to all your normal saves and proficiencies from race, class, and background.

And in contrast to your position, I feel like an attribute-less system (however the details are eventually worked out) removes complexity. With stat caps, the standard array, and uniform proficiency, 5e basically already says that if you're level X, your expected bonus is Y. You can choose for it to be lower, but everyone's bonuses to attack, save DC, primary skills and so on will be approximately equal even going by RAW. The exception is if the skills you want to focus on use different stats than the ones your class relies on, in which case your bonus is up to 50% lower for no good reason.

Any time you take proficiency in a skill you're better than most commoners. Whether you have +5 from a stat or not, you're better than the average just because of that proficiency bonus. Complaining about something like wanting to be a martial class with all mental skills when you can't do those skills as well as a wizard is ridiculous. The wizard is smarter than you - why should it be easy for you to match his expertise? I'm not saying you can't, but it should require work - distribute your stats, take good feats, multiclass. Getting rid of stats is getting rid of (what I consider to be) the fun of the system - I find joy in making my concepts work within the system, when everything is simply handed to me - when everyone has the exact same bonuses - I find it boring.

I'm really not seeing where dissociation comes in. Your character is good at exactly the things you want him to be good at. If you use a greatsword but don't have any other Strength skills, being strong probably wasn't important to you-- you're relying on skill instead.

I think making everything based purely off of skill instead of attributes makes everything poorly defined. Some people are naturally good at things than others - replacing all of that with a purely skill based system gets rid of that. I tend to play strong character because I like big strong people. Then I direct my skills and feats towards things that make me interesting. I'm not 'the best' at anything but I have a character that is distinct and fun. Replacing that with something for no other reason than because it makes it easier to optimize in whatever you want sounds like it misses the point to me.

Regarding guiding new players, I think that's a lot less of a problem then you think, especially if you use the system of Bonds and suchlike. I'm playing in a Fate* group with players with RPG experience ranging from "about a campaign" to "nil," and I don't think anyone's confused about what their characters' deal or capabilities are. "No inherent observable or describable attribute that could show rather than tell what a character is capable of?" You have a list of skills you're good at right there in front of you. You picked it yourself.

*Sorry to keep bringing it up, but it's the attribute-less game** that I (and at least some of you) most familiar with
**Well, M&M has attributes but doesn't really care about them in any meaningful way
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I'm not against attribute-less systems in general and will gladly admit that D&D handles stats poorly. Personally I've always been a fan of the way systems like Shadowrun/WoD handle stats. My two problems here are that stats in this system are core to everything you do and making such a drastic change is essentially a homebrew rewrite of the system and that I feel is based around building characters and having to make balance choices regarding what you're good at - getting rid of that feels like it misses the point of the system and makes it way too easy to optimize.

Tanarii

2016-03-24, 11:11 AM

Of all the examples of "raw" ability checks the book gives, the only one that I couldn't place with a few seconds of thought was Use Rope (and I guess the raw Str ones, if you reject Athletics as raw Str)Okay. I don't agree with the majority of your assignments. But I see you're comfortable with forcing checks into skill and tool proficiencies. As long as the players don't object, you're good to go.

Knaight

2016-03-24, 05:31 PM

It still seems pretty odd to me, but I get that I suppose. It still feels like it's not accomplishing much because instead of having good stat + proficiency you're just going to have proficiency + proficiency - you're going to wind up in the same place. With skills you don't double in you're going to wind up with just proficiency - just like you were proficient with a skill that you don't have a good relative attribute in.

Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like not everyone is supposed to be the best at everything they want to be best in. Building a character within the confines of the rules is what defines him. A watchman with proficiency in perception is a better guard than a commoner without proficiency in the skill. Both of them pale in comparison to a wise character that's a guard. Or you can be a variant human who takes the feat that gives you +5 to passive perception and now the human watchman is as good of a guard, if not better, than the wise character.

Backgrounds are there to flesh out your characters skills in ways that make them different from generic NPCs. Being good in something doesn't have to mean you have the highest possible bonus in everything you want to do - that sounds incredibly boring to me - building a character with limitations is what makes characters distinct.
Having single proficiency also covers the equivalent of having good stat + no proficiency, but yes, the numbers work out pretty close to the same. It's just that it creates two new options, one of which is to be really good at something without generally having the attribute to back it (the specialized savant who's not all that bright in general but really knows a particular area, the skilled climber (and swimmer, and runner) who's very muscular but also pretty short, and as such isn't going to be good at things like lifting a portcullis regardless of athletics skill), etc. The other new option is that it creates an option to make a character who's broadly good within a field, but has some glaring flaws. You have the brilliant person who doesn't know jack about a particular subject, and embarrasses themselves every time they talk about it, you have someone who's built like Andre the Giant, and who while really strong is not particularly athletic due to a combination of low stamina and any athletics check for them involving moving their massive frame around. You're still building a character within the rules, you're just using a modified system.

Also take your continuation of my watchman example. You have them worse than a wise guard, or they can take the feat and get better than the guard. The point is, there's already a way within the system for that, there just isn't for other skills. You have the same range of characters, they're just made differently. If you want a fighter who used to be a line soldier, maybe you deliberately maintain a +0 to perception (or you don't, because that's a skill you might bump up just to reflect them being an adventurer. However, you can now also do so for any class that has wisdom as a core stat. If you're making the watchman you will probably get a +Prof, much as you would if you were trying to represent any number of other characters. If you want to represent a particularly skilled watchman who also got pulled into specialized duties that require observation, take +2*Prof. In this case, it's basically just a way of representing characters you already could, but now you have to fight the system less to do it. In other cases, it does open up characters.

As for everyone being the best at everything they want to be the best in, unless it's a modest list you still have to prioritize, there's still a limited number of proficiencies. On top of that, it's worth noting that your statement "I feel like not everyone is supposed to be the best at everything they want to be the best at" is a bit messy at distinguishing between player and character. If you mean that the player can't choose that their character is the best at everything then this doesn't actually change anything. At the very least other players can choose to be just as good at the same thing, the same way they can in the old system, and there's probably NPCs who are better than you, at least up until really high levels. If there's collaborative character generation and you have multiple characters who both want to be in the niche of being the best at a particular thing, some sort of compromise is needed.

Something else - this system is built upon DM rulings, more so than other systems. If I had a player that came to me and said, "My character is very smart but not very wise, but he's sort of OCD and notices everything - can we do something about that?" I would say, "Sure, you can use INT on perception checks". Concepts that don't work within the confines of the rules should be spoken to the DM about - not require a complete re-write of the system.

Small numbers matter in this system. You say there's no distinction and yes - rolls do create an element of randomness that sort of eliminates, but that's going to be a problem as long as you're rolling a twenty sided dice and adding numbers smaller than your target DC. It feels like you're saying that because the numbers don't have enough impact stats need to go away and I don't understand that correlation.
I'm not saying there's no distinction between different bonuses. I'm saying that because of how the system works, there's no real distinction between rolling 1d20+2+6 or 1d20+5+3. It's a 1d20+8 roll regardless, and there's noting that affects only the individual parts of it. That's my contention for how there isn't actually any real differentiation between talent and training made within the system.

As for the system being built upon DM rulings, the fact that the DM can work around the rules doesn't mean that the rules shouldn't also be modified. That it's much easier to do so in 5e than a number of other systems is a point in its favor, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be tweaked to make it better for particular use cases.

Most 'soldiers' in D&D probably have 10s in all stats. Not everyone is a PC with a 20 and an 18. The rules are an abstraction of who a character is and what they can do - if you want to completely erase the whole 'what a character is' (AKA the stats) then why use this system at all? That's why I say it's homebrew - you're replacing a stat driven system with a skill based system.

Lots of feats have stat bonuses, leveling grats stat bonuses, the entire MM would have to be re-written, races are losing what makes them distinct, class bonuses are being replaced. Probably more but that's what comes to mind over the course of 5 seconds.

Abilities are literally the spine of this system - nearly everything you do flows from those 6 numbers in one way or another. Getting rid of them isn't just a quick and easy houserule or modification to an existing system, it's completely changing the core mechanic of this system in a way that will require massive amounts of re-writes, balance changes, and adjudications.
On soldiers, that's besides the point (although the average person having flat 10s as opposed to an average bonus of 0 just feels off, and soldiers not being skewed a bit towards soldiery things also feels off). The point is that one doesn't need to be hugely strong to wield a big weapon well, and that someone weaker keeping up with someone stronger is not just believable, but completely unremarkable. You can swap from "this person is good with that sword because they are strong" to "this person is just good with that sword" without any loss of verisimilitude, so there's not actually a verisimilitude-options trade, just a gain in options. The other point is that this holds true for a lot of things, particularly when the baseline standard is for a character to be generally functional, as in 5e.

Any time you take proficiency in a skill you're better than most commoners. Whether you have +5 from a stat or not, you're better than the average just because of that proficiency bonus. Complaining about something like wanting to be a martial class with all mental skills when you can't do those skills as well as a wizard is ridiculous. The wizard is smarter than you - why should it be easy for you to match his expertise? I'm not saying you can't, but it should require work - distribute your stats, take good feats, multiclass. Getting rid of stats is getting rid of (what I consider to be) the fun of the system - I find joy in making my concepts work within the system, when everything is simply handed to me - when everyone has the exact same bonuses - I find it boring.

I think making everything based purely off of skill instead of attributes makes everything poorly defined. Some people are naturally good at things than others - replacing all of that with a purely skill based system gets rid of that. I tend to play strong character because I like big strong people. Then I direct my skills and feats towards things that make me interesting. I'm not 'the best' at anything but I have a character that is distinct and fun. Replacing that with something for no other reason than because it makes it easier to optimize in whatever you want sounds like it misses the point to me.
Making everything skill based doesn't do that though. Take your big strong character, which is also whatever else they are. Go through the skill list, take +Prof to most strength related skills to represent the character being big and strong, and then spend the rest on whatever else they are. Bam, you have a big strong character. It also lets you choose to exclude things, such as in my above example of the big strong character who doesn't have any Athletics bonus.

And again, saying that everyone has the exact same bonuses is total nonsense. Characters are still good at some things and bad at other things, and complaining that two characters who both emphasized a skill enough to get +2*Prof have the same bonus at the same level is pretty much the same thing as complaining that two characters both have the same bonus in a proficient skill with the same attribute. Yeah, they do, how is that a problem?

I'm not against attribute-less systems in general and will gladly admit that D&D handles stats poorly. Personally I've always been a fan of the way systems like Shadowrun/WoD handle stats. My two problems here are that stats in this system are core to everything you do and making such a drastic change is essentially a homebrew rewrite of the system and that I feel is based around building characters and having to make balance choices regarding what you're good at - getting rid of that feels like it misses the point of the system and makes it way too easy to optimize.
There's some work involved in the change, sure. It takes a bit of home brewing to change the system. It's vastly less effort than it would take to build a D&D style system from scratch with the change though, and if you like the classes, feats, spells, core mechanics, etc. then it's a rewrite worth doing.

As for making it "too easy to optimize", I suspect this is one of those irreconcilable differences in how we approach RPGs. I don't see characters being supported by the system but hard to make a good thing. I don't see character power varying based on player skill in the character generation subsystem as a good thing (variations in character power because of people wanting to make weaker or stronger characters and the group being on board with that, sure). I'd much rather the process be one where you come up with the concept behind a character, get the mechanical stage over with as easily and directly as possible, and then get into the game.

So, does this change undercut the whole character creation minigame pretty dramatically? Absolutely. That's a feature though, not a bug, as for a lot of people character creation isn't so much a fun minigame as a chore to get through to get to the game proper. Maybe I'm misinterpreting here, and that's just my position and not mine, Grod's, and a substantial fraction of the proponents in this thread in general.

I doubt it.

Vogonjeltz

2016-03-24, 06:49 PM

So, would it be THAT bad if, for example, you'd say a Monk gets proficiency in Dexterity AND Constitution?

I'm just spit-balling here, but if I were going to build around this theme - improved saving throws - I'd probably make it an archetype, and have it run off of either the ranger or rogue chassis.

The archetype would be called 'Survivalist', or something like that: at various levels you would gain proficiency in different saves, pick up evasion, indomitable will, maybe a variation of bladesinger's int to ac, and maybe resistances (a la the bear totem barbarian) or some variation of mastery of death (a la the monk of the long death). His whole stick is that he's just one tough little nut to crack.

Obviously, this is all just preliminary thought-work, so I've no idea how balanced (or imbalanced) that would be, but the idea has a lot of appeal, in terms of the fantasy genre.

The concept of the tough guy, who basically takes it on the chin and keeps on coming not matter what, who wills his way through where others fail, the one who never gives up and never surrenders, well that's a pretty common trope, and the only class kinda like that is paladin at the moment...

I don't know, what do you guys think?

I think 100% of monks get proficiency in all saving throws at 14th level.

I'd also caution that strong is misleading here as the least common saving throw types (Int, Cha) are also the most devastating to fail and the most common (Dex, Wis) are, usually, survivable if failed.

Grod_The_Giant

2016-03-24, 06:55 PM

So, does this change undercut the whole character creation minigame pretty dramatically? Absolutely. That's a feature though, not a bug, as for a lot of people character creation isn't so much a fun minigame as a chore to get through to get to the game proper. Maybe I'm misinterpreting here, and that's just my position and not mine, Grod's, and a substantial fraction of the proponents in this thread in general.

I doubt it.
Pretty much this, yeah.

Also, a thought: keep ability scores/saves as-is for nonproficient checks, but leave them universally divorced from anything you're proficient in.