Considerations of changing stats (and their associated checks)

[Kane0]

Hello all.

I've been tinkering with shuffling around the classic six stats and the skills attached to them and was looking for thoughts and opinions. Well beyond the sacred cow stuff anyways.

- Strength and the physical aspect of constitution get rolled together. Call it strength, body or physique. Covers HP and saves against being moved or subject to bodily stresses like poison.
- Dexterity stays as is. Covers initiative, fine manipulation and dodging things
- Constitution becomes Discipline. is based off strength/body/physique, discipline covers concentration and non-physical resilience (willpower, resisting persuasion, etc)
- Intelligence stays pretty much the same, although may want to rename to something like Acumen to avoid double up of abbreviations
- Wisdom remains the same but gets renamed to something a bit more accurate, like Intuition. Covers perceptiveness and spidey senses
- Charisma remains pretty much unchanged, covering ability to exert influence over others

The new skill list:
Phys: Athletics, Brawn
Dex: Acrobatics, Stealth, Thievery
Acu: Arcana, Lore, Medicine
Int: Investigation, Perception, Survival
Cha: Deception, Intimidation, Persuation
Disc: Concentration, Insight

Basically Athletics gets separated into brute force and endurance, sleight of hands and thieves tools get merged, nature and survival are merged, religion and history are merged, concentration becomes a skill check rather than a save. Skills are evenly distributed amongst stats, with all of them having 3 each except for Physique and Discipline.

Some major changes to characters and gameplay that I see:
- MADness is increased across the board (casters want good Disc for concentration, dumping phys and dex are bad ideas for most)
- Casters all get another secondary stat they want to keep high with HP and concentration no longer linked to the same stat
- Concentration as a skill rather than save makes it much easier to get high
- Phys saves are much more prominent, good chance of outperforming the other two 'big three' saves
- Wisdom saves get a lot more murky, they could be intuition or discipline saves
- Acumen is still about as useful as intelligence, which is to say a dump stat in too many cases
- Barbarians generally have one primary, one secondary and four tertiary stats like fighters and rogues now, unlike the 1-2-3 or 1-3-2 split of other classes

What do people think? Has anybody had their own ideas on the matter? How did it go if tried?

[Unoriginal]

What is your purpose in doing this? What do you think this add to the game?

[Kane0]

Primarily to generate discussion, but I'm also interested in seeing what set of statistics fits best and works smoothest.

Constitution annoys me because it's an entirely passive and defensive stat compared to the others. What do you roll constitution to do rather than avoid something compared to other stats?
Both wisdom and charisma annoy me with their relative vagueness and odd interactions/implications. Does charisma have anything to do with my looks or personality, and if not what does it mean and if not why is it there? This has been argued many a time.
I wonder what stats are actually necessary, and which ones are superfluous. Why are there six? To satisfy an even physical/mental split? Was four too few? Likely it's just a sacred cow, but I would like to dig deeper if possible.

Ideally I'd like the stats to map well to the pillars of the game. For example two stats that are obviously for combat, two for exploration and two for interaction but also cross over to provide functions in other pillars. Passive attributes are somewhat undesirable from my point of view.

[Blood of Gaea]

I don't really have any interest in changing the stats themselves, but changing what skill is tied to what stat could make some sense. Medicine, for example, does make more sense as an Int skill.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Cons I can see:
You have to go back and rebalance literally everything. Every race, every class, every saving throw, every non-attack spell. That's a huge amount of work for (to me) marginal benefit.

You also make Concentration a skill tax. Every single caster will take that if possible, usually by making a custom background or by being V human or half elf. Oddly, it makes concentration checks easier to make, as it's easier to get a skill proficiency than a save proficiency. And if you can get expertise in concentration (cough bards)...

[Asmotherion]

I... get the reasoning behind it. Like, what you want to accomplish. But, all in all, I don't see any actual mechanical benefit, other than enhancing MADness to more classes, who speciffically work well because they don't have Madness.

On the other hand, Most Gishes invest in those stats either way, so practically in this system, you give more reasons to a Gish to be a Gish. It's a Win/Win situation for them.

A simple example: As a Hexblade, I'd want 20 Cha, 14 Dex, 13 Str, a respectable Int and Wis (preferably at least 12) and the rest I'd invest in Con. With your example, you actually reduce my MADness, by linking my HP to Str; I can safelly go for a 14 CON and invest a Feat for War Caster, so that I won't worry too much for my Concentration.

An other problem with un-linking HP and Con is creating a too easy stat to dump for non-casters.

A non-Wisdom caster looses a ton of useful skills if he has too low of a Con, including perception, insight and survival; Key aspects of know-how and getting feedback from your DM. Not to talk about spells that are mind affecting. In other words, Dumping Wisdom, means you get to play DnD the Hard mode.

Dumping Charisma means that whatever you say, the others interpreat in the wrong way. Also not very easy to RP with a DM who actually enforces the world interactions on you.

And intelligence means you don't actually get a lot of what's going on aroung you.

Every stat dumping must have a consequance. In this case, a non-caster could dump Con (Dicipline), and untill he met a level 14+Necromancer who could cast Finger of Death, live with his 8- Dicipline a happy life, fith no fear of actually having to use it for anything. He has the Cleric or Monk of the party to tell him who the bad guys are, right?

[Cespenar]

1) You have to come up with a more streamlined conversion, like "all Xs become Ys now". Otherwise it'd a major pain to change everything.

2) Discipline (Insight) makes zero sense. You should put it back to Wisdom/Intuition.

3) The other parts I can't really disagree with. I can see the intentions behind them.

[Millstone85]

If I were to rework abilities and skills, I guess it would look like this:

Strength (used to calculate HP)
Athletics (covers Acrobatics)
Drudgery

Dexterity (used to calculate AC)
Sleight of Hand
Stealth

Acumen
Arcana
History (covers Religion)
Medicine
Nature (covers Survival)
Perception (covers Investigation)

Charisma
Animal Handling
Inquiry (covers Insight)
Intimidation
Performance
Persuasion (covers Deception)

Concentration saving throws use your spellcasting ability, which is either Acumen or Charisma.