Alternatives to using charisma for instruments.

[Wizard_Lizard]

I am thinking of an alternative to charisma, for people who learned their instruments from practice and skill.
For learning an instrument, you certainly use intelligence, and dexterity, and I feel like they would work.
It wouldn't be gamebreaking, I just want to know your thoughts.

[JackPhoenix]

Well, considering there are no ability scores associated with tool (or instrument) use, except Dex and Thieves' Tools....

I mean, there's no need for an alternative to something that doesn't exist in the first place.

[Teaguethebean]

As how dnd 5e works you can simply call for a dexterity(performance) check and that could be how someone plays the piano to a crowd as an example

[EternalPrime]

I’m definitely in favor of mixing and matching ability scores with tools, gaming sets, and musical instruments:

Woodworking:
Strength: raising a barn.
Dexterity: intricate detailed carving on a chair back.
Constitution: raising a barn in one day.
Intelligence: picking the right wood for a ship’s keel or a warbow.

Musical Instruments:
Strength: marching in a parade playing a sousaphone
Dexterity: playing a particularly complex or intricate piece at twice normal tempo.
Constitution: making it through a third four-hour set with few or no breaks.
Intelligence: recalling an obscure, ancient lullaby specifically requested by the Duke.
Wisdom: reading the crowd and switching to a slow traditional piece after a lively quadrille.
Charisma: bringing the whole house to tears with your haunting rendition of “Bushes of Love”

Gaming Sets:
Constitution: keeping your cool during the thirty-sixth hour of the poker tournament.
Dexterity: putting a little extra spin on the bocce ball.
Intelligence: knowing how to execute King John’s Gambit in Dragon Chess.
Wisdom: recognizing that your opponent is trying to execute King John’s Gambit.
Charisma: making your opponent believe you’re trying to execute King John’s Gambit.

BTW: I reserve Performance for things like acting, public speaking, dancing, and singing where YOU are the instrument.

[Corran]

I am thinking of an alternative to charisma, for people who learned their instruments from practice and skill.
For learning an instrument, you certainly use intelligence, and dexterity, and I feel like they would work.
It wouldn't be gamebreaking, I just want to know your thoughts.
Wisdom. Wisdom is what best represents practice/training.

[greenstone]

What is the character trying to do?

Impress someone with their playing? Charisma check.
Simply play something the best they can? Dexterity check.
Play sheet music? Intelligence.
Play music in harmony with already-playing sounds? Wisdom.

[Misterwhisper]

I see it like this:

If you are the lead guitarist and you are putting on a concert you want the crowd really into it and want to impress them and look cool, that would be charisma based. You want attention and influence.

If you are a member of an orchestra or are showing off you exceptional technique like at an audion for a school, that would be dexterity. Your skill with the instrument is the point not looking cool.

Ex.

You are the head chef in the best restaurant in the city because you make the best food. Dexterity.

You put on a weekly cooking show with huge ratings where you show cooking tips. Charisma

You are judging dishes for a competition. Wisdom

You only have 3 hours to cook for 100 people. Con

You are designing a new recipe that has never been done. Int

It would take a very odd situation to have to use strength. Like you are forced to cook for a storm giant and all the cookware is as big as you are.

[Tanarii]

Wisdom. Wisdom is what best represents practice/training.
How does being attuned to the world around you, and perceptiveness and intuition, represent practice and training?

[Teaguethebean]

How does being attuned to the world around you, and perceptiveness and intuition, represent practice and training?

Agreed I feel Intelligence would be training to use something or Dexterity for the execution of a difficult piece

[Corran]

How does being attuned to the world around you, and perceptiveness and intuition, represent practice and training?
They don't. I was expanding wisdom so it can include practice/training because I thought that it is more appropriate to use this ability than any of the others. On second thought though, it's the proficiency bonus that takes care of the practice part. And the ability used just describes the nature of your talent. Which is rather hard to describe (as a generalization, using CHA for arts is probably the most appropriate).
ps: So yeah wisdom is out.

@op: It's a stretch for sure, but maybe you could use CON for wind instruments.

[JellyPooga]

Ex.

You are the head chef in the best restaurant in the city because you make the best food. Dexterity.

You put on a weekly cooking show with huge ratings where you show cooking tips. Charisma

You are judging dishes for a competition. Wisdom

You only have 3 hours to cook for 100 people. Con

You are designing a new recipe that has never been done. Int

It would take a very odd situation to have to use strength. Like you are forced to cook for a storm giant and all the cookware is as big as you are.

Sorry to shove my oar in, but as a chef myself, I have to disagree with some of these! Please forgive my "corrections";

"You are the head chef in the best restaurant in the city because you make the best food. Dexterity."

Eh...Dexterity doesn't have much to do with being a good chef; sure, you need a bit of decent hand-eye, but better "Dex" only really increases speed. Being Head Chef has more to do with smarts (knowing your menu, knowing what foods taste like and how they combine to make a great dish, etc.) and Charisma (working a kitchen is a team game and a good head chef is the captain of the team...and why do you think TV Chefs make for such good viewing? It's not because they're trained actors; they're just naturally charismatic people at the top of their game). If it's based solely on the quality of food, then I'd say Intelligence. If it's about being Head Chef of the best place in town...mmmmm, probably Charisma. Being a chef is not so much a profession, as it's an art form.

"You put on a weekly cooking show with huge ratings where you show cooking tips. Charisma

You are judging dishes for a competition. Wisdom"

Yeah, agree with these ones.

"You only have 3 hours to cook for 100 people. Con"

Hahahahahaha! That's just a quiet Saturday night in even a middling restaurant! Sorry for the derision, but two sittings of 50 is easy money for any chef worth the name (assuming you're prepped and have a team with you). If you're going from scratch, solo, then 3 hrs for 100 people is possible, but also more an exercise in logistics than cooking (and little to do with endurance; anyone can boil pasta and heat sauce for 100 within 3hrs; no-one can serve solo, a la carte from a menu without significant prep). If you want an example of what a chef might consider a Con check...hmm, maybe judging dishes for a (really bad) competition? :smallwink::smalltongue:

"You are designing a new recipe that has never been done. Int."

Again, like my comments about head chefs earlier; Int, yes, for food knowledge, but for a truly great dish...that needs flair, which is all Charisma, baby. You could also include Wisdom to know what kind of dish might impress a particular guest (some of the most famous dishes were designed with a particular guest in mind and their popularity is more to do with that reflected limelight than the dish itself).

[Coffee_Dragon]

Wisdom. Wisdom is what best represents practice/training.

Proficiency is what best represents practice/training.

[Imbalance]

Maybe a little homebrew, but let's say I want to powerslide into a shred and dry hump the monitor speaker as a bonus action without missing a lick. Assuming concentration for the duration of the solo, what DC would I set to see how many faces melt?

[greenstone]

…what DC would I set to see how many faces melt?

The DC has to be.... eleven.

[Damon_Tor]

You are the head chef in the best restaurant in the city because you make the best food. Dexterity.

What? Why? Because you can... mince vegetables real fast? The head chef won't be doing that. Maybe he had to do that to get where he is, but he doesn't have to do that anymore. The Head Chef sets the menu and instructs others in the creation of dishes. That's all Int (remembering flavor profiles) Wis (tasting dishes and figuring out what's missing) and Cha (effectively managing your team). Of the three, I'd say Wis is the most important here: the trope of the chef who comes by his underlings making sauce, tastes it, smacks his lips, then adds a few extra handfuls of some spices is a Wis check. Checking ingredients for quality is also the duty of the head chef, and that's a sensory challenge, using sight, touch, smell and taste to make sure the meat is fresh, the vegetables are clean, the fruit is ripe etc.


You only have 3 hours to cook for 100 people. Con

3 hours of labor requires a con check? Meh.

If you want a con check for cooking, think about exposure to pungent odors or juices that can act as skin irritants. Cutting onions, for example, can debilitate guys with sensitive eyes. If you need some higher DCs invent a fantasy onion that literally blinds people when they cut it unless they make a con save.

A con save might also be required when you make a mistake on some other check: smoke inhalation when you leave something in the oven too long, grabbing a hot pan handle to stop it from spilling or spilling boiling water on yourself when you fail to grab that handle, that sort of thing. Pass the save or wind up with a debilitating debuff for the rest of the night. There was one time at this restaurant I was working in when a customer asked for some kind of hot pepper to be put into their fajitas. When the water was added to the skillet (to make the "sizzle" effect when it gets brought out) the pepper juice in the steam cleared us out of the kitchen: it was like someone had used pepper spray. There's another way you could sneak a con check in.


It would take a very odd situation to have to use strength. Like you are forced to cook for a storm giant and all the cookware is as big as you are.

I mean, there's brute force needed for lots of stuff. Shucking clams comes to mind... not that it's a huge STR DC, but maybe if you're in a fantasy setting the princess really wants this particular type of magical clam that's extra hard to open. Shelling nuts can be challenging (you often can't just hit them with a hammer because you shatter the nut inside, so you need to apply even pressure using a specialized tool), and again they could be fantasy nuts of some sort. For meats, sometimes you have to cleanly chop through bone to get the cut you want, though that's an aspect of butchering, not something a chef usually has to do, but maybe to make this feast for the princess the huntsman just dropped off this SuperStag and you have to butcher it yourself because reasons. You can use a strength DC for pulling something large out of the oven or off of a cookfire. Like when a whole pig is roasted and served intact on the table; fail the strength check and you drop the pig into the coals and ruin it. Moving a large finished pastry item, like a wedding cake, from the place where you created it onto another surface for transport, display, and serving is easily a strength check. If you watch baking competitions in TV this is sometimes a point of failure. They're not strong enough, they shake trying to hold up the cake, and it topples.

[GreyBlack]

Anyone who has been to a rock concert knows that playing the instrument is the least important part of the performance. You can be technically masterful and know how to play the instrument flawlessly.... but that's still only a quarter of the actual performance. It's not just being able to play the instrument but the subtle inflections, the character, and the other events that happen that make the performance a performance. You can be extremely technically skilled at an instrument.... but Mozart wasn't known just for his technical skill. Same with all of the great artists. Hell, most music is written with just the same 4 chords anyway; the question is how do _you_ perform those 4 chords?

That said... if you're just trying to be part of a larger horn section for example, technical skill is a little more important so I'd make it some combination of dexterity and intelligence if you're not making it a charisma check.

[DeadMech]

5e you can and are encouraged to choose the attribute bonus that makes sense for a task. You simply have to convince the DM to let you and probably do the math equation with the new variables on the spot.

Music is a pretty good example. The challenge of writing a piece of music could either be charisma for knowing how to manipulate the audience's emotions but it is probably even more likely to be intelligence for knowing the rules and patterns that make a piece work.

Performing could be charisma for capturing the crowds attention and feeling out the mood of an audience but it could also be dexterity while playing a physically demanding and challenging piece. Or it could be int for playing a long complicated piece or set from memory. Or it might even just be a con check to get through the entirety of a concert without blowing out your vocal cords hitting the wider range of notes and ending up with laryngitis for the next 3 days.

My sister's fiancee has a talent for hearing music and being able to then play it without ever having seen the sheet music. That could be both wisdom for perceiving it clearly or int for knowing the structure of music well enough to guess the progression.

My wizard is fond of handing potential apprentices a handful of songs, giving them a day to memorize them, and then making them perform them for her as one of a handful of tests to see if they are worth the investment. Anyone who can't memorize the words to a song likely to either be be too unintelligent to memorize complicated spell components or too lazy to be a good student. And anyone unwilling to follow instructions or complain excessively about such a silly test is probably not to be trusted to follow directions and warnings about potentially dangerous magic study.