Sense and Sensability Scores

Look, I know that ability scores have a sweet place in all our hearts.
I know we all have our favoured ways of rolling them up.
We all recall the unbridled joy the first time we rolled a character with an 18 Strength.
We all remember working out ways to cheat at getting higher scores.

Not a bad roll.

But they confuse every newbie that's ever sat at my table. My dad still cannot work it out at times.
The way the modifiers are calculated are confusing. And then you say: "Roll d20 and add your Strength bonus" and they inevitably end up adding their actual Strength score and it all gets very muddled.

There's no point in having two numbers to represent one stat.
The ability scores were part of the original game devised by Gygax and Arneson (although a surprisingly limited part, compared to the influence your choice of class might have on character progression).
But now it's all about the modifiers.

To that end I was intrigued in the days of the Dnd Next playtests to read somewhere (and I cannot for the life of me recall where, but I am convinced it was Mike Mearsl that wrote it) that they were seriously considering doing away with the old roll 3d6 type ability scores. Because I was thinking the exact same thing at the time.

Now Wizards eventually shied away from doing this, and I guess that nostalgia and familiarity are the main reasons. After all, telling someone they've an 18 Charisma is how most of us met our wives, right?
But in the same way they clung for far too long to the morass that was descending armor class, I think it could be time for the old school ability scores to take a hike.

The math is weird anyway, as rolling 3d6 or 4d6 drop lowest or whatever's your poison gives you a nice bell curve... while the modifiers they translate to are fairly flat.


Why not give every score a rating from, say, 0 to 5? That's your Strength score. That's what you add when you roll a d20. That is it. Nothing else to worry about.


With that in mind, I started to devise a more simple and streamlined version of Dnd which uses the 0-5 system (something like a retro clone but not TOO cloney). I've been tapping away at it all week and already written up most of the races and classes. I've also reduced the number of ability scores down to four and tweaked several other bits of the game, all in a view to make it more playable for complete newbies, and young kids.

Having the 0-5 system is handy because you can give them, say, five points to divide between stats at the beginning of the game and the system feels "fair". Then as characters progress up the levels, you can offer them more points to spend. It's simple but it still plays quite a lot like pure Dnd would, in practice.

I'll tell you more tomorrow.