5 Stats For 5E

[GreatWyrmGold]

I would change WISDOM into WILLPOWER, though. This is just a personal preference for me. Willpower represents mental strength, determination, and a general "stubbornness" in a PC. This is a quantifiable CHARACTER TRAIT that can be measured by an ability score for role-playing purposes just like STR, CON, DEX, INT, and to a lesser extent CHA.

WISDOM, on the other hand, is a "measure" of how much one "understands" the world and how it "works" and is based on one's "experiences" in that world. This is VERY HARD to quantify as a statistical value and more appropriately represents a PLAYER TRAIT instead of a Characteristic or Attribute. Therefore, I always change Wisdom to Willpower in my games.

Aren't intelligence and charisma equally unquantifiable traits, which in practice depend on how good the player is at acting intelligent or personable? And how does willpower relate to one's perceptiveness (both in a literal Perception sense and in some related skills &c, e.g. Insight)?

[olskool]

Aren't intelligence and charisma equally unquantifiable traits, which in practice depend on how good the player is at acting intelligent or personable? And how does willpower relate to one's perceptiveness (both in a literal Perception sense and in some related skills &c, e.g. Insight)?

Intelligence is fairly quantifiable which is why we have IQ tests. Playing a "smart" character can be hard but you can substitute things like knowledge or idea rolls for the PLAYER role-playing Intelligence. It is MUCH harder for a player to act "wise" and the DM may be hard-pressed to come up with a roll to counteract impulsive or foolish behavior by that player.

Charisma is more difficult to quantify because it like Wisdom is "nebulous" in nature. Hitler had the Charisma to allow the Nazis to rise to power but I doubt anyone would really consider him to be either good-looking or personable. Yet, he rose to power due to his Charisma. Likewise, many movie stars are only average looking but there is "something" about them that causes them to be popular. Often this is their self-confidence but it could be other traits we see as desirable in a given culture. It is my own "viewpoint" that Charisma is based on what a society "views" as charismatic that causes me to impose a -10 on the trait when a character is interacting with a foreign society or race. There is a certain level of "prejudice" in every society towards "strangers" or foreigners that must be overcome through interaction with said society before the penalty towards CHA-based tasks is reduced or negated. This is just something that I do based on my own experiences during my military and law enforcement careers.

Willpower can relate to perception by being a measure of how patient and how attentive a Character is. The more patient and detail-oriented a character is, the more they will tend to notice. I dislike single characteristic skill/proficiency roots anyway (a reason I played Runequest/BRP for years until my current group insisted on playing 5e). In my opinion, Perception should be a combination of Willpower (a measure of patience) and Intelligence (understanding WHAT you're really seeing). That doesn't work well in 5e though.

[JNAProductions]

I would appreciate Godwin's Law not being proved right so soon in a homebrew thread for D&D.

[Knaight]

Intelligence is fairly quantifiable which is why we have IQ tests. Playing a "smart" character can be hard but you can substitute things like knowledge or idea rolls for the PLAYER role-playing Intelligence. It is MUCH harder for a player to act "wise" and the DM may be hard-pressed to come up with a roll to counteract impulsive or foolish behavior by that player.

We could make charisma tests too, that doesn't retroactively make it quantifiable. IQ tests have serious issues in terms of measuring intelligence, especially if you use them outside the parameters they're intended for (which is identifying people with severe intellectual disabilities; once you go over the average the test starts fraying fast). You can study for them, the proxies selected for intelligence tend to break hard when dealing with non-native speakers, there are cultural biases built into the verbal portions of the test in terms of the expected material culture of test takers. Similar issues apply to some of the other pattern recognition parts, where it's more about knowing the expected patterns and being able to identify things from that list than being able to recognize patterns more generally (not finding a pattern and finding a true but unanticipated pattern both fail equally).

[GreatWyrmGold]

Intelligence is fairly quantifiable which is why we have IQ tests.

A quick Google search calls BS on this. I thought that was common knowledge by now...

Playing a "smart" character can be hard but you can substitute things like knowledge or idea rolls for the PLAYER role-playing Intelligence. It is MUCH harder for a player to act "wise" and the DM may be hard-pressed to come up with a roll to counteract impulsive or foolish behavior by that player.

Two points.
1. You absolutely can substitute rolls for player wisdom. The DM can ask the player to roll a "common sense" check as easily as a Knowledge check; I know because I've done that myself.
2. You absolutely can't expect either Intelligence or Wisdom checks to replace player intelligence/wisdom. I've dropped hints thanks to PC Intelligence checks that the player completely failed to grasp the significance of, and this isn't just a "me" issue.
Yesterday, I was playing in a D&D game at the local game shop, and the next table over was struggling with a puzzle. The characters had (I assumed) made Intelligence checks of some sort to sort out how the instructions riddle and the puzzle interacted; the DM had to repeat the check-derived hint that the riddle wasn't talking about the eyeless statue when it mentioned a statue seeing something, several times, before it sank in. The characters were plenty smart to put it together, the players made the rolls, but for one reason or another the players weren't bright enough to put it together.

Willpower can relate to perception by being a measure of how patient and how attentive a Character is.

Not really. Putting aside numerous depictions of fictional characters who both "strong-willed" and impulsive, distractible, and/or oblivious*, I've met plenty of people in real life who were stubborn (basically the only way a strong will can manifest without mind magic, psychic powers, or the like) and oblivious. You can make any justification for why one person's willpower improves their attentiveness, but it doesn't apply to everyone, because the two concepts are only tangentially connected.

*Sometimes even portraying these characteristics as the cause of their strong will, ie due to not noticing the mental influence or whatever. Granted, this usually only shows up in comedic works, which is why I'm relegating this point to a footnote.

I dislike single characteristic skill/proficiency roots anyway (a reason I played Runequest/BRP for years until my current group insisted on playing 5e). In my opinion, Perception should be a combination of Willpower (a measure of patience) and Intelligence (understanding WHAT you're really seeing). That doesn't work well in 5e though.

I get that in theory, but it overcomplicates things in practice (unless you've got a computer recalculating everything whenever one of your numbers changes, of course).
I like how GURPS handles this sort of thing. Perceptiveness, willpower, and intelligence are all loosely associated; Intelligence is a core attribute which affects all three, Perception and Will can be raised or lowered independently of Intelligence, and skills which rely on willpower or perceptiveness are based off of Will or Perception.

[Marcus Amakar]

I think its a good homebrew which does get around the strange ubiquitous yet forgettable nature of the Constitution stat; simple but covers all bases.

However, the talk around additional merges which could be done reminds me of Grod the Giant's homebrew which removes all ability and replaces their bonuses with proficiency or half proficiency. I can't find the 'brew, but it seems to be the culmination of projects of this type.

[Caelestion]

It's here.

[Moxxmix]

This is a cool idea, though I'd take it further and fully rebuild the ability stat block.

Body         - Strength, constitution, physical resilience, athleticism, health
Coordination - Dexterity, agility, hand-eye coordination, fine manipulation, balance
Mind         - Memory, attention, retention of detail, problem solving
Presence     - Notability, sociability, attractiveness, leadership, reading people
Spirit       - Attunement, purity, magical capability

Where it converts from old to new:

Strength → Body
Constitution → Body
Dexterity → Coordination
Intelligence → Mind/Spirit
Wisdom → Body/Mind/Presence/Spirit
Charisma → Presence/Spirit

Reasons:

1) Constitution is just for saves and hit points. It's a bit of a waste, as far as the skill side of things go. It's also rarely separable from Strength in actual practice.

2) Int/Wis/Cha as magic casting stats creates a bias in their usage and the resulting skills. Generally the only reason people raise the stats is for the magic benefits, not the skills (except maybe Perception).

3) Wisdom has always been rather difficult to reconcile as a stat to correspond with skills. It's very easy to move the Wisdom skills to other stats.

4) Intelligence is almost always a dump stat for anyone other than Wizards. There should be better motivation for having it as a stat.

5) Spirit as a stat allows consolidation for magic power with conceptualization of ideas that are harder to represent with the traditional stats. It very easily leads into a better architecturing of undead, for example.


With the adjustments to the stats, there's a corresponding adjustment to the skills:

Skills
    Body
        Athletics
        Survivial
    Coor
        Acrobatics
        Sleight of Hand
        Stealth
    Mind
        History
        Investigation
        Medicine
        Nature
        Navigation
        Perception
        Religion
    Pres
        Animal Handling
        Deception
        Insight
        Intimidation
        Persuasion
        Performance
    Spirit
        Arcana

This is mainly to show how the Wisdom skills got split up (plus moving Arcana to Spirit).

And a quick summary of saving throws:

Body: Handles saves vs strength or resilience checks (grapples, poisons, concentration, etc)
Coor: Handles saves vs movement checks (entanglement, falls, dodging AOEs, etc)
Mind: Handles saves vs mental effects (illusions, magical blindness, reading thoughts, etc)
Pres: Handles saves vs mental influences (charm, dominate, fear, paralysis, etc)
Spirit: Handles saves vs spiritual effects (necrotic attacks, antimagic, spirit drain, Turn Undead, banish, polymorph, etc)


Anyway, this then necessitates a number of other changes, and it's an interesting rabbit hole to follow. The six stat system is traditional, and from a marketing perspective it's easy to see why they'd want to keep it, but a five stat system really feels more solid.