The Six Ability Scores

 Several months ago I idly began to try my hand at figuring out a sort of reconstruction of 5th Edition D&D to work as a purely science-fiction based RPG system. By this, I mean that I wanted to have a system that could work in a world without anything "magic" or "supernatural," but where the fantastical elements were portrayed as technological or new scientific discoveries.

For most of my life I've had this kind of internal debate as to whether science fiction and fantasy are actually the same genre or very firmly distinct, with science-fantasy hybrids like Star Wars making things all the more complicated (well, or just really making the former argument).

I ran into the following problem, though: in a world of firearms (and indeed, things like laser guns) what purpose would melee weapons play? To be sure, melee weapons are still employed in combat these days, but generally they're employed either because you screwed up and let the enemy get close to you, or you're planning on fighting an unarmed adversary. But lethal combat is almost entirely fought at range, and has been for centuries. The sword had a really good run for thousands of years as the most versatile, effective weapon, but once the average joe could shoot that guy with the sword from a hundred yards away, it didn't seem so great anymore.

Anyway, my solution was to create an alternative set of ability scores. I wanted to use them both to get rid of what I figured would be a useless strength stat and also add a bit of nuance. So I got Hardiness, Agility, Knowledge, Awareness, Capability, and Presence.

To explain: some of these are more or less one-for-one conversions. Agility is Dexterity. Awareness is Wisdom. Presence is Charisma. The new names were to reflect more accurately what I think those stats do. Indeed, you could make the argument that Intelligence and Wisdom in D&D should each have the other's name - Wisdom is something I usually associate with a broad breadth of knowledge and the ability to sort through that and come up with the right thing to do, while Intelligence is something I tend to associate more with on-the-spot logical and intuitive reasoning that lets you understand things as you see them.

Wisdom makes sense as Awareness both in that things like Perception, Insight, and Survival all really deal with you "noticing" things. Even Medicine (which maybe should be an Intelligence skill) can be argued as your being trained to spot the tell-tale signs of various injuries, poisons, or other medical issues, not necessarily just being able to recite a medical textbook from memory.

The way Intelligence works in D&D almost always involves recalling information. Indeed, of all the Intelligence skills, only Investigation really plays into that idea of taking in new information and sorting through it. One thing I'd encourage dungeon masters to do is make intelligence checks more helpful. Nine times out of ten it seems that succeeding on such a check at best just gives the players some interesting background lore that, honestly, everyone at the table would probably like to just know. I think you can and should absolutely let players who succeed on intelligence checks know things like what a creature is resistant or immune to. But this is, of course, very knowledge-based.

I created Capability to kind of differentiate between the sort of book-smarts and more direct, practical knowledge. A Wizard is all about the pursuit of knowledge, gaining new spells to cast as their knowledge increases. But someone like an Artificer uses their intelligence in a more creative and intuitive way, inventing and building. The benefit of separating these out into different stats is that you can have a brilliant mechanic who has never read a book in their life, or you can have a cloistered academic who has no idea how the hatch on a spaceship works.

Presence is borrowed from Black Void (which has a lot more of these stats than D&D) and plays the part of charisma. Charisma has certain connotations in typical parlance that often force a player to kind of run into a conflict between their character's conceived vibe and what they can, mechanically, do. Say you've got a Sorcerer whose power has made them isolated and awkward, but on a mechanical level, they have the best Persuasion or Deception, and thus tend to serve as the party's face. Calling it presence doesn't really fix that, but it emphasizes the notion that charisma isn't just suaveness - it's a kind of ineffable and not even conscious impact that the person has when people interact with them.

Now, Hardiness was the attempt to combine Strength and Constitution. In normal D&D, this would be terrible, given that it would mean some classes would really only care about one stat. But, my thought was that the lack of melee weapons to use in this sci-fi version would make this ok.

But, as a friend advised me, in fact it would lead to a bunch of problems where either making a Hardiness-based character work would result in an overpowered character, or you'd have to nerf any possible melee build to the point that you might as well not even have a stat for melee damage.

And I think that led me to a conclusion: the six ability scores in D&D feel flawed and broken, but they're profoundly versatile, and I think it's hard to come up with as elegant a spread.