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pmurray@bigpond.com wrote:

Can someone please fix the primary stats?

Lets take an old man, a jewler, incredibly skilled with his fingers. Dex 17. Why on earth does this old man get a dodge bonus to AC? If strength is general athleticism, then being agile is an aspect of Str, not Dex. Or you can split it into Strength and Agility, if you want.

I'd say this is modeled by ranks in a skill. The old man might have a poor dex, but his levels in expert have allowed him to offset his old age with years of training.

And Wis/Cha need to be overhauled. Wis seems to mean, variously, what we usually mean by wisdom vs foolishness; and physical awareness of your surroundings. Why should being judicious have anything to do with noticing a footstep?

Again, noticing a footstep in 3.5 comes from the survival skill rather than from Wisdom directly. Untrained people get their natural ability from Wisdom. I think this makes sense since it represents an awareness, whether this is a moral awareness (being judicious) or an environmental awareness (noticing your surroundings).

Cha seems to mean both physical attractiveness, and also your ability to project strength of mind/will (as per what a socerer has).

I like the books definition. It's generally your force of personality. This is, of course, affected by your looks. But your talent at influencing others also plays a great role. But in the end, it's how well you interface with others.

I don't like how this ability is tied to sorcerers. By ability scores, sorcerers should be the most liked people around. Maybe there's a correlation (like marketing majors are probably better at parties than math majors), but it should not be so strongly linked. There should be some shy sorcerers that are still good at casting spells.

The only stats that make sense are Int and Con.

Speaking of Con - can we please get rid of the absurd idea of negative hitpoints? I say - hitpoints are a measure of your ability to to go on defending yourself. At 0 hp, you are not unconcious but defenseless. Critical hits do not do extra hp damage, but do constitution damage equal to what is now the crit multiplier of the weapon. If you are defenseless then every hit is an automatic critical. Simple.

No conceptual problems here. However, from an administrative stand point, I don't want ability damage to be too commonplace. This is hard for a DM to keep track of, especially when running many creatures. D&D has a simplicity that most of the time the only statistic that you need to keep track of is HP. I hope this is preserved.

Lets take an old man, a jewler, incredibly skilled with his fingers. Dex 17.

This is a highly unlikely Dexterity score for an elderly jewler. He may have had a 12 or 13 in his younger years, old age has likely brought this down (arthritis, mayhaps?).

Wisdom is your perception and intuition of the world around you, Intelligence is your ability to reason and learn, and Charisma is mostly about your force of personality and attractiveness - how easy is it for you to influence people to see things your way.

Combining Strength and Constitution makes no sense. Think of it this way: would you expect a power lifter to be able to keep up with an endurance runner in a 5K race?

I can't go on, this stuff is bad. This thread shows a lack of understanding of not only the game rules, but the real world of which they are an abstraction.