Dungeons & Dragons Ability Scores Are Pointless

When the original D&D designers were creating the game; they wanted a means to differentiate one "type" of character from another. So they came up with the six core stats (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution and charisma) that they felt would best encapsulate the parts of the character's body and mind needed during an adventure. Next they needed a way to quantify how powerful each stat would be. They chose to give each "ability score" a numerical value. Since the twenty-sided die (d20) was new and shiny back in the day; they wanted to use it in parts of their game.

A d20 allows for a random number to be rolled between one (1) and 20. Therefore, each number has a 5% chance of being rolled. I believe the original designers figured an "average" humanoid character in D&D would have a stat number somewhere in the middle of all this, and thus declared an ten as the average stat number. At first glance it seems to make sense, too: we humans have ten fingers and ten toes, we use a decimal system, and when rolling a d20 there is a 50% chance of rolling 10 or less and a 50% chance of rolling 11 or higher. All perfect, right? Not quite; that's when everything begins to unravel.

To better understand what is inherently wrong with this logic; let me ask you a question: on a day-to-day basis, how often do you consider yourself failing at things? Let's imagine you're carrying some heavy boxes up some stairs. You have to move 16 boxes up a flight of stairs; how many of the boxes are you typically going to drop and helplessly watch tumble down to the bottom? Probably none; if you're careful. But with the logic of D&D; an average character should fail at 50% of everything they do. What a bummer!

Ten is a Terrible Number

Worse yet, ten is just a terrible number. Our decimal system is not one (1) through ten (10), it's zero (0) through nine (9). Yup, nine is the limit. Starting at ten is starting over the maximum of our single-digit decimal system; not in the middle. The number ten is like that awkward period in our lives when we're going through puberty and our bodies are all gangly and disproportionated as we're growing into our true potential.

The number ten, it turns out, is too big for some things and too small for others. Imagine your PC has a constitution of 10; what does that get you? Does that mean you can start with 10 HP? Nope; that'd be too much HP to start, according to old school D&D. Okay, maybe if you had a dexterity of 10; that denotes how many spaces you can move per turn. Wrong again. What if we said an intelligence of 10 was the number of spells we could cast or the number of languages we knew? All too many. 10 is just too big of a number for these kinds of things.

The original designers of D&D decided that rolling 3d6 was a good way for you to randomly generate an ability score for your character which would have a statistical bias toward the number ten, as seen here. Except--wait a minute--there's a problem, isn't there? 3d6 doesn't center on the number 10, it centers on the number 10.5. If you have OCD tendencies like me, that 0.5% imbalance will make your eye twitch. It's almost as if the designers of D&D either didn't know their dice probabilities or simply shrugged it off, grabbed a beer and said "good enough". This means you're just as likely to roll an 11 as you are a ten. They easily could have used a plethora of other methods, such as roll 4d4, but decided to use an imperfect dice mechanic.

Ability Modifiers Are A Hack

But none of this solves our original problem with ten. You see, the founders of D&D knew ten was imperfect, which is why they had to come up with a hack to fix it. Thus, Ability Modifies were born. The idea was that the more of an extreme you rolled over or under this fabled ten, the more +1, +2 or +3 modifiers you would gain for various tasks. In later editions of D&D these modifiers would be expanded up to +4 and +5 and sometimes even beyond).



It was these numbers that the designers truly wanted to work with. These numbers were smaller, more manageable and more applicable. They allowed characters to dictate a number of feats:

• Melee Combat -- Increased the chances a character would hit their target.
• Increase Weapon Damage -- Melee and thrown weapons would deal more damage with a high strength modifier.
• Force Open Doors -- Could be used to increase the "Open Doors" roll.
• Languages -- Dictates the number of languages a character knows.
• Save Throws vs Spells -- Applied to the save throw roll to increase a character's odds of saving themselves from damage or magical effects.
• Armor Class -- Effectively increased the defense of a character who had a high dexterity modifier.
• Extra Hit Points Per Level -- Added a number of extra HP equal to the constitution modifier.
• Reactions & Number of Retainers -- The charisma modifier added to reaction rolls and dictated the number of hirelings a character could hire.

As you can tell, these modifiers are an important part of what makes a character capable in an adventure. It was as if the ability scores, and their average stat of ten, were only there to create the ability modifiers then fade into the background.

How It Should Have Been

A more proper design would have focused on these smaller numbers from the start. For example, instead of centering on ten (or, technically, 10.5) D&D characters should have had about half that value (for an average of 5). With a smaller number like five you can assign values that matter in the game with the number as-is.

For example, with a CON 5, you could say your character starts with 5 HP. If you wanted to retain that 50/50 success-to-failure ratio, simply roll a 1d10 for any and all ability rolls; then add your character's number to that roll. If the total is equal to or greater than ten, the character would be successful in whatever they were attempting to accomplish. It's such a simple, easy to play and easy to remember mechanic; it makes one wonder why the designers used such a roundabout system, instead.