Thursday, September 21, 2023

Renaming Ability Scores

Whenever I have had the chance over the past couple of years I have been playing in Humza's wonderful Legacy of the Bieth game. One of the things in LotB's extensive player handbook document of house rules is a simple renaming and retooling of sorts for the standard D&D Attribute scores. Namely the game no longer has Constitution as a score and replaces Intelligence and Wisdom with Skill and Power. 

I've seen discussions online of both the general problems of having stuff like "Intelligence" (with all of its weird connotations and baggage) as a stat anyway, plus the ever-present discussion of how does one play a character more intelligent than the player themselves. 

Combining that with the approach of establishing setting through renaming the classic Saving Throw types, I have decided to do some tweaking and renaming of attributes in my own ever-shifting patchwork of house rules of B/X.  

From here on out, instead of Intelligence characters have a Knowledge attribute, whereas Wisdom (an even harder to define concept) is now Power. Magic-users will now rely on both of those, with Knowledge helping them with starting spells, and both Knowledge and Power both being used when performing magical research, using an Arcane Research toolkit or doing similar stuff. 

This way Power still affects your ability to withstand magic by modifying your Saving Throws, but also lets all characters, not just magical types, interact with various devices and things by making checks against it. Meanwhile Knowledge is a bit more straightforward in indicating how much stuff your character knows (with low Knowledge not meaning the character is stupid or incompetent, but simply has a very narrow field of what they know). 

That's about it. Not much else to this post, but I wanted to establish this as I plan on posting more ideas for house rules, class changes (or even new classes entirely) and this would be helpful so people aren't utterly confused.

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