Jason, I know you are heavily inspired by DCC. Have you considered merging Wisdom and Charisma in FotF2, like they did? It’s called Personality in DCC but I think Presence would be a better name for such a stat.
Jason, I know you are heavily inspired by DCC.
Jason, I know you are heavily inspired by DCC.
That’s interesting, but I feel like it would really include radically different things under the same umbrella attribute. I mean, Wisdom already merges sharp senses, wilderness survival and willpower, which doesn’t always make sense. Including also social skills would make it even weirder. Or how does it work in DCC? I’m guessing you don’t use Personality for perception checks…
Nicolas Francart In DCC, a lot of that stuff falls under Intelligence or Luck
Presence would cover willpower and interaction with others while Intelligence would be used for anything related to perception.
As for wilderness survival, it really is a matter of knowing what to do (intelligence), finding prey or plants to forage (luck), being stealthy (agility) or enduring the elements (stamina).
I have not considered it, but it’s an interesting idea. I went with the original six ability scores because I wanted to stick close to my OD&D roots, and I added Luck because I liked the way DCC uses it to mitigate disaster. I can see how Intelligence might cover for Wisdom in a lot of areas, but I would miss things like Magic-Users with high Intelligence and low Wisdom, which can say a lot about a character. I really enjoy that kind of mechanics-driven character color.
Jason Lutes You mean that although he has high Intelligence, he wouldn’t be picking up what’s happening around him because he is lost in his thoughts (i.e. low Wisdom)? I agree that if perception/awareness is linked to Intelligence only, we would lose that. I’m thinking about Sherlock Holmes in the Sherlock series… he is such a genius and absorbs all those little details (intelligence=perception), but he is definitely not wise and sometimes oblivious to the people around him (presence=empathy, understanding how others would react).
There’s a sort of symmetry with three physical and three “mental” or ephemeral qualities (wisdom, intelligence, and charisma) that I’d miss also, though I think what DCC and others do in moving away from traditional stats is valuable.
Frederic Oriol, that’s exactly it, yes. For me, in gameplay terms, Wisdom encompasses empathy, intuition, and willpower, which I find interesting contrasted against things like analysis, reason, and calculation.