What Do Ability Scores Represent?
Recently, Into The Odd and the players in my home game helped me realise something fundamental:
Ability scores represent how good you are at acting under pressure.
- STR isn’t strength, it’s toughness;
- DEX really means reflexes;
- WIS is more accurately calm or willpower;
- etc.
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It is convention in roleplaying games that your ability scores / attributes / six stats determine who your character is.
High DEX means your character is spry, capable of acrobatic flourish; a good Willpower generally means you can browbeat others / themselves / reality (if you are spellcaster) into doing what they want; etc.
There is pleasure in looking at a sheet and seeing: Oh! These are the things my character is good at.
But you do run into problems. Does my 18 DEX rogue know they are fleeter than the 17 DEX bard? What if my wizard thinks she is stronger than her 10 STR? What if I have a brilliant scheme but my barbarian only has 9 INT?
How well, in other words, does the map represent the territory?
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(Art by Vesha, who is an illustrator! source)
I’ve got three players in my home game:
- Vesha plays the teenaged trader Khabar (and his buffalo friend / parent-figure, Paal);
- Amanda plays the monkey warrior Boots-Ra, now going white-furred;
- Aish plays Captain Phung.
Phung does not yet own a proper sea-going vessel. Perhaps he lost his previous ship? Perhaps he never had one. (He does have a magic five-person sampan, though!)
He is impulsive. He tends to make dodgy deals with hapless village-folk, pick up dangerous-looking objects, and flirt with dangerous-looking men.
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Mechanics-wise, here’s how my interactions with Aish / Phung tend to go:
Me: Okay, make a DEX save to duck before the hunter stabs you.
Aish: Damn, my DEX is only 6, guess we’ll see …
Amanda: Oh, no, Phung!
In a previous session:
Me: Okay, I think I’ll call for a WIL save, because the ghost in the goat skull is trying to possess you.
Aish: Well, my WIL is 5, hopefully this works out …
Vesha: Oh shit, Phung!
Some sessions back:
Me: The automaton shoves you. Make a STR save? Otherwise you’ll be on the ground at its mercy.
Aish: Guys I have 6 STR, I may be in trouble here.
Me: Wait wait wait. What are your stats again?
So it turns out that Aish had terrible rolls at chargen. STR 6 DEX 6 WIL 5. Just going by ability scores, Phung is an idiot weakling.
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Thing is, Phung isn’t an idiot weakling.
I’ve got crafty players; they are pretty good at cooking up multi-part schemes. (Their go-to tactic is bamboozling rival factions to show up at the same place, then benefit from the fallout.)
Phung is generally the face for whatever racket they’ve got going: he’s the most obvious leader (the party is generally “Captain Phung and crew”), and Aish plays him as a capable, charismatic go-getter.
Looking at the character sheet, is Aish playing Phung wrong?
Fuck that. A player cannot play their own character wrong. I reject this notion outright.
What’s going on?
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Different rulesets try to bridge the gaps between player action, character ability, and abstract math in different ways: eliminating mental attributes; going totally skill-based; etc.
The ruleset that comes closest to “solving” this, for me, is Into The Odd.
Saves are the only kind of test player-characters make, in ITO and its derivatives. This is key.
The ruleset assumes competency on the part of characters; you only go to the dice if you need to figure out stuff that is out of your control.
How badly a straight-up fight goes; whether you can jump aside in time if you’ve accidentally sprung a trap; whether you can improvise a lie on the fly.
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Implicitly, and in practice:
The STR stat in ITO is more accurately toughness—ie: how well you can withstand a physically demanding situation you didn’t prepare for.
Ditto DEX, which is an abstraction for how quickly your reflexes trigger.
Same with WIL, which is how well you stay calm under duress.
I can be sharp when I’ve got time and it is a subject I have experience in. But suddenly ask me to make a speech and I’m toast (low INT).
Some folks have no martial arts training but can hold their own if a brawl breaks out in a bar (high STR).
Captain Phung is a pretty cool operator when he’s in control, but tends to seize up when things go off the rails (low WIL).
There’s my answer to the conundrum of Captain Phung: he’s a genuinely capable guy. He’s just not necessarily great under stress. His reach exceeds his grasp, sometimes.
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Your ability scores don’t represent who your character is. Your ability scores represent who your character is, when under duress.
In other words:
Ability scores are who your character is when they are not in control. Ability scores are your character’s reactions.
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I do feel slow on the uptake, for only grokking this now.
Chris McDowall probably has a post from the mid 2010s or something where he discusses this aspect design in detail, the clever genius bastard. It is probably internalised play-culture within the ITO-and-descendants community; Emms points out that the current edition of Mothership explicitly talks about stats in this way.
Still!
Am glad to have a regular TTRPG group again, and I have them to thank for my epiphany!
(They are kickass. I ran them through Whirling Mummy a while back and it was a RIOT)
