Design Notes: Attributes

 I want to spend some time discussing the design choices I made for Dungeons Deep & Caverns Old, which owing to considerations of space, I wasn't able to do in the actual rule book.

The first way in which I've diverged from the standard OSR-style game mechanic is with the attributes, which in DD & CO are Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Knowledge, Acuity, and Charisma.  I've discarded Intelligence and Wisdom in favour of Knowledge and Acuity, and I'd like to explain why I decided to do so.

I've been involved in this hobby for fourty-three years now, and I've played a lot of different games.  Nearly all of them use Intelligence, or something like it, as an attribute.  Because of its ubiquity I never questioned its use, but at the same time I never really felt comfortable with it, and while designing DD & CO I finally took the time to evaluate the attributes and how I feel about them.

First and foremost, attributes are what define a character: who they are, how they act, and how a player will role-play them.  Every character attribute must contribute to our understanding of the character, and its personality, or it becomes useless. It is here that Intelligence fails the test as a useful attribute.

Firstly, what is Intelligence?  What does it mean to be intelligent?  There are different types of intelligence.  Here's the Wikipedia entry defining human intelligence, but this covers a lot of different facets, and I, like most people, rate highly in some respects, but poorly in others.  If I was creating myself as a player character how would I rate my Intelligence?  I honestly don't know.  This ambiguity makes Intelligence fairly worthless as a personality trait for a character.

Secondly, how does one go about role-playing Intelligence?  How does an average player, like myself go about playing a character with a genius level Intelligence score?  You are limited as a player to your own mental capabilities.  I guess you can do it if you use Intelligence solely to make dice roll checks, which, I admit, is the way that most modern role-playing games handle attribute scores, but this isn't role-playing.  Even harder is for a smart player to play a character with a low Intelligence score.  The whole point of old-school role-playing games is to challenge the players, and if you tell a player that their character couldn't have come up with the clever idea that the player just proposed, because the character is too stupid to have though of it, then you're defeating the entire purpose of the game, as well as creating a frustrating experience for the player.

Wisdom isn't much better.  It is also an ambiguous trait that I recall debating often with friends back in high school during our frequent discussions of how to get a handle on D&D.  The best way I've ever seen Intelligence and Wisdom differentiated is the statement that someone may be intelligent enough to know that smoking will kill them, but lack the wisdom to quit.  But, again, this isn't very useful, and I have never once in over four decades of playing seen Wisdom actually come into play in a game except  as a Prime Requisite for certain classes.  It serves no purpose in role playing a character, so it's out too.

In Dungeons Deep & Caverns Old I have replaced Intelligence and Wisdom with Knowledge and Acuity.  Knowledge is fairly straightforward: it is a measure of a character's education, and their ability to memorize and retain facts.  I use this as the Prime Requisite of the Sorcerer class and also to determine how much lore a character might know, and how much information to give them.

Acuity is the keenness of a character's senses and quickness of thought.  A character with high Acuity experiences very little delay between thought and action, and would receive a bonus to Initiative and Surprise checks.  This means that a character with very high Acuity is rarely or never surprised, and is the character who should be making the group initiative rolls, using his quick thinking to shout out orders to the rest of the party.  This corresponds quite nicely with personality types, as one of the traits of extroverts is assertiveness and quick thinking, and such characters are excellent candidates as group leaders in crisis situations.  Introverts, on the other hand tend to react slowly to changing situations, but are capable of intense and prolonged concentration, and deep thinking.

Personally, I'm an introvert, and I would judge myself to have a high Knowledge score, but a low Acuity score, as I'm prone to daydreaming, so my awareness of my surroundings is not as high as it could be, and I lack the ability to make decisions quickly.  I'm the sort of person who needs to analyze all the facts before reaching a decision, and I tend to spend a lot of time researching even relatively simple online purchases, for example.  Just last week I bought a tree pruner, but before I did I read multiple reviews of each model, and carefully compared all the product information before reaching my decision.  My extroverted sister, on the other hand, would simply have bought the first one that caught her eye, then moved on to other things.

So in game terms a high Acuity character will make an excellent team leader and combat commander, whereas you'd probably rather have the slow-thinking high Knowledge character actually planning the expeditions.  Knowledge and Acuity give us a much better handle on how to play our characters, and what their personalities might be like.

As far as Intelligence goes, I consider it far better to assume that a character is exactly as smart as the person playing it, which in the end makes for a much more satisfying role-playing experience.