Are Abilities Necessary?

[Elemental_Elf]

Carp... I can't believe I never thought of getting rid of Atributes and sticking with skills... Its such a perfectly simple and ingenious notion! You should definitely concept this out more, I know I would definitely be willing to help the system along. Until then, have this (you deserve it):  [spoiler] [/spoiler]

[Superfluous Crow]

Cool, i actually also had this idea a while back :) (although, admittedly, I didn't back it up in my head with as thorough a criticism as you have managed to make)
For good measure, if it's not apparent from the first few lines, i agree with you. I'm not saying that ability-dependent systems are  wrong, just that they aren't the only possibility. For my system-in-the-works i went for traits to show what "genetic capabilities" the character was born with (stuff like "muscular" and "astute"). The really great thing about this is that it doesn't limit your range of ability scores in any way; you can make a "bestial" trait to simulate animal intelligence, and "canine cunning" trait to make a slightly smarter animal capable of learning traits, without being limited to the 1 or 2 values of D&D. And effects, like the knockback caused by awesome blow, could now be built into the genetic trait of "enormous strength" (okay, these examples are mostly important to monsters, but i hope you get the idea).

[samwise7]

I thought of doing something like this awhile back as well, but I never got around to it.  I think people accept the idea of stats/attributes because it seems more Real to them, but we are playing a game after all, and it only needs to be as real as we want it to be.  For purely mechanical reasons, having only skills, or skills + special abilities I think would work very well.

"You are only as good, as the ranks you put into skills.  You can be anything you like, all that limits you is where you put those ranks."

[Hedgewriter]

I relate ability scores to our DNA or the genes that Mom and Pop gave us.  My parents physical traits (or a mix thereof) defines my genetic makeup thus defining what I will be naturally skilled at.  If dad was 6'4" and a weight lifter I would likely have that same CAPABILITY to be strong, but not necessarily the ability to be a world class athlete unless I trained and practiced.  
Conversely, if my dad was a 5'4" 125lb weakling that got sand kicked in his face at the beach, it would be very unlikely that my genetic makeup would allow me to be a gold medal winning weight lifter, even if I trained 8 hours a day for life.
I look at the normal everyday folks walking around my world as the average person.  Tavern maids, shopkeepers, blacksmiths, etc.  The players I equate to people who, through some trait passed on by generations, have the capability to do something extraordinary and have trained the skills that allow it.  Their ability scores define what they could be if they set their minds to it.  
I also think ability scores allow some randomness in the class.  For instance, in Evercrack or WOW, where there are no ability scores, just about every top level tank is "built" one of two or three ways.  There is little variation in them other than their gear, this transitions across the majority of the classes in those games.  Obviously in a RP game there are many, many more variations than in a computer game, but a concern nonetheless.

Just my 2 Copper Pieces!

[Aequitas]

Is it fair to consider abilities to represent "raw talent" with skills representing specialized training? Consider the football example again. Just about anyone is able to pick up a football and throw it a distance. But, with increased training in "Throw (Football)" one would be able to refine this raw talent (Strength, Dexterity, etc.) and throw like a pro.

[LordVreeg]

I've read through this a few times.
I love any 'out-of-the-box' idea.  And I do believe that this would become a playable system.  
But I don't agrree with all the logic being used here and have fundamental issues with the arguments.

[blockquote=PC!]So we leave the D&D "abilities modify skill checks" system in the dust, but I believe the observations here are more far-reaching. What I'm trying to assert here is that abilities, in general, are necessary components of skills, and as a result abilities are rendered superfluous in systems that track skills. In any skill that you consider to be keyed to an ability, it is fundamentally inconceivable that you could have a high skill with a low ability (barring ex post facto intervention, like a champion weightlifter being hit by a ray of enfeeblement). I challenge you to come up with an example of a skill in which you can be highly proficient with a naturally low score in the relevant ability.[/blockquote]
Sure. Most weightlifters are strong, but there are many strong people who are not weightlifters.  By definition, this makes strength separate from weightlifting.  
The abilities exist, therefor, independent of the skill.

also,  
[blockquote=PC!]But this is preposterous on its face. In reality you would never call a physically weak person "skilled" at a physical task or a strength-based athletic activity. Having a high level of strength is part and parcel of the "skill" of playing football; strength training is the basis of improving your skill in strength-related tasks. We can expand the argument to break down the D&D system completely: how do you have an expert dancer with low DEX? An expert chess player who is mentally handicapped? A champion weightlifter with a Str of 3?[/blockquote]
You are confusing the concept of a 'skill' as a definition of a learned ability/profession and the definition of 'skilled' as very adept at a particular thing ( a person can be skilled at a skill, but having a particular skilled Does not make you skilled at it).  This paragraph, when this definitions are made distinct, loses validity.  
Just because someone learns a skill does not make them extremely proficient at it.  Is everyone with a 'skill' (a learned ability) an expert, such as your dancer or chess player examples?  or do you wish to get rid of the whole range of talent levels?
In gaming parlance, a skill is a learned talent, but the ability to succeed at this talent may vary widely, from apprentice to journeyman to master to expert.  In your above paragraph, you seem to be using the words 'skilled' and 'expert' as synonyms.
I also point to the above paragraph where you challenge the assembled community to, "to come up with an example of a skill in which you can be highly proficient with a naturally low score in the relevant ability", but the key here is the term 'highly proficient'.  One does not have to be highly proficient at something to be able to preform a mundane application of a skill.  I can drive, but am not an 'expert driver'.  I can operate my computer, but am far from being 'highly proficient'.  I think those of you who have made fun of my typing will attest to this lack...
I may not call a physically weak person "skilled" at football watching them play, but that does not mean they do not understand the game better and might actually surpass the 'football skill' of an less experienced but more physically powerful person.  And this is going to be at the crux at why taking abilities out of the game will actually make it more complicated in the long run, trying to accomodate for this.


[blockquote=PC!]Additionally, not all skills need to have broad synergy like athletic skills would. Being good at one "smart" thing like philosophy doesn't necessarily mean you are any better at certain others (math, for instance). Hacking might have synergies with a few other select related skills, while jumping would synergize with a wide variety of athletic skills. Skill synergies were afterthoughts in 3rd edition D&D, but in a skill-based system they would become important parts of the system.[/blockquote]
One of the biggest problems with abilities is they are incomplete descriptions.  You may not have mentioned this specifically, but in my mind the biggest knock on abilities is that they are very rough estimations.  Even something so well known as the difference between muscular strength and muscular exertion is not seperate, though they are very different.  The same is more true in the mental realm, in that there are people with great recall with no problem solving ability or intuitive geniuses with little deductive ability.  Emotional intelligence describes this issue but is still really in infancy.

At the crux of this is a fundamental question on how you wish your players to percieve their characters and the world.  I've run a skill based game for a long time, and at the heart of this is the ability to find and learn new skills.  The abilities do not merely exist independently from the skill, they often precede it and predicate an advantage or disadvantage for a skill. As such, what you really propose is more of a question of how realistic a game you want to play.  My players, late in their careers, often pick up 'non-ideal' skills, or skills that they would like but that their attributes are not a perfect match for.  Drono Biddlebee is an ex-farmer from the Turnipers commune, and after a long, 13 year career, is learning restorative spell points from the Chruch of Amrist, in his new quest to become a priest of the God of the Autumn Harvest.  He's got a mediocre wisdom, so he does not have the 'natural aptitude' of some of the priests there, and will have to work a little harder to become even a decent journeyman with restorative spell points.  But this is the grist of a good game.

Again, love the iconoclasm, and the daring, and am honored to be included in the conversation.  

[Raelifin]

Two things occur to me:

1. This system might work really well with a classless system.

2. Skill overflow seems to be the biggest problem. If you have to develop a set of synergies for nearly everything, the skill list gets bloated with things like "baking" as opposed to "butchering" as opposed to "gardening" with a set of synergies for all of them.


Ra-Tiel got me thinking about covering this by packaging skills into groups, and then granting synergies through skillsets. One might be able to focus and train specific skills, but they'd soon max out without exploring the skillset a little further. Think of this like someone putting energy into philosophy, which doesn't really help them in day-to-day life very much at the start. In order to really understand philosophy, the character must branch out into basic logic, theology, literature and history. Now we start to see the synergies really kick in. Get it?

[Stargate525]

So you can have a Sleight of Hand skill and a Surgeon skill, and though you don't have any ranks in the latter, your ranks in the former grant you a synergy bonus to the latter.  The same result is achieved without any of the inconsistencies presented by abilities.

or through your synerbilities, which I'll discuss below in more detail.

I'm not sure how this is an argument against my point.  Are you trying to say that only characters with an inborn talent for a skill should be able to take ranks in it?

No. What I'm saying is that if you're going to be invoking reality to poke holes in a system, you can't selectively choose what aspects of reality you take. In a fully realistic scenario, no one who is not strong will take strength-related skills in any number. They will take skills that complement their abilities. The system remains sound.

Computers are calculation-based.  They possess no skills as such.  They are programmed to do something and they do it; there is no intelligence or use of a skill involved, unless we're talking about futuristic AI or something.  I don't see them as germane to the argument about characters.

I would argue that many skills are extremely calculation-based, but that's leading down a side path that has nothing to do with ability scores.

I disagree with this because I believe there are ample ways to show talent through mechanics without tracking abilities....What else have you tried? ;)

What have you tried except the synerbilities? Since you're the one advocating the removal of abilities, it falls to you to try these other methods.

If synergy bonuses were abilities, why did D&D include both with no apparent complaints about overlap?

Because D&D synergies are not designed to be what you propose them to be, and indeed, are not. I'm not saying synergy bonuses in general are abilities, I'm saying YOURS are.

If you were to network all the strength, dex, whatever, scores together into a single synergy grouping, you now have a number that effects a certain number of skills equally, and can be used as a representation of your natural talent. If you want to do something that doesn't fall into a specific skill, you would conceivably use the appropriate synergy bonus, no?

Going back to ability scores, the main thing they do is:
-provide a representation of natural talent.
-allow unskilled checks to have a bonus.
-effect a certain group of skills with a flat bonus.

They. Are. Abilities. The only thing you've done is figured out a better way to generate them and buried them in the skill mechanics.


And so far, I think, you've only addressed how this applies to skills. What about attacks, defense, and everything else that abilities apply to?

[Nomadic]

Nothing replaces abilities.  The point is that the very fact of having skills displays the body's abilities adequately.  A character with a huge "wrestling" skill is, by definition, quite strong.  There's no need to quantify that strength separately from his skill, because that would be redundant.  In other words, I sumbit that this:

you cannot go without something that shows the bodies natural tendencies and its effect on skills.

dependent[/i] variables that are in large part determined by skills, and can be safely eliminated.  The abilities are necessarily implied by the skills and there is no need to track them.

I also believe that "the body's tendencies" are far overplayed in gaming systems, and that a few traits (like feats, remember) can easily describe notable talents (and the opposite).  If you want a strong character, give him plenty of ranks in strength-related skills.

Synergy bonuses would not require any formulae.  Skills would simply be categorized into types, eg. Physical (Coordination) for skills like Use Rope or Sleight of Hand, and having ranks in a skill would impart a synergy bonus to other skills in that same category (or something, I haven't thought about the exact mechanics yet).

And thus you haven't gotten rid of attributes. You have just given them new names and hid them inside the skill mechanics which are going to become extremely bloated thanks to needing a skill for every possible thing you could ever do (i.e. - fishing, jigging, fly fishing, trawling, deep sea fishing, etc etc... just to give one example)

[LordVreeg]

[blockquote=HALF-ASS]And thus you haven't gotten rid of attributes. You have just given them new names and hid them inside the skill mechanics which are going to become extremely bloated thanks to needing a skill for every possible thing you could ever do (i.e. - fishing, jigging, fly fishing, trawling, deep sea fishing, etc etc... just to give one example[/blockquote]
Hey! what's wrong with a bloated skill list??  I just haven't gotten to the sub skills of fishing yet...give me time...

[Hibou]

Howard Gardner has published a theory called the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which states that people have different types of intelligence attributed to social interaction, linguistics, music, logic, etc. I'm using this for my system I'm designing, and I can say that so far it has seemed to eliminate the balance issues that have been previously mentioned between training to become stronger/tougher/more agile and natural intelligence. The theory is a useful one for roleplaying games, really. It allows for bonuses to certain types of skills and helps design a system where certain people learn certain skills faster without the training issue or any of the other issues related to mental ability scores (like whether a section of thought goes with intelligence or wisdom).

[Polycarp]

1. This system might work really well with a classless system.

No. What I'm saying is that if you're going to be invoking reality to poke holes in a system, you can't selectively choose what aspects of reality you take. In a fully realistic scenario, no one who is not strong will take strength-related skills in any number. They will take skills that complement their abilities. The system remains sound.[/quote]What have you tried except the synerbilities? Since you're the one advocating the removal of abilities, it falls to you to try these other methods.[/quote]They. Are. Abilities. The only thing you've done is figured out a better way to generate them and buried them in the skill mechanics.[/quote]ability scores[/i] as such, which are a very specific thing that exists in most, if not all, roleplaying systems I've ever seen.

All roleplaying systems are basically trying to accomplish the same thing - modelling a character for the purpose of gaming.  An ability-less system is no exception.  The fact that it has a mechanic that accomplishes some of the same things abilities do doesn't mean they "are abilities" unless, as I said, you define abilities so generally and amorphously that anything that quantifies "talent" is categorized as an "ability."  I'm arguing against a very specific thing, not the idea of "talent" in general.

And so far, I think, you've only addressed how this applies to skills. What about attacks, defense, and everything else that abilities apply to?

You have just given them new names and hid them inside the skill mechanics which are going to become extremely bloated thanks to needing a skill for every possible thing you could ever do (i.e. - fishing, jigging, fly fishing, trawling, deep sea fishing, etc etc... just to give one example)[/quote]seen[/i] how many skills GURPS has?

[Moniker]

Shortly before my group was invited to playtest 4e, I had been working on a system that used Fortitude, Reflex and Will as the definitive system to determine abilities. Fortitude focused on Feats, Reflex focused on Skills and Will focused on Spells. I adapted a few of the ideas surrounding Adepts, Warriors and "Skillmonkeys" (for lack of a better term) to create a system that was strikingly similar to D&D, using current terminology through different interpretation. I used a general level model, just as 4E does, for BAB and general 1/2 level modifiers.

Basically, it turned the entire mechanics behind the d20 to a complex yet fluid paper/rock/scissors model, modified by feats, spells and skills on the d20.

Unfortunately, a lot of that was lost during my move in the shatstorm of boxes in my basement. Although, I believe the first iteration of the system was posted here on these forums, if I could find them...

[Superfluous Crow]

First off, Joker, using Howard's theories as a basis is a very cool idea; pure genius.
Now, as to everybody arguing about whether removing ability scores is a good idea, i think the issue here is that Polycarp isn't so much removing the abilities as the scores. He mentioned himself that, in addition to the synergy idea which i'm not an overt fan of because of the complexity, you could use the genetic traits/advantages/perks/etc, that would, together with skill groups, essentially be able to simulate the same things as ability scores, just more flexible as they aren't generalizations.
Am i completely wrong or?

[Polycarp]

Am i completely wrong or?

more ably performed[/i] by existing mechanics, rendering ability scores themselves redundant.  It may be that I've been conflating "ability" and "ability score" when I should be drawing a distinction between them, as so far I've pretty much been using them synonymously.

"Existing mechanics" refers to the pairing of synergy bonuses and traits/feats, but I don't rule out the possibility that other mechanics or new mechanics would work as well or better.

I'm also making a "larger point" on roleplaying paradigms - "ability scores" are so ubiquitous that it seems almost past due that we should be rocking the boat.  Most new systems I've seen accept their presence as a given; we had a discussion in this forum not long ago about which ability scores to use, which accepts as its underlying premise that ability scores are necessary, which precludes any discussion on whether they are good.  Even if I'm utterly wrong about how to challenge that premise I think there is a fruitful discussion to be had in challenging it.

Many of the objections raised so far have been objections of implementation, which are hard for me to address because no system has been implemented yet.  These include "there will be too many skills" and "synergy bonuses will be too complex."  All I can do is respond "no, I don't think so" because nobody has any concrete examples to base it off of, including myself.  I hope to eventually rectify that with a proof of concept system, but for now I can only resort to arguments from comparison:

1. With Craft/Profession, D&D has an infinite number of skills, and other systems like GURPS have a huge amount as well; in addition, having many skills doesn't strike me as automatically bad (how many is too many?).
2. Synergy bonuses don't have to be complicated either; synergy bonuses in D&D, while not common, were relatively straightforward, and I don't see any reason that they would have to become more complex for an ability-less system.  Even if they were complex, synergy bonuses were generally not things you needed to constantly compute; you got a +2 bonus to Ride from your 5 ranks in Handle Animal, noted that on your character sheet, and never thought of it again.

edit:

Howard Gardner has published a theory called the Theory of Multiple Intelligences

I've started reading up on this and it looks very interesting.  I'm a bit critical because I feel it's very hard to distinguish "natural" intelligence from learning and thinking styles acquired through socialization and environment, but I could definitely see a system based around this.