Jan 19, 2012

Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma Should Not Be Attributes

I've been growing increasingly critical of attributes that measure properties that are so dependent on a player's abilities that their separate measurement for characters does nothing but add conceptual confusion about the site of agency. Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma of the six classic attributes are the particular ones I am moving closer and closer to simply replacing.

Intelligence: The problem is two-fold: Simply that a dumb person cannot roleplay a smart one without constant fudging, assistance, and interference by others; and the concept of g which underpins a unitary intelligence attribute is psychometrically dubious and conceptually overladen. When I meet smart people in ordinary life, I find that their minds produce thoughts with distinct, often recognisable characteristics that are unique to them. By contrast, when a character is "smart by committee" in a game, the presentation of their ideas is vague, and imprecise, and the chain of reasoning that led them there cannot be reproduced.

Wisdom: This attribute is a muddle of different qualities, even within its two larger categories of "Perceptiveness" and "Insightfulness". I have never managed to find two people who agree on what exactly a "high Wisdom" character is like once you get beyond vacuous and banal generalities. The character with the highest Wisdom I have ever played (18) was a psychopath who had driven himself to prodigal levels of skill from an early age, and whose basic attitude towards others was that they were mildly dangerous pets.

Charisma: Another conceptual muddle, and another one where players skills overwhelm character ones, unless one takes seriously the advice to let dice-rolling overwhelm excellent roleplaying and the formulation of reasonable, compelling arguments or plots. Basically, either you make this attribute irrelevant, or you make roleplaying irrelevant, or else one becomes the back-up for when the other fails.

I think that by choosing more constrained and reasonable elements from each of these conceptual muddles, we can relegate the rest to the realm of roleplaying and player ability, which are far easier to talk meaningfully about and to resolve problems with than continuously trying to resolve the unsolvable puzzle of how a player's charisma should interact with a character's charisma.

In place of these three attributes, I propose:

Intelligence could be replaced with an attribute called either "Attentiveness", "Acuity" or "Reactivity". Acuity would measure a character's conscientiousness, attention to detail, visual acuity and ability to integrate and adapt to changes in the environment. Specifically, it would influence initiative rolls and saving throws, cover what is now lumped together under "perception" tests of various sorts, and assist in finding traps and clues and such.

Wisdom could be replaced with "Calmness", "Focus" or "Repose". Focus would measure a character's ability to remain calm in stressful or confusing situations, to concentrate on a problem or object of reflection, and to avoid being distracted from their goals. It would be the spellcasting attribute used by wizards. It would help with certain kinds of saving throws, as well as resisting temptation, and overcoming certain types of fatigue.

Charisma could be replaced with "Grace", "Luck" or "Holiness". Grace represents a person's connection to the greater magical forces in the universe, especially but not limited to the gods (if any), demons, extra-dimensional tulpas, whatever. It serves as a luck attribute, as well as being the key casting attribute for clerics and other divine casters. It should aid saving throws to resist magic effects, and general misfortune.

Each one of these is conceptually narrower than the attribute it replaces, but I think the added coherence is a benefit here. As well, these are all areas in which the character's abilities can be clearly distinguished from the player's. Since players primarily deal with verbal descriptions of what their characters are seeing, acuity represents a characteristic that the player cannot truly exercise. Focus pushes roleplaying by preventing characters from asserting that their characters are psychopathically and implausibly calm in situations that there is no reason to believe the characters would be as blase about as the players are. Grace represents the luck of the character, something player ability has no real effect on unless that ability is cheating on dice rolls.

I have not tested these out, but I think I shall in my next Swords and Wizardry Complete campaign, whenever that will be. Anyhow, I'm curious for people's comments and opinions on these changes.

8 comments:

  1. All of these sound good; it's just a question of whether it's more trouble than it's worth to make the change. No reason not to try it out and see how it works in play, though, especially in so basic a system as S&W.

    Is there any reason not to just use "Perception" instead of acuity/attentiveness? Acuity and Attentiveness both sound easy to confuse with Focus, which I think is the clear best choice for the second attribute.

    I like "Grace" for the last.

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  2. "Perception" was my original choice, but I rejected it as overly broad in the end. "Perception" is really a whole bunch of different things that come together, some on the part of the player, some on the part of the character. Since my goal is to load the things attributes measure entirely onto the character, the mixed quality it suggested was misleading.

    I also find perception as a single attribute or skill can be the source of disputes in practice. Like, does the player get a perception bonus for looking specifically for one thing out of many possible candidates, or a bonus for looking for anything that might even possibly be relevant at all? I've never seen a clear consensus on this, and I can't even say which way I'd rule on it.

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    1. Hi John,

      I agree that the three 'mental' base stats of D&D are part of its lingua franca but lack any intuitive appeal. However, having played it for years, I find it impossible to abandon the nomenclature. For instance, 'Wisdom' in D&D simply *is* what Perception (Listen, Spot, ...) requires - funnily enough, I think of it precisely as acuity, the term you suggest for Int. The other conceptual half of Wisdom is of course (thinking through 3rd and 4th edition lenses) a character's ability to withstand powerful mind warping magic. So 'spiritual resolve' or even 'mental resolve' would capture that. That makes 'Wisdom'-D&D a very odd hybrid, with no inherent rationale to combine two unrelated things.

      Charisma to me best relates to Plato's notion of 'Thymos' or 'spiritedness' (Republic, Book V), that part of the soul which reins our social interactions, is the visible social-personal drive of a person that impacts how others react to him (or her). As such, it's dead easy to see why good looks or even a soft demeanour are neither necessary nor sufficient for a high score in CHA. It measures brute social impact, ability to influence others - so it measures a goal, not a specific way of reaching that goal.
      Again, the English term "Charisma" is a tad misleading (for me, the term is mostly related to its theological meaning in charism - which is precisely not the goal-term but the means-term, and worse, a pretty narrow understanding of those means fitting at best characters out of the 'Book of Exalted Deeds').

      So, agreed on the misleading nomenclature, but can't think of better English terms. Perhaps you could give it another go?

      Finally, this bit,

      "Charisma: Another conceptual muddle, and another one where players skills overwhelm character ones, unless one takes seriously the advice to let dice-rolling overwhelm excellent roleplaying and the formulation of reasonable, compelling arguments or plots. Basically, either you make this attribute irrelevant, or you make roleplaying irrelevant,"

      is not only irrelevant to the semantic point (a game oughta communicate its key concepts in straightforward English), I think it's also typically the type of thinking that is answered here:

      http://kotgl.blogspot.com/2009/03/skill-resolution.html

      CHA-rolls (or Bluff, Disguise, etc) can only ever be partial resolution mechanisms. 'I hit it with my axe' is descriptively adequate to allow you to roll your to-hit die with your standard modifiers. 'I bluff my way to get by the guards at the gate' is not, because in that case I'd argue (as Mearls does in the article) that a partial description of the means chosen are required before one rolls a die on that stat or skill. Plus, successful die rolls only net one further info to then finish the resolution by further roleplay.

      Sorry for the long comment - you're sorely missed at TheRPGSite, and left quite something behind for lesser natures to fill.

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  3. WJ> Thanks for the kind words.

    I'm in a special position compared to most people because my PCs are mostly new or lapsed gamers, and they're all playing Swords and Wizardry for the first time, so they don't have any real commitment to D&D or its legacy, so far as I can tell from asking them. This gives me incredible freedom to tinker with and alter the rules compared to most groups (including most groups I've played with), where the situation is comparable to the one you're describing - decisions made 40 years ago have become dogmas kept for their familiarity and ease of use as a lingua franca.

    My goal isn't just to change the name of the attributes, but to actually change both the name and what is being measured by them. I'm not convinced that Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma can be measured, either in game or in the real world. In fact, the difficulty of measuring them IRL is part of the problem, since otherwise we could simply develop a set of correspondences (I don't believe IQ is a meaningful measure of the qualities of character ordinary people mean when they say someone is "intelligent", but only refers to a narrow subset of them if it measures anything meaningful at all).

    In terms of renaming stats while keeping broadly similar conceptual bases to the legacy, I think Wisdom is the most problematic of the three, for similar reasons to the ones you discuss - it mashes perceptiveness and resolve together, with a penumbra of piety and insight that only add to the incoherence. As I said, I cannot really imagine what a "high Wisdom" character is like in the consistent way I know what a "high Strength" or even "high Intelligence" character is like.

    In English, I'm not sure Charisma is misleading, as ordinary use is closer to pop-Weberian than to the theological sense. If it is causing confusion though, something as simple as "Charm" or "Respect" might work. Of the two, I favour the latter. "Respect" would indicate simply how much respect a person commands through their presence and conduct, which could include rank or simply be force of personality. When I think of the core of the Charisma stat and the various ways one could have or use a "high Charisma", the core of it is always the respect one commands.

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    1. Hm, for some reason I can't reply to replies, and have to start a new comment in the thread. Is this my own ineptitude, or is there some feature I can enable that I am missing?

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    2. "In English, I'm not sure Charisma is misleading, as ordinary use is closer to pop-Weberian than to the theological sense. If it is causing confusion though, something as simple as "Charm" or "Respect" might work. Of the two, I favour the latter. "Respect" would indicate simply how much respect a person commands through their presence and conduct, which could include rank or simply be force of personality. When I think of the core of the Charisma stat and the various ways one could have or use a "high Charisma", the core of it is always the respect one commands."

      Thanks, brilliant! Reminds me of the time when a native speaker first explained to me the conceptual difference between arrogance and sovereignty: arrogance is a sense of superiority you exude purely from your own persona, whereas sovereignty is superiority you draw from others on their own account. "Respect" captures it pretty nicely, and "Charm" too is easier on my own ear than Charisma.

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    3. I've always preferred "Presence" to describe that ability. "Respect" is the resource that is commanded, while "Presence" is the power to command that respect.

      Similarly, "Wits" is a good term for encapsulating awareness, perception, social savvy, and the quick-thinking ability necessary to seize initiative in a situation.

      Not sure what to replace "Intelligence" with, but I suppose a case could be made for dumping it altogether.

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  4. Hi John, I'm Michael, a Toronto gamer and first time poster here.

    I think that renaming and focusing those abilities for DnD based games is probably a good idea, though I think I'd probably go in a slightly different direction.

    Intelligence has always for me been more about training and education level than anything else. Not necessarily book larnin', but breadth of experience and how quickly characters learn. I feel that preventing less sharp players from playing brilliant, highly educated characters is... the wrong way to go. Sometimes I like playing a barbarian with thews of steel, but I'm weedy. Sometimes I like playing a military genius, when the closest I come is being a middling chess player. Rather than shifting away from enabling characters to play outside their abilities, I'd go towards finding ways to enable less intelligent players to play really smart characters.

    I think you're on the right track with Wisdom, which always seemed an odd combination of perceptiveness and stubbornness. Perception, probably, would be the best way to describe it, and lump stubbornness into either into intelligence or charisma.

    Again, with Charisma, I think that social combat has a lot to offer games. Not everyone likes it, I realize, but I think that enabling shy players is an important thing, as is avoiding hour long debates about something which could just be decided by rolling the dice and moving on. If you do want to go with something thematically appropriate, what about Carriage? How the character carries herself and interacts with others. Similar to Grace. Even Confidence would work, and that could be lumped in with the stubbornness usually associated with Wisdom

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