Bit of a Problem

Over the past couple of years, I have become increasingly convinced that D&D just has a bad set of ability scores. Indeed, I'm increasingly inclined to think that characters should have three: Body, Mind, and Soul (with the possible inclusion of a fourth, in the form of Luck).

That's not a perfect arrangement, of course - under that model it's not really possible to differentiate between the guy who is really strong, the guy who is just really tough, and the guy who is really agile. And it probably suffers from a certain amount of blurring between Mind and Soul (though no worse than the current blurring between Int and Wis). However, I'd be inclined to resolve at least some of this by having each player pick a Trait for his character - either in addition to the current Race, Class, Background trio, or perhaps instead of the 'Race' option (in which case 'Dwarf', 'Elf', and the like would become Traits).

All that said, there's a bit of a problem with this: the six ability scores used by D&D are one of the few truly sacred cows of the system - the moment the game switches to something else, it ceases to be recognisably D&D (the others are classes, levels, and hit points).

What that means is a couple of things: Firstly, D&D is probably stuck with a set of ability scores that really isn't too good. And where D&D leads, the rest of the RPG market follows. Secondly, I'm most definitely not in the market for any RPG that uses those ability scores or any near variant of them - I'm just not in the market for any near-D&D game. That said, at the moment I'm pretty much not in the market for any RPG at all, so there's always that to consider...