As long as I’ve been playing with D&D, there have always been rules that I felt were wrong, that I would change if I’d been in charge of the game. I was reminded of this when I saw a recent tweet asking what people would change for D&D 5.5. I can’t answer that, because the sorts of things I want to see in D&D would be a 6th edition, 7th, or more likely another game.

Instead, my answer will be a series of articles, where I discuss the features I would put into my own fantasy role-playing game. The changes I’m going to discuss are sweeping enough — just wait until you see what I do with classes — that this would create a different game. I’m going to give this game the generic title Fantasy Quest RPG, at least until I think of a different name.¹

Think of this as a thought experiment. As much as I would love to try to run a game with these rules, that would require enough interest to make it worth the work to put it together. It takes teams of people several years to create these systems, and I’m not a team. But if you like these changes, especially if it inspires something in you, please let me know. With the right encouragement, I would be willing to make this game.

Abilities

Abilities are one of the most classic elements of D & D. As I’m revisiting almost everything, I should start with them. What I would like to change are the three so-called mental abilities. Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma have always seemed too fuzzy for me.

Intelligence. For lack of a better word, I’m going to keep Intelligence. I’m even going to keep its in-rule definition of “mental acuity, accuracy of recall, and the ability to reason”. What I’m going to change is to pull under that definition things given to other abilities in the rules.

Any learnable skill that depends on mental function should be part of Intelligence. This should apply to several of the Wisdom skills, such as Medicine and Survival. But Intelligence not only allows you to reason about the world, but about people and animals as well, and governs your ability to communicate. This means that it should also handle Charisma skills such as Deception and Performance. This leaves Wisdom and Charisma with a smaller, but clearer areas of focus.

Perception. The above leaves Wisdom with only two game uses: perception and divine spell-caster capabilities. For reasons that will become clear in a bit, I will move the latter into what’s replacing Charisma. This means that I should rename the ability to Perception. Perception shows how well you perceive the world, what you can notice and search for. Perception is already a skill, but this makes it an ability instead. I may create a new skill to represent more learned perception capability, or move Investigation under this ability. Perception will also replace Wisdom saves and checks which allow a creature to notice illusions.

Willpower. After the Intelligence takeover, Charisma retains only its uses in magic abilities and saves. This requires a more numinous ability, which I will call Willpower. Willpower governs not only one’s ability to persist under duress, but also one’s spiritual strength. Faith is persistent belief, so it clearly fits under Willpower. Thus, Willpower now takes over the magical attributes of both Charisma and Wisdom.

Ability Scores

Since the first editions of D&D, the game has used 3d6 for ability scores. Yet as the editions have passed along, the game has overtaken those scores with related modifiers ranging from -3 to +4. These modifiers are now the primary numbers that come into play in the rules, so it’s time to get rid of the original.

I feel that the only reason the scores are still 3-18 is because that’s the range of the 3d6 die roll. But random ability generation for characters stopped making sense long ago. You’re going to play the character you want to play, which means you’re going to manipulate the scores to match that character at creation. At best, the random rolls might give you some sort of inspiration when you don’t know what you want to play.

In this game, player character ability scores will be the -4 to +4 modifiers only. The official, preferred generation methods will not be random.

Point Buy. The suggested method for building character ability scores is a point buy system. With this method, you start with ability scores of -1 across the board. You then receive 13 buying points which you can spend to raise, or lower, the scores according to the table below. A negative cost means that you can increase your buying points by the opposite of that amount. Note: You do not need to end with 0 buying points when you’re done, I may allow spending the extra on other bonuses during character creation.

Standard Array. In an alternate method, you receive following scores which you can assign to abilities in whatever order you wish: +2,+2,+1,+1,+0,-1. This corresponds to the modifiers of the standard array scores in fifth edition.

Random Roll. Sometimes you may still want to generate random ability scores. You may want the die rolls to inspire your character idea, or a DM may want to roll random stats for NPCs. This method will look familiar. For each ability, in order on the character sheet, roll 4d6 and drop the lowest die. Consult the table below, and choose the score based on the value rolled. Once you have rolled all abilities, add the scores to get a total. if the total is below 5, increase the lowest score by one point and total them again. Continue to add to the lowest score until the total is 5 or above. If you are not rolling for a player character, use 3d6 instead of 4d6, and don’t adjust the lowest scores based on the total.