Having CON be an active use stat like STR & DEX

[OgreBattle]

So in most DnD type games the endurance stat is passive while Strength and Dex or Agility is used to do things.

Fatigue rules and stamina points are a possible solution, but thats more stuff to track. Maybe con gives action points that need a rest to replenish?

This isnt necessarily for DnD but more on how to approach this trinity in game design. Reading about boxing theres strong power punchers, agile distance boxers, and tireless close in flurry boxers. So applied to DnD I could see 3 different kinds of attacks powered by different stats, so CON as a hit bonus to a flurry that prevents someone from withdrawing.

[MGuy]

It's been a long time so I need a bit of a refresher. Why does Con need to be active like Str and Dex? What is the bad part of having a stat that passively determines things like stamina, health, toughness, resistance to diseases/poisons/etc?

[Dean]

My preference is to just have a Body stat for stuff like that. If one would struggle to explain the narrative difference between stats to someone unfamiliar with the rules then there shouldn't be a difference. Strength and Speed being in two categories is very defensible. Brock Lesnar's and Anderson Silva's are a thing I can easily explain the difference between narratively but I don't think there's narrative value in differentiating strongness and toughness. Sure some boxers have amazing chins but that's not really a thing in storytelling. The big strong guy is also supposed to be tough and that's intrinsically understood to be true.

[owlassociate]

This reminds me of the wounds and vitality system I made as after reading through Unearthed Arcana. The system also incorporated the class defense bonus and armor as DR variant rules, both slightly modified. The idea was that vitality had to be spent to add your class defense bonus to AC and your BAB to attack rolls, both on a per-hit basis. You could spend less vitality to get less of a bonus (e.g. if you had a class defense bonus of +4, that meant you could spend up to 4 stamina to defend against an attack, each point spent adding +1 to your defense) but you didn't really want to do that because all damage went straight to wounds.

Naturally this system necessitated altering much more of the game, but at that point I realized this would be a nightmare to incorporate into the rest of the rules, it kind of destroyed the heroic fantasy assumptions of the game and it was probably way too fiddly for what it was worth. Still, if there's a kernel of anything good in there, I'm happy to help. Otherwise feel free to rip the idea to shreds.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

What's the advantage of having CON be its own stat instead of just giving each class some extra HP?

[pragma]

As much as CON is a pretty dumb stat, I think D&D itself is struck with it because it's one of the few consistent and recognizable pieces of the IP. The six attributes as iconic as beholders and fighter/cleric/wizard/rogue split.

Ogre's idea of granting techniques that leverage CON to attack a different set of "exhaustion hit points" seems novel to me, but also fiddly. I think you'd want to build an RPG around that conceit rather than bolt it on to DnD.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I think that "you'd want to build an RPG around that conceit rather than bolt it on to DnD" is a sentiment that comes up 90% of the time when talking about specific ways to fix D&D. It's... kind of depressing.

[JigokuBosatsu]

It's... kind of depressing.

Sturgeon's Law rearing its ugly head, but I'm starting to think it should be amended to "Everything is crap, but 90% of it is different crap."

[MGuy]

I'm not sure there's an 'advantage' to splitting power and toughness. Most design decisions surrounding something like attributes are pretty arbitrary. There could be a number of reasons to change Con and Str into one stat but this is 'for' DnD and so I'm not sure of what the reasons for desiring for it to be more active are.

[Orion]

There are very few things in the source material that are strong but not tough, but there are lots of things that are tough but not strong. Halflings aren't supposed to punch hard or lift gates, but it's fine for them to march long distances and resist diseases. Lots of supernatural creatures or magically empowered people are very hard to kill despite having only normal human strength. I think there is a coherent conceptual basis for distinguishing Strength from Con. There are a lot of problems, though. High Strength, low Con, still doesn't make a lot of sense. Also, Strength and Con together often do roughly the same thing that Dexterity does by itself. So there are good reasons to want to stop having them be two separate stats. Merging them into one does have problems, though, so I think the best thing to do might be to kill off one of those stats entirely and just don't apply stat modifiers to the things it used to cover. Your could have a game with no CON, where hit points and fortitude saves scaled strictly with level except for perks like "Great Fortitude" "Very Healthy" and so on. Or, you could have a game without STR where attack rolls scaled off dex or just off level and where weapon damage also scaled with level, and a few people got bonus damage from their "Extraordinary Strength" perks.

[Foxwarrior]

One of the big struggles with ability score arguments is that ability scores are somewhat redundant with classes. Barbarians are big and strong and angry, rogues are sneaky and speedy and have good hand-eye coordination. So having six ability scores to declare "there are six categories of stereotype that can describe someone's physical and mental abilities" is a bit redundant with classes.

I think maybe ability scores would be a bit less pointless if you ensured that every class could work with three different main ability scores, like if Barbarians used Strength for being angry strong, Constitution for being angry durable, and Charisma for being angry scary, and you made well over three different configurations of Strength, Constitution, and Charisma viable for a Barbarian.

And then obviously the ideal set of ability scores would be one that made it easy to come up with ways to make three ability scores relevant for every single class.

[PhoneLobster]

Well the problem with attributes isn't that classes make them redundant. It's that basically everything makes them redundant.

Why have an attribute score that works like 3.x D&D and only exists to derive a bonus? Why not just have a bonus?

If your Strength is mostly just a source for a damage bonus... why not just have the damage bonus?

If you are giving out a pile of skills or abilities that scale to level and in part to a single attribute each, BUT your design assumption is that characters will only invest in skills/abilities tied to their "good" attribute and that "good" attribute value will be moderately predictable and fixed or failing that not significantly variable compared to level... again the attribute itself is a totally redundant step in the process.

If you are using them for the basis of fairy tea party to back engineer ass pulled answers to random questions not supported by standard formal mechanics... fairy tea party doesn't need them either.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Attributes. period, are a fairly bad mechanic. Basically a bunch of labeling and fakery that is totally unnecessary and just clogs things up with needless make work.

If your goal is a stamina points system it doesn't even need Cons to be a thing that exists. If you want some characters to be better at the stamina point system they can invest directly in it, they do not need a redundant intermediary number.

If your goal is "A Strength themed attack, a Speed themed attack, and a Tough Themed attack" you can just write up those attack abilities and make them purchasable options, you do not also need to ensure the game has a matching "base attribute" for each of those.

And considering you don't need attributes at all, if you decide you want them anyway you can pretty much do "whatever" within the confines of avoiding the usual stupid errors that can apply to basically any mechanic.

It's why talking about attributes is kinda a pointless mess unless you commit to a specific thing you want to do with them, and then the conversation really becomes more about that specific thing. It's also why so many attribute discussions are pointless unsolvable quibbles about which specific personally preferred set of attributes should exist at all. Because in the end, absolutely non of them have any particular reason to be there so it's all too easy to look at one you personally dislike and say "why is that even there again?".

[Foxwarrior]

If your Strength is mostly just a source for a damage bonus... why not just have the damage bonus?

Why, because you want people with good damage to be able to lift heavier objects, of course! (nevermind that everyone else gets class features to keep their damage values equally level-appropriate)

[pragma]

I agree with PL some days: a principal components analysis of D&D characters would reveal fewer dimensions than the combination of all the choices players have available among attributes, skills, weapons, etc. It's tempting to aim for a design where (a) every choice matters and (b) it's impossible to make a bad deal because all the correlated things are mechanically bundled together.

On other days, I think having the layer of head faking provided by attributes helps players to invest in their characters. If the rules are that all powerlifters stab unusually hard, that helps create a sense of how the world works. Attributes justify (sometimes weakly and nonsensically) the pure numbers game, and that helps people pretend they're playing a coherent game rather than MTP.

[Thaluikhain]

Dragon Warriors doesn't have a Con stat. It does use Str instead, but normally just doesn't bother with anything you'd want a Con for. Notable exception of "roll under STR to resist effect" where you might maybe want a separate Str and Con.

IIRC, in one scenario, Oliver Johnson decided to use Str as weight as well, which is odd.

[Harshax]

In every home brew, including the one I’m working on now, I always fold con into strength, as Brawn or Might. Constitution has always been, for me, a problematic stat. In my youth, I was more accepting of it, because I read Elric and fought Glass Joe in Mike Tyson’s Punchout and thought the glass cannon character concept was worth wasting 16% of a PC’s attributes to emulate.

It needs to just go away already.

[OgreBattle]

It's been a long time so I need a bit of a refresher. Why does Con need to be active like Str and Dex? What is the bad part of having a stat that passively determines things like stamina, health, toughness, resistance to diseases/poisons/etc?

The boxing triad example brings up more styles of fighting possibly baked into attributes and core combat instead of being extra feat stuff

"Why have stats when we got class and..." is a good question and brings up all the other moving parts of DnD characters. Attributes can do more in face of skills and stuff, or attributes can be taken out.

High Strength, low Con, still doesn't make a lot of sense.

I think a cat or eagle fills that. Pouncing ambush hunters that often target prey that can outlast them if they're spotted early. D&D dungeoneering games tend to attach CON to "sheer bulk" though. If I were to use D&D attributes as is but with revision... dogs & ostriches are high CON compared to cats & elves. Supernatural stuff like troll regen gets special traits/feats/tags. "sheer bulk HP" is a function of hitdice and size stuff.

And considering you don't need attributes at all, if you decide you want them anyway you can pretty much do "whatever" within the confines of avoiding the usual stupid errors that can apply to basically any mechanic.

I figure the purpose of attributes is make a short easy to read/understand/interact with set of numbers for your game character to interact with game stuff. Most of the time this falls far from ideal, but that seems to be the intention.

Like... what are the numbers that make a cow exist in your game world. For D&D dungeoneering things focus on round by round combat, breaking/overcoming obstacles, ambushes, and long distance travel. Cows are stronger and tougher than a normal human, they can see and sense things to some degree, they have a speed, they can't climb as well as a cat.

---

In every home brew, including the one I’m working on now, I always fold con into strength, as Brawn or Might. Constitution has always been, for me, a problematic stat. In my youth, I was more accepting of it, because I read Elric and fought Glass Joe in Mike Tyson’s Punchout and thought the glass cannon character concept was worth wasting 16% of a PC’s attributes to emulate..

So that's a case of CON as a 'toughness' number, but not a 'stamina' number. D&D views athletic movement and chopping through iron golems as something that's not tiring, all the tiring things are tied to one-off special rules like spell slots and rage exhaustion.

[Emerald]

D&D views athletic movement and chopping through iron golems as something that's not tiring, all the tiring things are tied to one-off special rules like spell slots and rage exhaustion.

Well, kinda. D&D didn't originally have rules for individual character stamina because it folded that stuff into the dungeon- and wilderness-crawling process. Out-of-combat actions (and things like torch durations) were measured in 10-minute "exploration turns;" everything the party did, from listening at a door to exploring a room to engaging in combat, took a minimum of 1 turn (with the assumption that even if the whole combat only took a round or two the remaining 8-9 minutes involved resting, bandaging any wounds, etc.); and PCs were required to rest every 6th turn, regardless of what actions they'd been doing in the meantime.

When 2e rolled around and X-crawling was no longer the default mode of play the strict crawl structure was de-emphasized, but it was still assumed (in DMG discussions on tracking time and such) that PCs were taking regular rests even if you didn't explicitly count turns. In 3e it disappeared entirely, but "there aren't any stamina rules because it's assumed they'll never come up" doesn't mean "every PC can sprint around punching iron golems 24/7," in the same way that the fact that there are no rules for wounds getting infected (like there were in 1e) because it's assumed that you'll always have a cleric on hand to patch you up doesn't mean wounds don't ever get infected in-setting.

Which isn't to say that you shouldn't have stamina mechanics, rather that if you want to retain Con as a stat and make stamina-based/-themed abilities based on it there's thematic precedent for that in D&D, it just hasn't previously been a big enough thing to need separate mechanics for it.

[Stubbazubba]

I think 5e may have accidentally done something right when it made proficiency bonuses approximately equal to ability score bonuses, and then called every attack, save, and skill check just an ability check that proficiency may or may not apply to. They did it for Bounded Accuracy purposes, which is wrong, but the effect is an ability system that isn't entirely redundant after the first couple levels for a change, which keeps the number of moving parts to a minimum and is easier to understand than having separate formulae for attacks, skill checks, saves, and everything else. You still have the score-bonus divide, and the cap on abilities and skills is too low, but buried in there is a good attribute mechanic.

On the topic of CON, there really isn't a good reason to divide it from STR. The only argument might be that you don't want every melee class to be so SAD, but every ranged/finesse build is, so that doesn't hold a lot of water. If the argument is that it's one more defense (Fortitude) to exploit against a stronger foe, that's what DEX and INT are for, it's at best redundant. Divorce HP from it entirely, make it all class- and race-based, and never look back. If you want someone to be hardy beyond what their Body/Brawn/Might/STR score would suggest, call them Hardy and give them a bonus to Fortitude saves, done.

[PhoneLobster]

what are the numbers that make a cow

You don't, won't and shouldn't have an attribute mechanic that represents the whole animal kingdom. The granularity isn't, and shouldn't be there and if were there it would be disastrous.

It's already stupid enough that D&D pretends anyone actually cares about the difference between 16 Strength and 17 Strength, no one wants to start caring about the difference between 74 and 73.

When designing your game's base mechanics you need to retain focus on what is actually important for your game to represent. And if in the process you end up with something that can only give you a kinda fuzzy representation of a cow, of all things, I think you might just be fine.

And anyway. I might suggest... the most important game mechanical aspects of a Cow, assuming, for some reason, you needed to represent them. Are NOT best represented by a list of abstract numbers measuring such key cow features as its Wisdom and Charisma and Dexterity. But maybe, would be mechanics relating to it's actual potential actions represented via available active abilities or an acknowledgement of it's anatomical form and animal nature, neither of which attributes really interact with.

[Harshax]

I think Hit Points are already the resource that is used to weigh fatigue and effort.

I vaguely remember that 1e had non-lethal damage rules, where a character could beat a monster into submission. In fact, I think those rules, as I remember them, were designed to defeat and tame dragons.

If you’re looking for a resource to expend on tiring activities and more importantly, a resource to expend to double your efforts, you already have hit points as a statistic that is scaled to character concepts. Barbarians have lots of hit points and thematically lots of raw effort to apply to tasks, whereas wizards have few hit points and almost zero ability to apply effort on the fly.

[MGuy]

Choosing what is and isn't going to be an attribute and what it represents is going to be arbitrary. The value of having attributes is that you can correlate some flavorful stuff about your character with being better/worse at tasks you think the attribute will relate to. Whatever set up you decide on is probably going to be alright and I don't think that you should be worrying too much about things like cows unless they are going to come up often or knowing about how strong or hardy a cow really is will be very important.

[Thaluikhain]

I think Hit Points are already the resource that is used to weigh fatigue and effort.

I vaguely remember that 1e had non-lethal damage rules, where a character could beat a monster into submission. In fact, I think those rules, as I remember them, were designed to defeat and tame dragons.

The 1st ed AD&D Monster Manual had them in the dragon section, yeah. Not sure why you couldn't do that to things not in the dragon section.

[hogarth]

I vaguely remember that 1e had non-lethal damage rules, where a character could beat a monster into submission. In fact, I think those rules, as I remember them, were designed to defeat and tame dragons.

The 1E DMG also had pummeling rules (besides grappling rules and overbearing rules) for use against humanoids, where one result was a non-lethal KO.