D&D has had a long history, with all kinds of funky slang and hobby jargon evolving from it. Among those is the designation of "dump stat". The rundown goes like this: To start a character, you roll up 6 random numbers, then appoint them to your 6 abilities (or stats). Obviously, you want your highest rolls in your most useful stats, but then the question becomes what to do with the least useful rolls. Obviously, you have to put them in the stat that will be used the least, or can be sufficiently avoided. This is your character's dump stat. Now, look at all of the characters that are being made and search for a pattern. What is the most common dump stat? Whatever it is almost everyone uses as the dump stat is the single least important thing in the game. It is THE dump stat. The opposite is the one stat to rule them all; the stat you should try to fill with every point and bonus you have. The god stat is the one stat to rule them all for everybody.
Now, each edition has had some variance on exactly what the dump stat is. It is usually charisma, but sometimes wisdom or intelligence are slightly less useful for certain characters. So, how does 5e stack up?
Well, for once, strength is not the one stat to rule them all! This doesn't happen often in D&D. STR is usually so important that other game designers have actually made whole RPGS which parody it, having only one stat, STR. Don't get me wrong, STR still matters; it is the only stat that can add bonuses to high damage die melee weapons, and it determines carry capacity, (not that anyone tracks that anyways) as well as being a common save and the base stat for the athletics skill, which can be important, as climbing comes up rather frequently... But in this edition, it is totally possible for every archetype to be successful without STR! And that's a pretty big deal!
No, dexterity is the one stat to rule them all, and the god stat for 5e. Let's be honest; it kind of always has been. DEX does the following:
• It's your AC bonus. (Makes you harder to hit) This actually makes DEX more important than CON, as it completely mitigates damage all together, as opposed to mere damage reduction in other games. In older editions, a high AC could allow a character to survive with only 2hp for a whole campaign.
• It's the attack bonus for ranged weapons.
• Versatile weapons use DEX for their attack bonus, allowing even melee combatants to displace STR in favor of the attack+defense combo of DEX.
• If you play with feats, characters can basically give all weapons versatile.
• DEX saves are the most common save in the game. In particular, they are used for evading dragon breath and trap damage. Typically, if an attack or spell calls for a save, it will very likely be a DEX save.
• DEX is your initiative modifier; it decides your order in combat, allowing you to get the jump on everyone else in the round.
• Several classes rely on DEX, granting you all pof its implicit advantages as well as class features. This makes DEX based classes patently unbalanced compared to the others, and DEX reinforcing races are just more of the same problem.
Constitution is unusually unimportant in this edition. Previously, having a low CON has either been suicide or at least a very risky idea. However, this edition is more lenient on HP loss and death, so it's no longer the begrudged prerequisite that eats a good roll because you have no choice.
• CON based saves don't happen anywhere near as frequently as they once did. Many old standard fortitude (CON) saves are now DEX saves.
• CON has NO skills based on it. This drastically reduces the conditions which would call for a CON check. As such, it is pretty much relegated to rare saves.
• It does play a role in suffocation, starvation, etc., but most people forget air exists when they play the game, and water becomes more like cold blue lava. Eating winds up being "assumed" along with defication, grooming, and dreaming. As a result, nobody cares. It doesn't even get recorded on standard charsheets!
• CON does give a base HP bonus on each hit die, but that only matters if you get hit. As mentioned before, AC prevents damage absolutely. Also, incoming damage from monsters does not scale with character HP as characters level. Monsters deal exponentially more damage as they get stronger, while HP grows in a roughly linear progression. As a result, your extra HP means less as you progress through the game. Worse, tougher monsters like to inflict conditions and effects when they hit you, something CON rarely helps with. It's better to simply not get hit in the first place.
• Long gone are the days of the 1hp fighter. Your first level HP is automatically your highest HD result plus your CON bonus. Penalties don't apply. So now you don't need to use CON as a defensive measure to rebalance bad HD rolls! Also, a CON penalty won't eat your HP growth potential.
• With the current incarnation of stabilization rules, and HD recovery during rests, it's actually pretty hard to die. On top of that, so much as one healer in the party just makes death trivial. Because death is so easily escaped, losing HP isn't as dangerous any more. No instant death. No countdown to doom. All a higher HP total does is reduce the frequency of death scares, reducing the probability of your character actually dying overall.
Intelligence stands about where it always has: awkward. Basically nobody role plays intellect. Idiots can't play at geniuses, and geniuses won't play at idiots, regardless the numbers. Nobody can tell you you're role playing your character wrong, that would be insanely rude and arrogant. Nobody likes being told their character MUST be an idiot just because all of their low rolls happened to be VERY low. Being restricted in how you play a character because of a die roll just seems stupid, and nobody looks to see your actual scores anyways. So, role play wise, INT is pretty much meaningless. It basically only represents academic knowledge accumulation and regurgitation, which are not actual intelligence in their own right. All but one of its skills are just different restricted manifestations of the old knowledge skill, each with limited use, making them all feel like partial skills; like you need to waste proficiency opportunities elsewhere in order to get a full skill- a skill that won't save your life or earn you extra treasure. In other words, building for INT skills is literally paying to suck. Investigation can come in handy- it can get you treasure AND save your life! ... Sadly, it seems that most adventure writers forget it exists. Most "investigations" are handled by perception, investigation's big brother. If your DM is good, get investigation- it will help, even if it has a low base score. If you're playing published stuff, don't worry about it- you've only missed out on a few plot hints and 100gp so far. Everything else was handled by perception despite investigation being more appropriate. With each adventure having different writers, this may change at some point, but as of now we're half way through the second season, and investigation has become completely absent from play.
Wisdom has, comparatively, become immeasurably more important! Both insight and perception use wisdom, and both are important. Perception is basically your ability to notice stuff that's hard to notice, kind of like a super-version of investigation, and insight is their sister skill, which is basically perception for social encounters. Both will save your life, reduce opposition, and give bonus loot. Insight suffers a bit from perception overstepping it's territory, much like investigation, but not quite to the same extent. You want a decent WIS score, and you NEED perception proficiency. So important is perception, most character sheets have its passive score recorded separately from all other skills. That's impressive; the skill has damn near become a standalone ability! There is a problem though; WIS has no real inherent function beyond those two skills, and it's remaining skills are pretty forgettable. (Animal handling? Really? An enforceable means of revoking the value of animal allies? Dicks.) Unlike DEX, STR, and all the others, WIS has no inherent function. Worse, it is still very poorly defined and vague, meaning WIS checks are essentially non existent. WIS also takes over from old will saves, though many old will saves have now become CON saves, so WIS is probably the least useful stat in its own right. Thus, if you're going to be forced to put a good roll in a useless stat for an essential skill, there is high motivation to make some sort of return on that investment, making WIS based classes (and by relation, WIS reinforcing races) more valuable.
Now, I'm sure nobody is surprised here, but yet again, CHR is the dump stat. What a shock. What is that? 8 iterations of the game with the same dump stat? Basically, CHR suffers from the same problem as INT: it is in direct conflict with the idea of role playing. Either you don't role play and handle all social interactions with CHR checks, or you never use CHR for anything and handle all socialization through role play. You simply cannot have it both ways! However, it is less useful than INT because it is even less likely to save your life or earn treasure, determines nothing inherently, and all of its skills are just extensions of regular CHR checks. CHR saves are pretty much unheard of. The published adventures try to make CHR matter by referencing it frequently... But it has the opposite effect. If you are playing published adventures, it is actually beneficial to have a terrible CHR score, because it almost always results in more fights with more enemies (meaning more rewards after you kill them) and never results in a true penalty. So having a CHR penalty is actually REWARDING! It never hurts you.
5th edition is pretty wonky, quite frankly. It's the first D&D where strength doesn't matter, constitution isn't a prerequisite, an ability is completely absorbed by a single skill, and you are actually rewarded for dumping on CHR. What total weirdness.
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