Player’s Strategy Guide: Choosing Your Scores

Last month we discussed ability scores in general terms, what they mean and how they influence role playing.  This month we’ll delve into how to allocate them and how characteristics such as race and class affect that process.

Pick Your Class and Race

First, we need to determine which combination of race and class fits our character concept the best.  Sometimes this translation process will be easy, particularly if we picked a well-known archetype for our character, such as the halfling rogue, elven ranger, or dwarf fighter.  Other times, we may need to work with our DM to slightly tweak or re-skin an existing race or class to fit our concept.

In D&D, races represent the different types of humanoids we can play, such as humans, elves, minotaurs, etc.  Classes encapsulate what our character can do, such as fighter, rogue, and bard.  Builds are specific examples of classes, and which build we choose determines which three ability scores are the most important and their order of importance.

These characteristics often have a fair bit of interplay between them, as some races are better at the abilities important for some classes.  Some players will always look for a race/class/build combination that maximizes racial bonuses while others may choose to ignore it.  After all, sometimes it’s fun to play against type.

For those who want a good idea about which classes and races pair well together, the Player’s Strategy Guide contains a few charts with that information.  Otherwise, the class builds themselves list the abilities most important for any given class and those can be found in the appropriate book, such as the Player’s Handbook, or in the character builder.

Determine Your Scores

Once we’ve picked our class, build and race, it’s time to assign our actual ability scores.  The most common way to do this is to pick an array and apply the scores in the order of the importance of the stat to our character’s build.  Some DMs will restrict which array(s) we can use, often preferring what is considered the standard array, (16, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10), while others have no restrictions at all.

If we are allowed to choose our own array or the point buy system, we need to determine how specialized we want our character to be. This decision underlines much of the tension between storytellers, those who place story above mechanics, and optimizers, those who want their characters to be as mechanically effective as possible in the game. The standard array has a pretty even spread of scores while providing the possibility for pretty decent modifiers in the core skills for a PC’s class.

However, most optimizers will prefer more specialization, having one or two things their character does really well at the expense of some other abilities. This is often referred to as min-maxing. Many D&D adventures and settings reward people who specialize, although the risk is that the specialization won’t be useful in the game the DM is running. So, people who prefer to min-max should work with their DM in advance to make sure their character won’t be useless in the game.

For the rest of this exercise, let’s choose an elf archer ranger to build. This means the primary abilities are dexterity, strength, and wisdom and the racial modifiers are +2 dexterity and +2 wisdom.  We’ll also assume that our DM has stated that he prefers that we use the standard array when creating our character.

The first thing we’ll want to do is make a note of the racial bonuses.  One nice trick on a handwritten sheet is to put the racial modifiers to the left of the ability score box as a reminder to add them in later.  Then we work our way through the top 3 scores in order of importance.  In this case, we would give DEX our 16, STR 14 and WIS our 13.  Of the remaining, I tend to value CON over INT or CHA for this build, but feel free have fun with it.  Once the racial modifiers are added in, our ability scores would look something like this: STR 14, CON 12, DEX 18, INT 11, WIS 15, and CHA 10.

When assigning scores, keep a few things in mind.  First, we’ll have a few opportunities to add to our scores as we level.  So sometimes it makes sense to start off with a slightly lower number in one score (an odd instead of an even) since when we add 1 to it later, the modifier will increase as well.  Also, some feats require a minimum ability score.  Newer players probably shouldn’t worry about that too much.

Once our scores are chosen we determine our modifiers, which are actually the important part of this exercise.  The modifiers are what we add to our attack and damage rolls and skill checks.  Page 17 of the Player’s Handbook has a handy guide for converting ability scores into the correct modifiers.

There you have it, how to translate your character concept into ability scores.  If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments. And next month we’ll be looking at how to choose feats and powers.