Age Categories in 5.5e

So, 5e and 5.5e doesn't have Age Categories. I'm on the record as enjoying aging effects, but admittedly, it does get a bit fiddly, doesn't it. Figuring out what age category an elf is as compared to a human of the same age, or whatever? Fiddly.

The Modifiers

I do rather like 3.5e's numbers:

• At middle age, a character gains -1 to Str, Dex, and Con; +1 to Int, Wis, and Cha
• At old age, a character gains an additional -2 to Str, Dex, and Con; +1 to Int, Wis, and Cha
• At venerable age, a character gains an additional -3 to Str, Dex, and Con; +1 to Int, Wis, and Cha

So being Middle-Aged is strictly a sidegrade; Old is a downgrade (with a silver lining); Venerable is an even worse downgrade (with a silver lining). Extreme min/maxers might choose to be Old or Venerable; Middle Age is an eminently reasonable choice for a moderate min/maxer.

What Age Category Am I?

We can probably mostly basically just use 3.5e's numbers for what age category a character of a given species is is at any given age.

(I believe 5.x canon is that elves age like humans until adulthood, and then just stay there; the relevant 3.5e charts indicate that they used to definitively hit Adulthood at 110 years; we could split the difference and let them Young Adult at a more human-like age)

Aging Effects

I used to use specific year amounts for aging magic and effects, but I'm leaning towards, instead: you don't advance specific year numbers; if you fail a save, you straight-up advance an age category; elves just have advantage on the save.

Maybe mix it up with a touch of what 3.5e used to have you do for Negative Levels: at the end of the day, make a save vs it becoming permanent. ...no, I low-key hate that, because I hated that about NLs in 3.5e.

Ooooh, here's an idea: You know how if you have 6 levels of Exhaustion, you just straight-up die? What if, instead of death, if you have 6 levels of Exhaustion (perhaps: "and at least one of them is from a magical or supernatural effect"), you straight-up advance an age category? Or maybe you go unconscious at Exhaustion 6 either way, and if you fail a save you also advance an age category?

Origin Ability Points in 5.5e

So, a thing that 5.5e does: it decouples ability score bonuses from species (previously known as 'race', in PF2 known as 'ancestry'; I think 'species' is a fine choice). I don't necessarily disagree with this decision, and I recognize it was done for good reasons, but there is much nuance to be dug through, so let's explore.

This is a hugely contentious issue, so hopefully I don't make too many dumb assumptions or dumb material conditionals. (I almost certainly will!)

Nomenclature

Ok, so the main reason ability scores are decoupled from race is that we Definitely Do Not want to leave ourselves open to real-world biological race conspiracy theories, like "Black people have lower Int but higher Str than white people". Which is fair!

...but, we already renamed it? Nobody can any longer fairly accuse D&D species of being the same thing as Earth race?

D&D species is of course not the same thing as biology science species, but the name change does make the decoupling of ability scores from species slightly goofier -- who could possibly argue that your average standard-issue hippopotamus is not able to lift more weight (ie, is not stronger) than your average standard-issue groundhog?

Introducing Sex, for the Purpose of Clarifying but Probably in fact Muddying the Issue

In OD&D 1e, women had a cap on how strong they could be. That's goofy in at least two ways (probably three: I think female characters didn't get any advantages to compensate for this disadvantage), so let's cut it down to only one way: Pretend (biological, ie, ovary-having?) women had, say, a -2 to Strength score and a +2 to, I dunno, Dexterity. Or, let's make women the Default and pretend they had no modifiers to abilities, and men had a +2 to Str and a -2 to Dex.

It is a source of perpetual mass dumbness that, on average, men, however you define it, are probably statistically basically stronger than women, however you define it. This is the (ostensible) objection to having transwomen compete in women's sports.

Setting aside the very many dumbnesses associated with this argument, the core thing that's maybe true (depending, again, on how you define "woman" and "man", among other things) is that the bell curve of women's strength scores is shifted a bit lower than the bell curve of men's strength scores. The strongest man is stronger than the strongest woman; the weakest man is stronger than the weakest woman; the average man is stronger than the average woman; BUT it's only shifted a little, so of course the strongest woman is stronger than the weakest man.

If ability scores are generated by rolling, this shifted bell curve is of course represented very well by a flat +2 or -2. (This is why 1e's actual thing, a straight-up cap on Strength, is doubly dumb and bad.)

If we wanted to maximize Realism at the cost of everything else, a -2 penalty compensated by a +2 bonus elsewhere (or, like, giving men a +2 Str and women a +2 Dex, nobody getting penalties and everybody getting equal bonuses to different things) would be a fair model of offset bell curves.

Sex is a super-goofy thing to demand be "realistic"ally modeled, of course, but this is how we'd do it. (Why it's super-goofy: among other reasons, consider species with different sexual dimorphisms. Species where the girl is bigger and stronger than the boy, for example.)

Race, Tho?

Let's consider now if ancestry were still called Race.

Let's pretend there's an ability called Melanin, which reflects how much melanin is in a character's skin.

A character of the Black Race should have a bonus to their Melanin score, yes? And maybe a character of the Nordic Race should have a penalty? The average Black person is darker-skinned than the average Nordic person, yes? Still permitting the existence of the darkest-skinned Nordic person being darker-skinned than the lightest-skinned Black person, etc.

Sure, there are Backgrounds which could conceivably have an effect on the Melanin score -- the Beach Bum background, for example -- but most of them probably won't have as much effect as Race.

On the other extreme, we definitely would not want to say any Race has a bonus or penalty to, say, Intelligence, Charisma, or Wisdom. That would be some caliper-wielding chauvinism, away from which we want to vigorously shy.

But... are there maybe actually some Races that average stronger or faster or more hardy than others?

Ok, let's set Race aside again, let's set it from our minds, we're now again talking about Species only.

Curvature of the Struck Idiophone Variety

Ok, so the bell-curve thing doesn't necessarily so much completely apply, for like three reasons: first, we usually don't roll for ability scores anymore, as array and point by are objectively better; second, PCs are Special, so they shouldn't necessarily reflect the broader bell curve of the species population; third, bell curves in terms of populations have, like, a bad reputation, mostly because of a book of that name.

Still... does it actually make sense that the strongest Orc it is possible to produce is exactly as strong as the strongest Gnome it is possible to produce? The most dexterous Dwarf as dexterous as the most dexterous Elf?

Proposed House Rule

My inclination, to make Species at least have the ability to matter, though it doesn't necessarily have to for every character, is a house rule along these lines:

Assign each Species two (or so) ability scores, which will typically be whichever ones they got bonuses to in 5.0e. When you assign your Origin-related ability scores (your choice of { +2 +1 } or { +1 +1 +1 }, as usual), you may pick from the options given in your Background and the options given in your Species. You have the option for only your Background to matter to your ability scores, the option for only Species to matter, or the option for both to matter.

You still have a situation where any Orc and a Gnome Soldier have the same maximum possible Strength, which remains slightly peculiar -- but better than unaltered 5.5e, where a Gnome Soldier had a higher maximum Strength than an Orc Criminal.

Sub-Houserule: Synergy

If there is overlap between your Species and your Background, my first instinct is nothing special happens, but it does happen to provide, like, a soft limit: you have fewer options to choose from, so you are pushed towards choosing what is overlapped, though it is not in any special way required.

My second instinct is to give overlap between Species and Background some sort of synergy bonus. Which is kind of like 3.5e's Racial Favored Class, except it's more of a Species Favored Background, and also not something that every table just ignores because it's too much hassle to bother with.

My first thought here was to give ability scores with Background+Species synergy a starting max in that Ability of 22 instead of 20 -- then I remembered no character will ever start with higher than 15+2=17 in any ability, and I don't want Origin to add a thing you can first plausibly take advantage of at level 8.

Perhaps, if you have Background+Species synergy, then the option is made available to you to, instead of { +1 +1 +1 } or { +2 +1 }, choose { +3 } provided it is used on a synergized ability, thereby allowing a character plausibly to begin with a score of 18 in that ability?

Or, like, if you have synergy, then you have the option to forgo your Origin Feat and 1 point of your ability bonus (leaving you with a choice between only { +2 } or { +1 +1 }), and instead take a regular feat, provided it is a feat that gives you a bonus to the synergized ability (and, of your remaining ability points, the +2 or the +1s can go to any abilities, even the synergized one)?

Edited to Add:

It occurs to me: what if an additional option.

Original option as amended from 5.5e: Add { +1 +1 +1 } or { +2 +1 } to any scores benefited by your Background and/or Species.

New option as laid out in last section above: Instead add { +3 } to any score synergized by both your Background and Species.

New option being laid out now: In addition to any of the above, also add { -1 } (ie, subtract 1) to any ability not benefited by either Background or Species, and add an additional { +1 } to any ability benefited by Background or Species or both (which can be an ability you've already added points to).

So options are sixfold:

• { +3, +1, -1 }
• { +3 }
• { +2, +1, +1, -1 }
• { +2, +1}
• { +1, +1, +1, +1, -1 }
• { +1, +1, +1 }

Where +1 or +2 can be to any score boosted by either Background or Species, -1 can only be to a score boosted by neither Background nor Species, and +3 can only be to a score boosted by both Background and Species.

ALTERNATELY: You only get the choice between { +2, +1 } or { +1, +1, +1 }; but if your Species and Background synergize: you have the additional option to put { -1 } into any ability found on neither list and { +1 } into any ability found on both lists. Still brings the possibility of starting at 18, but you have to pay a little cost for it.

On Bringing Back Ability Damage

In D&D 3.5e, we had Ability Damage. Things (especially poison, but also other stuff, especially various creatures) could deal damage directly to an ability score -- if you take 1d6 Strength Damage, your Strength score goes down by 1d6 (so your Strength modifier correspondingly goes down by about half of 1d6).

If any of your Abilities reach 0 from damage, you are, depending on the Ability, paralyzed (a physical score), unconscious (a mental score), or dead (Constitution). If you take an 8-hour sleep, you heal damage in each damaged Ability by 1; if you take a 24-hour sleep, you heal each by 2. You can also take Ability Drain, which is basically the same but it doesn't heal without magic.

The designers of 5th Edition, of course, judged this all absurdly fiddly and mathy -- not only do you have to track each of your current Ability scores separate from your actual Ability scores (plus keep track of how much is Damage and how much is Drain), you also have to do the (x-10)/2 (rounded down) thing for each one to calculate your current and actual Ability modifiers -- and, probably rightly and correctly, dispensed with the whole thing.

I do find its loss very mildly unfortunate. It did allow a fair bit of differentiation between monsters. This guy just paralyzes you, that guy gradually makes you more sluggish until you're paralyzed, the other guy makes you dumber until you're paralyzed, and so on.

To the rescue: the OSR stylings of Swedish TTRPG Dragonbane!

In Dragonbane, each Ability score can have or not have a Condition. If you have a Condition in an Ability score, every time you roll that Ability for anything, you simply roll with what in 5e would be called Disadvantage (in Dragonbane, it's called a "Bane").

Porting that back to 5e, we could, while maintaining a high level of simplicity, have 3 (or even 4) levels of "ability score damage":

• Regular, undamaged (roll normally)
  If you then fail a save vs Ability Damage:
• Damaged (all rolls with that Ability have disadvantage)
  If you then fail another save vs Ability Damage in an already-damaged Ability:
• Paralyzed/Unconscious (or, if Constitution, unconscious and making Death saves)
  We could also introduce some sort of blessing/boon/etc that goes the other direction:
  
• Blessed or something (all rolls with that Ability have advantage, with the side benefit that you have an extra level of buffer against Ability Damage to that Ability -- failing a save vs Ability Damage when you're blessed in that Ability just brings you down to normal)

We could take Dragonbane's names for the Conditions (Exhausted, Sickly, Dazed, Angry, Scared, and Disheartened), some of which are already used in 5e (plus the term "Condition" itself has a 5e meaning, too). We could just call them Bane and Boon to Abilities, terms which are mostly not already in use.

Non-Human Animals in D&D 3.5e

This post is aimed primarily at a lay audience, and therefore I'll be defining a lot of terms that many of my readers will already be familiar with and take for granted.

In this post, I will default to the style of capitalizing in-game terms with defined meanings. This is most relevant example is the difference between animals (the normal scientific real-world definition of "members of the animal kingdom") and Animals (the D&D 3.5e definition of "members of the Animal Type").

--- Introduction

In Dungeons and Dragons, one rarely encounters actual living animals, except when a local cat elects to leap up on the table to play with the dice and miniatures. However, the game's treatment of fictional animals reflects our thoughts about real animals, and is thus worth contemplating.

--- Animals and Types

In D&D 3.5, all nouns are either Creatures, Objects, or Conditions. (There's some debate as to which category some things fall into and whether a thing can be both -- for example, it's not entirely clear whether a corpse is an Object or simply a Creature with the Dead condition. While it is clear that Intelligent Items are Creatures, it's not clear whether or not they are also Objects.) Note that the Creature/Object dichotomy is not the same as the Living/Nonliving dichotomy -- there are nonliving Creatures (such as zombies and golems), and there are living Objects (such as trees and bushes). A Creature is defined as anything with a Wisdom and Charisma score. A Condition is something that affects a Creature or Object, such as Paralysis or Disease.

Of the fifteen Types in D&D (Aberration, Animal, Construct, Dragon, Elemental, Fey, Giant, Humanoid, Magical Beast, Monstrous Humanoid, Ooze, Outsider, Plant, Undead, and Vermin), all real-world animals, past and present, are distributed between three: Animal, Humanoid, and Vermin.

The only real-world animals with the Humanoid Type are humans and neanderthals (Neanderthals are treated as somewhat of an afterthought in the D&D canon, mentioned only in one of many supplements, so I will mostly treat them as an afterthought as well). Other Humanoids include elves, orcs, dwarves (which are distinct from dwarfs), gnomes, halflings, and so on.

Vermin comprise, more or less, invertebrates. Most Vermin species are fictional, including such varieties as spiders, centipedes, and scorpions ranging from Tiny (the size of cats, just this side of realistic for some examples) to Colossal (the size of a smallish house). Vermin are often Mindless, which means they have no Intelligence score. More on that later.

The Animal type comprises, more or less, all real-world non-human animals, past or present. There are a few fictional species in the Animal type, mostly limited to the Dire Animal category (Dire Animals being creatures that are larger and stronger than their regular counterparts, but which still have the traits and features of Animals). From cats, dogs, and horses to apes, sharks, elephants, squids, and so on, the Animal type is what I will mostly be concentrating on today.

There are some animals that might not be considered Creatures at all. Tapeworms, for example, are not (to the best of my knowledge) given statistics or game effects anywhere in published materials, but if they were, I would lay at least even odds that it would be treated as a Disease (i.e., a Condition) and not a Creature.

The most salient trait of the Animal type is "Intelligence score of 1 or 2 (no Creature with an Intelligence score of 3 or higher can be an Animal)." (I could also run with "Alignment: Always Neutral", but that would make for a much more ethics-heavy post.)

--- Animals and Intelligence

In D&D 3.5, every creature has six Ability Scores: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. The most morally salient of these scores is Intelligence (and, to a lesser extent, Wisdom), so this is what I will be concentrating on.

"Intelligence determines how well your character learns and reasons." It also determines how many languages you know (a Creature with an Intelligence of 2 or lower knows no languages; most Creatures with an Intelligence of 12 or higher knows more than one language.)

"Wisdom describes a character’s willpower, common sense, perception, and intuition. While Intelligence represents one’s ability to analyze information, Wisdom represents being in tune with and aware of one’s surroundings. [...] If you want your character to have acute senses, put a high score in Wisdom. Every creature has a Wisdom score."

Humans have ability scores ranging in a bell curve from 3 (abysmal) to 18 (just this side of superhuman), with the mode, median, and and mean being 10. The most common method for generating ability scores for normal humans is to roll 3d6 -- which is to say, roll three 6-sided dice and add the results together. This approximates the given range and average. (Exceptional humans -- such as most player characters -- use other methods. Non-humans use the above method and then add Racial Modifiers to some Abilities and subract Racial Modifiers from others. For example, an elf adds 2 to their Dexterity but subtracts 2 from their Constitution, so an elf would have 5-20 Dexterity but 1-16 Constitution.) (Intelligence, being a range with a bell curve, can be mapped to IQ, but doing so is beyond the scope of this post.)

A Creature can have a Nonability in some score, which is usually indicated by "--" or "Ø". A Creature that cannot move, for example, has a nonability in Dexterity and Strength. A Creature that is not alive (such as a zombie) has no Constitution. A Creature that cannot think and is as an automaton has an Intelligence nonability. (Note that this is distinct from having 0 in an Ability. A Creature never naturally has 0 in an Ability, but it can have its Abilities reduced to 0 through Ability Damage or Ability Drain -- in which case it is paralyzed, unconscious, or dead, depending on the Ability affected.)

Which brings me back to "Intelligence score of 1 or 2 (no Creature with an Intelligence score of 3 or higher can be an Animal)." If an Animal should gain Intelligence of 3 or higher by any means (usually magic), it ceases to be an Animal (the rules are unclear on what it becomes, but many players hold the interpretation that it becomes a Magical Beast). Similarly, Vermin are usually Mindless (they techniacally can have Intelligence scores, and can even have Intelligence in excess of 2, but all published Vermin have a nonability in Intelligence), meaning they are no better than automatons.

This means two things with which I intend to take issue: First, that the most intelligent Animal is considered less intelligent than the least intelligent human; second, that the wide range of animal intellects is confined to the range of --, 1, and 2, whereas the (perhaps relatively narrow) range of human intellects is given the broader numerical range of 3-18.

Dogs, octopuses, corvids, parrots, monkeys and apes, elephants, dolphins, and rats are all widely considered very intelligent, capable of tool use, complex communication, and problem solving -- quite probably more intelligent than many very young or severely handicapped humans. And yet these creatures are all considered to have the absurdly low Intelligence score of 2.

Bees are hardly automatons, being capable of complex "dance" to communicate the precise location of desirable food sources. Other eusocial insects, such as ants, termites, and some wasps, are similarly gifted in organization. Some spiders are capable of weaving complex webs in unlikely places, or of lying in ambush. A defense of the "Vermin are Mindless" school of thought might be to observe that these behaviors are instinctual, preprogrammed into these animals by evolution, and not learned -- which is probably fair, and I don't know that I have a strong position on the subject one way or the other.

The numerical range of --, 1, and 2 is much narrower than the numerical range of 3-18. The game's focus is, naturally, on playable characters, so it makes sense that the range of human experience would be given finer degrees of distinction than the range of animal experience, but I would argue that the difference between the least intelligent human and the most intelligent human is less great than the difference in intellect between, say, a leech and an elephant.

The Wisdom of published animals, on the other hand, ranges from 8 to 17 (with an average of just over 13), so the general consensus at Wizards of the Coast appears to be that the average Animal is wiser than the average Human (though the wisest human is slightly wiser than the wisest Animal). This undoubtedly has something to do with Wisdom's connection to the senses -- many animals certainly have a variety of keener senses than humans do. It likely also reflects the perception that animals are more "in tune" with nature than most humans are (Wisdom is the primary ability score for Druids and Rangers, the two classes designed around being in tune with nature).

--- Animals as Trade Goods and Carrying Capacity

Animals also appear in the section Wealth and Money, under Trade Goods. In the same chart as "one pound of wheat", "one square yard of linen" and "one pound of platinum" are entries such as "one chicken", "one pig", and "one ox". This serves to emphasize the use of animals as objects, rather than subjects.

Similarly, it is possible to buy a mule to carry your loot. With a carrying capacity of up to 690 pounds and a cost of only 8 gold pieces (less than a pound of saffron or a flask of acid), mules are among the best methods to carry stuff around (until you start picking up extradimensional storage space like Bags of Holding and Portable Holes). This reflects their use for this purpose in the real world, but barely acknowledges their status as living beings, much less their status as beings of moral concern.

--- Animal Companions, Special Mounts, and Familiars

Some Classes gain a companion animal as a class feature. Druids and Rangers gain Animal Companions, Paladins gain Special Mounts, and Sorcerers and Wizards gain Familiars. These all begin as regular Animals but gain features as the character with which they are associated levels up.

Animal Companions are drawn from a list of Animals including wolves, owls, badgers, snakes, and so on, and never gain intelligence, though they gain strength in other ways.

Special Mounts begin as warhorses or warponies, but they are treated as Magical Beasts instead of Animals.

Familiars begin as animals such as bats, cats, owls, ravens, and weasels, but they become Magical Beasts when they become Familiars, and they gain, in addition to other abilities, Intelligence. This means that, at very high level, the Wizard's or Sorcerer's Familiar might wind up being among the most intelligent creatures in the party. And yet, despite being the most intelligent creature in the party, the Familiar still tends to be sidelined in favor of the main player characters.

--- Handle Animal and Wild Empathy

There are two main ways of interacting with Animals.

Most characters use the Handle Animal skill, which deals primarily with training animals to do Tricks (such as "Attack", "Heel", or "Track") and "pushing" them to do Tricks they don't know.

Druids and Rangers, on the other hand, can use their Wild Empathy class feature, which allows them to improve the disposition of Animals towards them, for example to make a Hostile Animal Friendly. This functions in the same way as the Diplomacy skill works on creatures with an Intelligence of 3 or higher.

Ability Score Generation

I like the evenness that a point buy system for ability score generation can bring. You don't wind up with one party member whose highest stat is 14 and another party member whose lowest stat is 15 like you inevitably do when you roll dice. (Especially what with how there's usually one player in every group who can't be trusted to roll dice unsupervised.)

But randomness is fun, is I guess what draws people to the dice-rolling method of generating ability scores. Or maybe people just like it because it's traditional. (Not for nothing do we speak of "rolling up a new character".)

---

A method that I've been mulling for many moons:

Roll 5 times, with whichever rolling scheme you like best: 3d6 or 4d6b3 or 1d20 or whatever thing you want to use (3d6 and 4d6b3 are traditional; 1d20 is for masochists; with this system, it shouldn't matter).

Then you set the sixth value to whatever number would leave you with the desired point buy. (If no such number exists, reroll the fifth one until one does. If rerolling the fifth one can't possibly make it possible to reach the target, roll the fourth and fifth until it's possible.)

Then you assign these six numbers to whichever stats you want.

Example: I just rolled 3d6s and came up with 9, 11, 9, 14, 14. If I'm aiming for 30 point buy (the value used whenever I DM), the last number must be 17, for an array of {9, 11, 9, 14, 14, 17}.

Example: Rolling 4d6b3s: 12, 10, 10, 13, 8. An 18 in the final stat would be a total PB of 29, so we reroll that 8, coming up with... wow, nice, 18. A final value of 9 brings us to 30PB, for {12, 10, 10, 13, 18, 9}.

Just for masochism, let's try 1d20s: 8, 6, 6, 14, 10. 18 would only be PB20, so we must reroll the 10. Except with those numbers it's not possible: if we rolled a 16, 18 would only bring us to PB28; likewise for two 17s; 17 and 18 (or 18 and 17) would overshoot, for PB31. So we must reroll the fourth and fifth numbers (the 14 and the 10), and now we get 15 and 16, which makes it possible to slot 18 in for the last number, for an array of {8, 6, 6, 15, 16, 18}. (Hopefully I don't need to remind you that this is something of an outlier because only crazy people roll 1d20 for ability scores anyway.)

---

This method has all the interesting randomness of rolling, but the party still winds up balanced, stat-wise. You don't need to keep an eye on that one player who always suspiciously rolls really well, because his cheating ways will just net him a 3 in his last ability score or something (assuming you're using one of the expanded methods that permit you to go below the DMG-mandated 8), and all you need to do to keep him honest is double-check his PB math.

One downside: it's probably a little confusing, and probably many players won't be able to wrap their little heads around it. You may need to hold their hands. You may have to tell them to roll five scores by whatever method they desire, and then just do the PB calculation for the final score yourself. (Use a calculator.)