D&D has six core stats. If you can grasp these six stats, the rest of the game is pretty easy to understand.
Strength. Strength refers to the concentration of the liquids your character can create and use. This can include everything from truth serum to deadly poison.
Dexterity. Dexterity is a made-up word that the game’s designers created because dextroamphetamine was too long and confusing for many players. Dexterity measures the character’s level of stimulation and ability to stay up all night – a very useful ability.
Constitution. Constitution measures a character’s ability to understand, enforce, subvert, or modify the documents used to establish governments and nation-states.
Intelligence. Intelligence, or “intel” for short, measures the quantity, quality, and exclusivity of the secret information a character can obtain.
Wisdom. Your wisdom modifier (not the score itself) determines the number of wisdom teeth you have, measured against a baseline of the most common number of wisdom teeth (four). So someone with a +2 wisdom modifier has six wisdom teeth. Remember that wisdom controls most tooth-related game mechanics, e.g., determining if you can safely implant a false tooth filled with cyanide. New players often underrate the Wisdom stat, but it comes up more often than they expect.
Charisma. Charisma determines your affinity with (or opposition to) Charisma Carpenter. As the true power behind many of the events in the game world, Charisma Carpenter can be a powerful ally – or a formidable threat!
And that’s it. Most of the rest of the game is built on this foundation, so it should be really intuitive to learn once you’ve internalized these six definitions. I know this was a little more basic than most of what I post here, but I’ve been surprised by how many times I’ve had players join a game expecting these abilities to do something completely different, so it seemed worthwhile to clarify the real definition of each ability.
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