What Is A Dump Stat?

A dump stat is going to be the thing that you are worst at. In terms of what that looks like on your character sheet, 10 is supposed to be average. If someone were to have a 10 in all their stats, they are the average person in the world.

So it’s not just your lowest stat, it is a stat that is below that average. If you are even one less, at 9, you get a negative one penalty on the roll and you are lower than average with what you can roll. But that is talking about it mechanically, it is also a weakness in how you role play out that below average trait.

Playing A Dump Stat in Dungeons and Dragons

The first question to ask if if your character knows they have a dump stat. If you are just below average wisdom or intelligence you know that you aren’t as smart. If they are a fair bit below, now they start to think that they are smarter. Some of the physical ones, strength or dexterity, you might always know that you aren’t as good at, but is that how you are going to play it.

Let’s go through each stat and come up with a way to play it.

Strength

For strength, I think that there are two common ways that you could play it. First, you could have the character constantly try and get people to help them. Even for a meaningless task, like opening a pickle jar with a loose lit, or pull a small dead branch off a tree, they also have someone else help them.

Or on the other side of things, they could refuse help. They might know they are weak, but they are going to do it themselves. So when the big fighter or barbarian tries to help them, they get upset and refuse the help. It is a matter of pride that they will be able to do it on their own.

Dexterity

Dexterity is going to follow along the lines of strength. They know that anything slightly dexterous is tricky for them, so they never do it. In fact, really easy things, they try and make someone else do it. Or they are going to try no matter what.

Constitution

For constitution you can make it about them getting sick all of the time. If the weather turns, they get a slight cold. They have the sniffles about 90% of the year. When the group goes into the bar, they are a light weight and after a drink they are up on the table and possibly looking to pick a fight or hitting on someone at the bar and getting into trouble that way.

Intelligence

Intelligence is pretty straightforward as well. You just assume knowledge about things. If someone talks on a subject, you assume that you know more than they do. And you don’t really feel a need to look into it further because, again, you know. On the other hand, you know about libraries but wouldn’t think about going to them to find out information.

Wisdom

Wisdom is going to be more about how the world works. You think you know how criminals work on the streets. You think you know how things will play out in a situation, especially social. But you really don’t know how any of that works. If you are down a little, you’re probably worried about messing any situation up. If you are very low on wisdom, you just assume that you know what is going on and are a bit of a bull in a china shop.

Charisma

Charisma is probably the most interesting to have as a low stat mainly because charisma as a high stat is pretty narrow. Or at least how a lot of people play it, it is. But as a low stat, you have a lot of ways to go. You can just assume that everyone likes you, even though you are annoying. Being very quiet is another way to play it. Or try and overcompensate by talking loudly or being too affectionate, or whatever thing your character believes is the normal things people do that is most certainly not normal.

Final Thoughts

Dump stats are fun, mainly because it gives your character a chance not to shine. There are a lot of opportunities to utilize strengths. And a good DM (Dungeon Master) should present opportunities like that to players. But a chance to create a fun or interesting moment with a weakness, that is going to be as memorable as that great thing that you did. A dump stat is also a great way to bring in comedy or intended conflict.

An example would be a low dexterity character trying to sneak around the edge of a group of goblins versus the rogue doing so. They fall into the midst of goblins, now you have a weird combat that is going to start happening. Or a low charisma character getting flustered by some light flirting and accidentally proposing to a princess in front of the king. You will be talking about when those moments happen way more than when the fighter takes out the goblins.

So lean into it and have fun. That is the fun of a role playing game. Dungeons and Dragons, or whatever system you are using, is about that fun at the table versus winning the game. In fact, very few D&D campaigns reach the end, stories get too big or schedules change, but there are always going to be moments that you remember in the game.

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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

One of the big things with a video game RPG, MMO or otherwise, or playing a pen and paper RPG like Dungeons and Dragons, or even playing a board game like Gloomhaven is that your character levels up and gets better. This can be done in a few ways depending on the system.

In all cases there are a few things that I would generally consider to be normal. The biggest thing is that when you go up a level, you get more health. Even within this, there can be some variability. It can be that you go up by a fixed number, or go up to a fixed number, or it can be variable. Let’s talk about a few of the different ways and how they work. Gloomhaven has the easiest one to explain. In that game you start out with a fixed number of healthy, every level your health goes up to another fixed number. Now Dungeons and Dragons covers most of the rest of the ways. You can either get a variable number, based off of a die roll or something like that, or you can go up by a fixed number. In either case in Dungeons and Dragons, that number is modified by your constitution modifier. For my game, I’m leaning towards the latter. I think that the characters will go up in health by a fixed number modified by a vitality stat or a fixed number based off of their vitality stat, more likely.

And talking about stats, what are stats that would make sense. I could use what Dungeons and Dragons have and go with Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. But for this game, I don’t think that makes that much sense. In Dungeons and Dragons you are playing another character completely in that world. In this game, you are playing as a person trapped in a video game. You are going to have your mental faculties still, so stuff like Intelligence and Wisdom are going to only be useful character stats for interacting with an NPC, maybe, more likely that’d be charisma.

Before I’d referred to the base stats as:  strength, agility, guile, toughness, intelligence, and allure. This is fairly close to mirroring what D&D has. However, I think I’m going to change that up slightly. We are going to still have Strength and Agility. Those are going to be the stats that influence your combat the most. Instead of Toughness, we are going to have vitality. Your HP, your ability to shake off poison or stun effects and stuff like that. I’m also going to keep Allure and Guile as stats. These will be important for influencing NPC’s, negotiating, seducing, intimidating, or whatever it might be that a player decides to use them for. But intelligence is going to go away. Storywise, maybe that was a part of the game before, but now it’s gone, and even before, it was probably just a rolodex of knowledge that your player could look up things in, versus a stat that was used to influence anyone.

So, when you level up, you have those five stats. How do you improve them, do they improve at a fixed rate, most certainly not. Instead, you’ll end up having a ability pool or points that you can put into a stat or stats as you see fit. You can bump up your strength as fast as you want, but you’ll have a harder time negotiating with NPC’s and probably even getting some of the quests that they might have to offer. But they’ll be much better at fighting.

Even at the beginning when building your character, you’ll have a few basic skills you can pick from, but you’ll also have a point pool for your base stats and you can assign them as you want. I’d probably do a base 5 points in every stat but then give an additional 10 points, or maybe even 15 points to add to customize your character. The reason for doing this is that I want character creation to be part of the game, and I also want characters and play styles to feel different from the very beginning. If everyone starts out as a level 1 commoner, that’s boring. You aren’t a commoner NPC level character at the start, you start as a hero.

One thing I haven’t mentioned are skills and how they’ll work. There’s a reason for that, I want skills not be something that you just get. Sure you’ll have “skill trees” to some extent, but I want skills be things that you to have to find. That can be from buying skills at certain shops, but they’ll be more generic skills to going on quests and getting skills. When you’re buying skills, they’ll be a bit more generic but you’ll have a larger variety of them that you can grab. The ones in quests, they’ll be better, and my current plan is that you’ll pick a skill pile and draw that type of skill. That skill will have a number that will modify the quests difficulty, but you can pick that from the start and you’ll know how much more challenging it’ll be, the better the skill the more challenging. I also want skills to be able to grow with the player. They are going to be based off of the base stats some, modifying how much they do with how good the player is in that stat or that combination of stats. I want something you grab at level one if you happen to get lucky, to be worth playing late into the game. Now, since skills with have cooldowns related to them you’ll want to have several.

I also want skills to do better when played in “sequence”. I don’t mean that you have to play Skill A1 before Skill A2 and then Skill A3 is better, and they always have to be in that order. I want to borrow from games like Marvel Legendary and Clank! In! Space! where you have factions of cards, so a card might be an Avengers card, and if you play that card before you play another card, that card might have an ability that triggers off of an Avengers card having been played. I’ve talked about keywords before, I want to do that with skills, if you’ve used a skill and it’s cooling down and it has a keyword on it that matches one for an additional ability on your next skill you play, boom, added benefit and power. This is kind of like the comboing between character with the modifier deck draw, but for yourself, so you can set-up turns. Granted, you still have to do that to match what the boss monster is doing as well.

Anyways, that got a little off track for the main topic, but I think that it’s important to add in when talking about leveling. You are basically just increasing your health and base stats when you level. Skills will increase based off of those stats, but you won’t get a new skill for hitting level milestones or just because you leveled up.

What are your thoughts on that, should you get skills when you level up, or should they be rewards for completing missions in the game, defeating bosses, and maybe even being something that you can buy?

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I’m back with some more Drinking in D&D. Tonight I brought up two Deschutes Fresh Squeezed IPA, but I only drank one of them. It’s one of my favorite beers, a good IPA.

The topic for Drinking in D&D was looking at the Character Sheet and what sections on the character sheet are. There’s a lot to keep track of it and it’s the basis for how you roll your dice and what your character can do, particularly in combat.

There are a number different areas that I looked at on the board, hit points, speed, initiative, proficiency, armor class (AC), ability scores, and skills. I’m going to go back and do the second half of the main sheet and hopefully the other two sheets in my next stream, which might be happening on Friday, tbd.

Thanks for checking out the video. If you are enjoying the content, it does go out live on Twitch at http://twitch.com/maltsandmeeples. The videos are also uploaded to youtube, and a subscription or a like will help people find the videos there.

Bottoms up!

Dragonborn, are a bit like tieflings or other races where they get some heritage from something non-standard fantasy. And because of that, in Dungeons and Dragons, they are treated as a rarer race. They pull both from their draconic ancestry, including getting a breath weapon. But with that draconic heritage, that means they often also take haughtiness and aloofness of the dragons. This can make them a bit temperamental in a party.

Mechanically speaking, besides that breath weapon that you get which you can use sparingly, you also get bumps to strength and charisma. For that reason, Dragonborn make good fighters, but also charisma casters. Their strongest class is probably Paladin, a charisma casting class that is also good in melee. You also get resistance to the element that your breath weapon is. This also helps you tank as an enemy caster might be using whatever element you’re resistant to, and you’ll be able to stay in melee longer.

Other than those stats, the real things we’re looking at is that Dragonborn tend to role play as haughty. I mentioned that before, but I think it’s worth mentioning again. They think that they are better than you, and that they can probably do it themselves. This can also lead to foolhardiness because they are more apt to rush into something if they feel like someone else is going to be able to do it first.

They are also going to be rare and the chromatic ones distrusted. In Dungeons and Dragons, while the metallic dragons aren’t necessarily helpful, they aren’t evil either. The chromatic dragons, aren’t helpful, and they might decide they want to rule or go on a rampage. So, the people who know this, and I suspect it would be fairly common knowledge in most D&D worlds, are going to distrust a Dragonborn that is chromatic. Even the metallic Dragonborn might be looked at askance.

So let’s talk about some backstories, why might a Dragonborn decide to join an adventuring party.

I was, what I would consider a legend on the battlefield, there were few who could stand up to me. I was able to shrug off spells like it was no ones business, and I was only ever bested once when my “rival” got a lucky blow in on me. That took me out of action for a few weeks, but I’d done enough damage to the opposing army that our forces were able to continue routing them and I was given a retirement. But retirement doesn’t suit me well, so I feel the need to save sad adventuring parties who don’t know what they are doing.
Alignment: Lawful Neutral
Class: Fighter
Background: Soldier
Notes: The point of that background, while it wouldn’t make sense for a level one character, is that the dragonborn exaggerates. They were in the army, but got injured, and were in bed for a long time, probably over a year, and now they want to actually do something worth their boasting so when people look them up, it’s something actually true.

With my size, people always thought that I would go into the army. But that wasn’t that interesting for me. I was much more interested in finding out about my draconic background. I spent years researching, trying to get a better understanding of who I was and where I’d come from. That led me all over the world, and I picked up some interesting skills and because pretty good at avoiding trouble. It might not be the most glamorous way to deal with problems, but smashing things with a club isn’t my style. I now want to go to the mountains where my people allegedly came from.
Alignment: Lawful Good/Neutral
Class: Ranger/Rogue
Background: Sage

People always looked at me like I was strange. I can’t help it if my parents left me in the big city at a young age. I don’t even know what happened to them for sure. I wanted to show people that I was better than just a kid who bounced around from temple to temple, helping when I could and getting a free meal. To do that, when you can’t go to school and life in the city is hard and dangerous, I could only come up with one way. I made a deal. I have some power now through it and I can help other people because of that. But mainly, I just want to find out why my parents left me.
Alignment: Neutral Good/Chaotic Good
Class: Warlock
Background: Urchin

There are some ideas for character backgrounds of a Drabonborn. In the game I’m going to be running soon, I’ll have a player who is playing a Dragonborn.

Let me know about some background ideas that you have for a Dragonborn character. Have you played a Dragonborn before?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

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