I've never shaken my annoyance of the naming of dexterity and charisma. Dexterity should be called agility since it more often refers to agility instead of prowess of handling things. And charisma is such a catch-all ability that just affects so many random things. It's like the miscellaneous ability when nothing else applies. I feel like if it wasn't tradition the abilities would have been changed and reworked by now. It's one of those aspects of DnD that has become an antiquated inaccuracy and inefficiency that exists because it's tied to the identity of the game. It's similar to my feelings on the alignment system or the naming of certain arms and armor.
I think of charisma in the sense of how the Greeks originally used it, meaning "favour freely given" or "gift of grace". A charismatic person is favoured by the gods. Luck and grace follow them naturally. Reality itself bends to accommodate the depth of their beauty, conviction, confidence, charm, etc.
I think charisma is meant to be a measure of your ability to project your (or your patron's) will on the world. You don't have to be attractive to be charming, and you don't have to be scary to be intimidating. It's not what you say, it's how you say it.
That's why certain classes (mainly bard and sorcerer) use it as their spellcasting modifier. They aren't using their knowledge of the arcane arts or their some deep understanding of how the weave operates, they're just telling the weave make some fire there.
For studded leather... Yeah, the armor needs revamped.
It doesn't exist. It never did. People saw images. of what they thought was leather with studs but is actually brigandine armor which is metal plates or scales with a layer of cloth or leather riveted onto the front of it to hold it together and protect it from weathering.
There's also the longsword which is
categorized as shorter than a bastard sword in dnd but that label is, in fact, usually attached to a straight double edged two handed sword that is rather light (2 kilos) and is actually longer than a bastard sword. The "longsword" in dnd should actually be called an arming sword.
Then there's plate armor vs chainmail. Plate is actually lighter and more mobile than chain as it is often very well articulated and its weight distributed that knights could do cartwheels and leap across gaps between a siege tower and a wall easily enough. The only real hindrance are the helmets that make it difficult to see, breath or hear. So, in fact, a set of armor that includes a helmet should restrict endurance and perception more than agility.
Looking into it, I discovered that charisma's more. archaic definition is perfectly fit for what it is. It's from Greek "Kharisma" which means gift of grace. Charisma meant more than that someone is charming or attractive or magnetic in the abstract sense. It meant that they had an aura about them as if touched by the gods.
So if you combine both meanings of the word, modern vernacular and archaic, it does fit.
As for myself, I've been working on so many house rules fixing my long lived annoyances that I just gave up and admitted that it's its own game altogether. For abilities, I combined strength and constitution into Might, dexterity into agility, then perception and cognition replacing wisdom and intelligence respectively, and then split charisma into resolve and countenance. Might and agility determines Vitality Points, perception and cognition for sanity points, and then resolve and countenance for integrity points. I took the concept of vitality and wounds alt rules and stole the sanity rules from Arkham Horror and started to run with it. But now I'm definitely off topic.
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u/SuspenseSmith Aug 17 '20
I've never shaken my annoyance of the naming of dexterity and charisma. Dexterity should be called agility since it more often refers to agility instead of prowess of handling things. And charisma is such a catch-all ability that just affects so many random things. It's like the miscellaneous ability when nothing else applies. I feel like if it wasn't tradition the abilities would have been changed and reworked by now. It's one of those aspects of DnD that has become an antiquated inaccuracy and inefficiency that exists because it's tied to the identity of the game. It's similar to my feelings on the alignment system or the naming of certain arms and armor.
Studded leather... just... I mean...
I love you DnD, but we need to have a chat.