Stat Blocks
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By now you have probably recorded your character's information on a character sheet. If you have not there is a link below to a pdf file.
On the sheet you will notice 6 boxes labelled Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Wisdom, Intelligence and Charisma. Those of you who
have played table top rpg games before, you are probably aware of what each one is. For those who do not lets break it down. Strength
is what allows a character to carry a certain amount of weight. It also determines how well you can hit with most attacks and how hard.
If we use the tomato analogy Strength is how hard and well you can throw it. Dexterity is often used to dodge attacks, traps, and
plays into your armor class (AC) which helps you dodge an attack. For weapons with the finesse property your dexterity modifier
gets used instead of strength for attacking. The tomato analogy for this is essentially how well can you dodge said tomato. Constitution
is what determines how much health you have, how much you gain on a short rest, how long can you swim or hold your breath, can you
avoid poison effect or exhaustion. Overall a really useful stat that often gets overlooked by new players in favor of the physical stats. The
tomato in this case is, "Is it poisoned?", huh I guess it was but I'm fine. Intelligence is your book smarts. How smart are you and do
you know anything about this item? It used as the spell casting ability for wizards. Intelligence is knowing a tomato is a fruit to put it
plainly. Wisdom is more street smarts. Just because you may not know everything doesn't mean you suck at your profession. If you need
to spot something or recall how to survive off of plants, then wisdom will be your friend. It also determines the casting ability for druids,
fighters (if applicable), clerics, and rangers. Wisdom is knowing a tomato does not go in a fruit salad. Charisma is your vocal style,
need to persuade someone or something? Want to tell a bold faced lie and get away with it? Maybe you need to put on a performance to
act or play music. All of these things use charisma as the base stat for skills. Bards, warlocks, paladins, and sorcerors use this as their
spell abilities. So now that you have gotten the quick rundown of each major stat block, it is time to roll for stats. If you're using an online resource such as DnD Beyond point buy is a viable option and is really useful if you have something very specific in mind. For those who wish to do the traditional way, I use the 4d6 method. A few other methods exist but I find this the most balanced. In this method we roll 4 6-sided dice drop the lowest number and re-roll 1's. For example I roll 6, 4, 1, 3, I take the 1 and re-roll to get 2. Therefore drop the lowest and add up the rest for 13. I would repeat this process 6 times so I have numbers for each stat. Once that is done I choose which number goes to which spot and add up the total score for the stat. There is a handy chart within the Player's Handbook which tells you what your modifier is based on the total score. From these modifiers determined by the score we can add up our modifiers for a section called skills. Skill modifiers use the base modifier of whatever stat acronym (STR, DEX, INT, CON, WIS, CHA) plus your proficiency modifier if you are proficient in that skill. Some classes give expertise which doubles your proficiency mod then adds base stat modifier. Mathematically this looks like this - skill = (1 x (expertise) x proficiency) + base modifier. That's a lot of info to take in so let us continue with the example. Alright rolling stats, I got 18, 12, 14, 13, 13, and 15. As a paladin I want my top 3 scores to be in Strength, Constitution, and Charisma. Refer to page 173 for a chart on modifers based on total score. I will put my strength at 18 giving me a +4 modifier. For my dexterity, I will pick one of the 13's plus 2 because of the racial trait for a total of 15 with a +3 modifier. Constitution lets go with 14 for a +2 modifier. Since we read that the paladin gains 1d10+CON modifier with max potential at first level our health points will be at 12. Intelligence lets go with the 12 plus racial bonus of +1 for a total score of 13 with a +1 modifier. Wisdom let's use the other 13 with a +1 modifier. Finally for charisma lets use the second highest score to 15 with the +3 modifier. Looking at the skills section of the character there is quite a bit of specific skills, read pages 175 to 178 for details of each skill. For now I will just show a couple examples. Athletics uses strength as its base stat, so our athletics modifier when we make an athletics check is +4. Thanks to Keen Senses we gain proficiency in perception and it uses the wisdom modifier giving us a modifier of +1 +2 for a total of +3. repeat this pattern all the way down the list. Our armor class (AC) is 10+ DEX mod which for our High Elf Paladin is 13. refer to the Players Handbook for making the stats for saving throws and passive skills. |
