Hey there!

As mentioned, it's very much appreciated for people to take the time and effort to write up a well thought out feedback report like this, and it's especially useful to have people coming to the game from different play-styles and different backgrounds. Many folks have discussed a lot of what you've put forward here and agreed with it, but each new report, from anew player, who reached the same conclusions on their own, really does matter. So thanks for taking the effort!


You're right; the game does not tell you nearly as much as it should. It is almost as if the designers do not want you to know how things work other than in very broad generalities, or that they are afraid of putting in even a moderate amount of words. Nearly everything needs a better explanation and more detail.

Regarding your raw ability scores. It's not a trap so much as it's a broader grading to give more flexibility and adaptability to individual characters. Your stat rolls may often come out uneven, some feats give one ability point plus some other perks, rather than two points, and some abilities and effects from monsters use your raw scores rather than your modifiers - overall, your stat range goes from 1-20 for a mortal adventurer, and in 5e you don't ever expect it to be able to exceed that except in extreme circumstances. The game does need to give players a better description of what each ability score represents - right now they just have drop downs to show you what skills are dependent upon them, with no real explanation, and it's not helpful.

If you're curious about Ability Scores:


Strength - represents your raw physical capabilities, and covers things like your ability to carry, push and drag, your athleticism and general feats of strength. It affects the damage you do with, and how well you effectively use, melee weapons, generally speaking. It controls your athletics skill.

Dexterity - represents your reflexes, your balance, as well as your fine motor control and other acts of precision. It affects the damage you do with, and how well you effectively use, ranged weapons. Some melee weapons can be used with finesse - this lets you use dexterity for them instead of strength, as well. Dexterity also affects your AC (armour class), which is how hard you are to hit (higher is better), when you're wearing no armour, light armour, or to a slightly limited extent, medium armour. It controls your acrobatics, slight of hand, and stealth skills.

Constitution - represents your general hardiness and resilience. It helps determine your total hit points, how well you can hold your focus when things hamper you, and is used for tests of endurance, such as trying to hold your breath for along time, or pushing a forced march long into the night. Constitution is usually more about longer term endurance tests, rather than active, in the moment things, so it doesn't control any actual skills.

Intelligence - represents your mental acuity. It's not necessarily just 'how smart you are', but rather it's about how well you can process, catalogue, retain and recall information. It also covers how well you can reason and put things together based on the information presented. How well your brain works, not necessarily how much it knows... although very intelligent characters generally do know a lot as well, as they are able to do with their well trained minds. It controls all of the game's knowledge-based skills; Arcana (knowledge about magic and magical practice), History, Nature, Religion and Investigation.

Wisdom - represents your perceptiveness, your instincts and your intuition; it's the balance half of Itelligence. It covers intuiting information from the things around you that may not be overtly presented - reading people, noticing details. It a lesser extent, it covers practical understanding, opposite Intelligence covering academic knowledge. It controls your Animal Handling, Survival (ability to read nature, track things and generally rough it well), Insight (reading people and situations), Medicine and Perception.

((One Perception and Investigation, Intelligence and Wisdom: Perception is about noticing things - a highly perceptive person might notice the scrap marks near a book case in the study, but if they aren't intelligent they won't make much of it. Investigation is about being thorough and putting information together - once the marks are pointed out, for example, a skilled investigator would be more likely to put together the idea that the bookcase moves, and would be better at searching for and finding the trick to open it. It's a silly and extreme example, I know. Intelligence and Wisdom have similar interplay; A wise but unintelligent person might easily have their thoughts scatter and lose their senses when assaulted by the overt mental battering of an intellect devourer, while the more ordered mind of an intelligent person might retain control and keep their mental faculties in order. At the same time, a very intelligent person with no wisdom would not notice the more subtle, creeping charm that sought to influence their mind, or alter how they feel about something, while the wiser, more self-aware person is more likely to notice such an attempt to affect them, and throw it off. The nitty-gritting of intelligence and wisdom gets fuzzy for a lot of people...))

Charisma - represents your force of personality and absoluteness of self. Iy is your personal gravitas and your ability to impose your presence on the world around you. In turn, this affects how easily you can convince people of things, or cow them into following you; it should also control your effort against things that attempt to overtly dominate or control your behaviour, and crush your sense of self, but most of those still end up in wisdom saves - a legacy from older editions where will saves covered everything mental. I can encompass appearance, but formally it doesn't - just your presence and force of personality; not necessarily how awesome your hair or dress is, but how well you pull it off. It controls Persuasion, Intimidation, Deception and Performance.

The overbearing nature of skill checks and the floundering that many are feeling is not necessarily an effect of D&D or of 5e, but mostly it's a result of how it's been implemented in this game at the moment. The checks come in over fa too many things that should be left in rolepaly space, the checks are far too all or nothing, for social situations, the DCs are generally higher than they should be for level 1-4 characters, and Larian also uses a cruel 'successive check' philosophy that will throw multiple checks in a row at you, for which you only need to fail one, any one, to be dumped back at the same identical full failure state just as if you hadn't tried at all. It's not a good system, and it's not particularly fun. Larian's DMing cold be described, at the moment, as the worst kind of sweaty dm who wants you to fail the things they want you to fail, and will make sure of it, so that they can jump to their pre-prepared failure dialogue... they're in love with their mary-sues, and your character only really exists to be the fall-line for their superior interlocutor... every time. You must be the 'dumb' person in every situation... even when it makes no sense, because the writing demands that anything introduced by any other character be reacted to in a particular set of ways. The only time the PC gets to have the upper hand in any situation are the situations where you're engaging with NPCs that are clearly designed with the intent that you're actually playing one of Larian's characters... who have to have the last word on everything. Sorry for the rant...

At any rate, regarding reloading, Larian have said that they want to make failure interesting and compelling, and fun, so that people aren't tempted just to save-scum through everything... but they have not, at all, delivered on this in any way, yet. Failures just feel like punishments and, and often the result of a failure is the same as if you had simply choices the exact opposite choice which required no check. I say 'yet' because I don't want to rip on Larian, so much as note that they have a lot of time still to fix these things, but they also have a lot of things that they badly need to fix.

Thanks again for taking the time to give your feedback!