Let’s say you had to rank every human on the planet on their proficiencies at everything. Maybe you work as a government official in a dystopian society trying to encourage competition between its denizens, or maybe you’re an alien observer gathering data on human dynamics. Such a task would be impossible, because the list of skills that could be enumerated is limitless (literally so: though my sister might be more proficient at weaving, I might be better underwater basket weaving, and she at drunken underwater basket weaving, and so on, ad infinitum). However, your dystopian dictator or alien boss allows you to choose a handful of qualities to rank, each quality representing the average proficiency at a whole category of skills. Which qualities would you choose to make your job of ranking humans easier?
For instance, I could choose critical thinking, emotional stability, self-discipline, bravery, people skills, and athleticism. A politician with deep-set insecurities who’s also adept at inspiring followers might score highly on people skills but low in emotional intelligence. A clever student who never achieves his goals in life might score high in critical thinking but low in self-discipline, and a visionary who goes against the fold might score highest in bravery than in any other category.
In videogames, these categories are used to track the growth of players’ characters, though they focus less on interpersonal distinctions and more on the raw necessities of violence. In the hack-and-slash classic Diablo, for example, the attributes that represented a character’s proficiencies were Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, and Magic, which corresponded to the power of your attacks, your accuracy, your health, and your spellcasting. The rampantly popular World of Warcraft kept Strength, swapped Dexterity for Agility, Vitality for Stamina, and split Magic into Intelligence and Spirit. The examples are myriad, in both JRPG’s and Western RPG’s and games of other genres (like Dota 2), and every one of them can trace the roots of this system to the early 1970’s, before even the advent of personal computing.
Dungeons & Dragons, which has inspired so many videogames in so many ways, was itself inspired by miniature wargame campaign called Blackmoor. In this campaign, Dave Arneson—one of the two fathers of D&D—chose various aspects to represent individuals’ personalities, including notably Brains, Looks, Credibility, Sex, Courage and Cunning. Gary Gygax—Arneson’s friend at the time and the other father of D&D—wisely folded the trio of Looks, Credibility, and Sex into the single kid-friendlier attribute of Charisma. The final list had six: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. The first three of those covered the basics of non-magical combat familiar from Diablo as well as so many other modern games, and they adequately distinguish the hardy from the quick-footed, the barbarians from the rogues. The next three, on the other hand, created a mess that the fifth and current edition of D&D (or “5e”) still deals with.
I’ve seen the difference between Intelligence and Wisdom explained through analogy: A mathematician might be intelligent, able to solve complex problems and retain ample knowledge, and yet lack the experience and empathy needed to navigate the turbulent waters of a relationship. I’ve also seen it explained pithily, as the difference between knowing how to do something versus knowing whether to do it. Unfortunately, the two qualities bleed into one another, as a lack of intelligence can lead to poor judgement, and the wisdom of accrued experience can easily cross into the domain of knowledge. Consider, for example, the turbulent waters of religion, a kind of relationship steered as much by faith as by love, and governed in 5e not by Wisdom but by Intelligence. Or consider the copious amounts of knowledge required to survive med school and then consider 5e’s medicine skill, which is governed by Wisdom, not Intelligence.
Charisma would make sense if it wasn’t for magic. While wizards and druids respectively use Intelligence and Wisdom for their spells (speaking to the difference between booksmarts and streetsmarts), paladins and sorcerers use Charisma. In the mechanics of D&D, the notion of Charisma has been overloaded to also represent the mostly unrelated notion of willpower, and then this notion of willpower was made irrelevant for half of the spellcasting classes. When defending against spells, rather than casting them, these three attributes become more confusing still. Charisma can help to deter the Calm Emotions spell, but not so for the Charm Person spell, which only Wisdom can deter. Most illusion spells fail to the Wise, except for Phantasmal Force, which fails to high Intelligence, and Seeming, which fails to Charisma. An enemy tries to banish you to another plane of existence? Roll a Charisma check. A scrying enemy tries to spy upon you from within the same plane of existence? Roll for Wisdom. Maybe these choices all have explanations, but they’re not intuitive, and they’re not the only alternative.
Here’s mine.
Postscriptum:
Ironically, my favorite attribute system I’ve encountered was from a videogame in a series that has since dispensed with attributes entirely. The developers realized that players could manage their skills (archery, alchemy, speechcraft, etc.) directly and that the attributes that governed them (agility, intelligence, personality, etc.) were redundant. The same cannot be said for D&D, which is prone to requiring ability checks outside the scope of any one skill, since the scope of what you might attempt in D&D is rather larger (infinite) than in any videogame.