You are about to enjoy a new dnd campaign and you need to create a new character. You make a nice and complex back-story you really like, maybe you draw a piece of art depicting your new character, you think of a cool name, and perhaps you even come up with a voice for them and you practice it. Then, you start rolling for ability scores. You are happy because you have rolled a 17, so your half-orc barbarian will have a +4 modifier in strength to start. But you roll a 5, and soon your hopes for a great character begin to fade. You know that barbarians usually have low intelligence, but 5 is VERY low, and you don't want to act like an idiot after all the practice you did to personify as your character! Perhaps, low charisma? Still, you don't want to be abhorrent and unpleasant to everyone! You begin thinking of scrapping this idea completely and make another character…

Well, do not! This is why you should welcome and embrace (hope for, even) low scores.

A low score –the lower the better– has the power to define a character sometimes even more than their best score. It is great to shape your personality, and gives you a flaw that will have you have more fun than playing a perfect character would. The most fun part out of dnd is taken from advancement, evolution and gaining experience. This is why having scores that are too high from the start would have you be the guy whose things never go wrong.

A low score can also give you more of a challenge! You'll definitely fail more ability checks and saving throws with one or two low scores. This will have you have to think of ingenious ways to overcome your weaknesses, instead of ignoring danger because you're so cool and mighty that nothing can stop you.

Also, a low score will have you depend on your party for at least a couple of tasks. You should avoid being good at everything in order to have the other of the party take their part in the action too and have fun.

Finally, let's make clear that a low intelligence doesn't make you dumb. A low charisma doesn't make you repellent. A bad wisdom doesn't make you blind. And so on.

First of all, ability scores are called strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma because that's how it's been since the 70s, and that's also very simple to . But, as far as I'm concerned, I'd call them strength, dexterity, constitution, knowledge, sensoriality, and willpower.

Low intelligence doesn't imply you're dumb, it implies you're ignorant about things as history, religion, and the arcane. Low wisdom implies you're inattentive about what's surrounding you and about what people feel. And low charisma implies you're not inclined to have your opinion be on top of everyone else's.

So go ahead and play that extremely-low-intelligence barbarian, and say that they've spent so much time of their life inside of their tribe that they haven't got a clue of what's happening 50 miles from their home. Does this make them stupid? Absolutely not! Or play them with an extremely low charisma score, just because all the time they spent in the tribe they didn't really make many friends, so they're now not very intrepid and bold when starting new relationships, or maybe they're not very interested!

Try playing a character with an extremely low score for yourself, I'm sure you'll grow to love it!

P.S. Also, a brief talk about cheating dice rolls and always hoping to succeed on checks. Sometimes, a natural 1 provides much more fun shenanigans and gives you and the party much more of a challenge. I'm surely happy when I get a natural 1 I can turn into an interesting roleplaying scene. Of course it's all fine and dandy until you roll one on a death saving throw...

ווו×

Personally, when I roll my stats for a character, I always hope for a 7, or lower. When rolling for the character I'm currently playing, Tocktokk I got a 7, and that immediately got me excited. I assigned it to intelligence in order to have a 5, as the orc race gives a natural -2 to your intelligence score. Apart from that low roll, I rolled quite high, ending up with an 18 that immediately became a 20 with the orc's strength score increase. But, as hard to believe as it may sound, what you may think of Tocktokk as soon as you meet him isn't "woah that's a big bicep he has there!", instead it is "woah this one's a very gullible orc!". My low score has provided so many interesting dialogues, plots, and such a great character development, that I would never go back rerolling those stats to get a 12 to replace it!