The Cosmere RPG’s equivalent of ability scores.
While the Cosmere RPG follows a d20 system that’s not too dissimilar from what D&D players will be familiar with, many aspects of how it works are slightly different too. Some of this is necessitated by the nature of the lore and working a system into how the Cosmere works.
One of the most fundamental ways that changes is through your character’s attributes. Which have a similar role to ability scores in D&D, but with some important differences.
In this article, I’m going to take you through how these work and what each attribute is used for.
What are attributes?
These are the broad capabilities possessed by your character and they’re split into 6 different categories (much like D&D). These are grouped further into 3 areas known as physical, cognitive and spiritual attributes. Cosmere veterans will note that these relate to the 3 realms that exist within the Cosmere. Attributes in the same area will combine to form defences against different effects and attacks.
| Physical | Cognitive | Spiritual |
|---|---|---|
| Strength | Intellect | Awareness |
| Speed | Willpower | Presence |
The higher an attribute is, the more likely your character can accomplish skill checks made using that attribute. Equally, the higher these attributes are, the better your defences are against relevant types of attacks or effects.
Typically, you can take these attributes up to 5, but they can go higher in exceptional circumstances. When you first create your character though, you’ll have 12 points to distribute between the 6 attributes and none of these can have a score higher than 3 (but you will be able to go higher as you level up).
The value of your attribute can be used to add to checks made with that attribute. This simplifies D&D’s approach which requires the ability score which determines your ability modifier. In the Cosmere RPG, these are one and the same (a sensible choice in my opinion).
What does each attribute do?
While you may notice some similarities in attributes and the ability scores of D&D. There some important differences. For example, there’s no constitution attribute. Instead, something like hit points is determined in part by your strength attribute. You also don’t just have dexterity (or armor) responsible for your AC (or in the Cosmere RPG, defence). Instead, each area of attributes combine to determine your defence in those areas.
Like D&D, each attribute is associated with a handful of skills and provides boosts to checks made with those skills. You can also enhance individual skills further with skill ranks (similar to skill proficiency in D&D, but where proficiency incrementally grows with your levels, skill ranks need to be invested in individually as your character progresses).
In this section, I’ll break down each attribute and what it does.
Physical attributes
Strength
Strength relates not only to your physical power (as it does in D&D) but also to your toughness and athleticism. It affects the following aspects of your character:
Lifting and carrying – The stronger you are, the more you can lift and carry without becoming slowed down or exhausted.
Health – Strength also represents your toughness so the more strength you have, the higher the bonus to your hit points
Athletics (skill) – This is a strength based skill that is partly affected by your strength score. It’s used when making unarmed attacks, jumping long distances or performing any other athletic task like climbing, pushing and so on.
Heavy weapons (skill) – If you’re wielding a heavy weapon, you’ll use this skill to enhance these types of attacks.
Speed
Speed isn’t just about how quick you are; it also impacts your finesse. Its closest equivalent in D&D would be dexterity. It’ll affect how good you are at the following things:
Movement rate – How fast you move is determined by your speed with 20ft per action at 0 speed, all the way up to 80 feet per action with 9+ speed (though that would be inhumanly fast). Best unpack those steel metalminds if you want to manage top speeds!
Agility (skill) – Any activity that requires mobility or manoeuvrability requires an agility check.
Light weapons (skill) – When you make a skill check to attack with a light weapon, you’ll use this skill.
Stealth (skill) – If you want to sneak or hide, you’ll use stealth to do this which is a speed skill. You can even do this in combat, but will have to outperform the spiritual defense of your enemies.
Thievery (skill) – Like sleight of hand in D&D, thievery is used for pickpocketing, picking locks, slipping out of bonds and other sleight of hand actions.
Intellect
Intellect represents your intelligence and wit. It can be used to determine what knowledge you can recall or to deduce facts from a situation. It affects the following things:
Expertise – You gain an extra expertise for every intellect point you have beyond the 2 characters normally start with.
Crafting (skill) – Crafting is used for creating items or occasionally repairing something. Crafting a simple item can be attempted by anyone, but if you want to craft something complex (like a weapon, armor or fabrial), then you’ll also need a relevant expertise for that as well.
Deduction (skill) – Any time you need to use logic or reasoning, it will require you to use deduction.
Lore (skill) – This represents your potential to have knowledge on a subject. This interacts with your expertise as well which represent areas of specialist knowledge. If you have expertise in a relevant field, then you may not even need to make a skill check to determine if you know that thing, but it does depend on how secret or obscure the information is you’re trying to recall.
Medicine (skill) – Medicine checks are used when attempting to diagnose or treat an injury or malady or perhaps to inspect a corpse. You must have at least 1 rank in medicine to attempt to treat an injury. You can also make a medicine check during a long rest to attempt to reduce the duration of an injury.
Willpower
Willpower represents your mental fortitude as well as your ability to enact your will on others. It affects the following aspects of your character:
Recovery die – The higher your willpower, the higher the die used to recover hit points and focus. This scales from a d4 at 0 willpower to a d20 at 9+.
Focus – Focus is used to fuel various abilities. The more you have, the more you can perform special actions. The amount of focus you have is directly linked to your willpower with characters having 2 + willpower + any bonuses or penalties for their maximum focus. As mentioned for recovery die, how easily you can recover focus is also determined by your willpower.
Discipline (skill) – This is used to maintain composure in the face of challenging circumstances. It can be used actively, like when putting on a brave face while approaching a formidable foe or reactively to shake off fear, doubt or distraction.
Intimidation (skill) – This is kind of the reverse of discipline where you might actively coerce someone by scaring them. Just beware that no matter how big your intimidation, when the odds aren’t in your favour, it can be much harder to intimidate.
Awareness
Awareness is kind of like wisdom in D&D. It represents your ability to perceive things around you as well as your ability to connect with others. It helps with the following aspects of your character:
Senses – Under normal circumstances, your awareness won’t matter for your senses. But in instances where your senses are considerably inhibited, like in darkness, your ability to tap into your other senses will be important. The higher your awareness is, the further your senses function under such conditions. Think Spook’s tin burning abilities in the Hero of Ages (or even less supernatural capabilities like just great eyesight or hearing).
In a mechanical sense, a character with 0 awareness can sense things within 5ft of them without being able to see, for example. But with a heightened awareness, this can reach 100ft or even cause you to be unaffected by sensory disruption at all when you reach 9 awareness.
Insight (skill) – This represents your intuition, your ability to see through deceptions and understand the true feelings of others.
Perception (skill) – Where insight is a manifestation of your social awareness, perception is the manifestation of your physical awareness. Much like D&D, you’ll use this to determine whether you spot things in your vicinity. And this doesn’t need to rely on sight or even sound. There are other senses you can use to determine such things.
Survival (skill) – This represents your ability to survive in the wild. It will aid you with things like tracking, foraging and creating shelters.
Presence
This is the Cosmere RPG equivalent of charisma. It represents your ability to connect with and influence others. It will help you with the following:
Establishing connections – The higher your presence, the quicker you can establish connections and contacts in an unknown settlement. This can vary from a year, to hours or even being instantaneously known due to your incredible reputation.
Deception (skill) – This determines how competent you are at deceiving others. This doesn’t have to just be by using speech, it could be through body language or even writing.
Leadership (skill) – This represents how well you can inspire, command and garner respect. You might use it to appeal to someone’s sense of morality, to command a crowd or to instruct others.
Persuasion (skill) – Persuasion is your skill for convincing others to do what you want. It’s used when you barter, debate or reason with people.
Defenses
On top of all this, your attributes combine into pairs to form your defenses against different types of skill checks. These are:
- Physical defense: Strength and speed
- Cognitive defense: Intellect and willpower
- Spiritual defense: Awareness and presence
Your defense for each of these areas is calculated with:
10 + both attributes in that category + any bonuses or penalties
What do you think of the Cosmere RPG’s attributes system? Do you think it sounds better than D&D’s ability score system? Let me know in the comments below.
