Dump Stat: Difference between revisions

* ''[[Mutants and Masterminds]]'' 3rd Edition and ''DC Adventures'' (a rebrand with identical mechanics) feature this for Presence, which only has the effect of adding bonuses to three solitary Skills, and one can buy all of them together for 1.5 points while raising Presence costs 2 points and gives no further advantage beyond protecting from Weaken Presence effects (which, while possible, has never been printed in official material and the potential issue applies at least equally as much to every other attribute). An easily missed line in skill descriptions indicates Presence actually boosts certain Expertise checks, but the examples given (music) are almost never useful for heroics. It was already a weaker option in the 2nd Edition, and the changes in the 3rd Edition made it even worse.

** A common [[House Rules|house rule]] to fix this is making Presence give a free Presence based advantage (normally worth one point) every rank in it, putting it at 2.5 points worth of stuff for 2 points like most attributes. This leaves Fighting and especially Dexterity as the most obvious Dump Stat, as both are worth ''exactly'' 2 points worth of stuff for 2 points. While Fighting improves melee combat ability and the Parry defense, it's cheaper to improve a single type of melee combat (unarmed, a particular weapon) and parry directly, and some characters can avoid making melee attacks entirely. Dexterity's situation is more dire, as the two skills (Slight of Hand, and Vehicles) it improves are rarely used on the same character (indeed, few characters take ''either'' and both are trained only, meaning a character with infinite dexterity is just as hopeless as someone with negative dexterity) and many characters have no form of ranged attack and most that ''do'' have ranged attacks will focus on only one type of ranged attack (such as bows, thrown objects, or the projectiles created by their super powers) even more than melee characters will. <!-- Stamina and Intellect appear to only grant 2 points worth of stuff, but they actually give more. Expertise is an effectively infinite number of skills, which makes high Intellect very worthwhile if a character has one of the two advantages that allow using Expertise untrained. Stamina is the only way to acquire natural toughness, which secretly boosts its worth a few points, has the minor effect of increasing how long you can hold your breath, and both defenses it gives are effectively mandatory for all non-robot characters anyways. Damage Stamina effects are also relatively common in official material and the only real way to go from active to dead in the system. -->

* In ''[[Eon]]'', the attribute Bildning, roughly translated to Education, is often treated as a dumpstat. Education shows how much general knowledge a character has about the world and things in it, and players make a check in case they want to see if their character knows something about the town they're in, what races are common in the country, and other miscellaneous stuff. The thing is, pretty much everything you get to know by making a check against Education, can also be revealed by making a check against an appropriate skill, like History or Cultural Knowledge. These skills are often more specialized, granted, but at the same time they provide more in-depth information than Education. Besides, most classes that are expected to have a high score in Education also have most of these additional skills. Also, if there's anything worth knowing about a town, odds are a NPC is willing to share some knowledge, or one of the PC's have already been there before.

 

* The My Unit creation system in ''[[Fire Emblem: Awakening]]'' goes out of its way to avert this. Whichever stat you pick as 'worst' will actually lower other stats too, though not as much. Picking Luck or Resistance (generally considered Dump Stats) for worst will also lower Strength and Magic or Magic and Speed respectively, all of which are considered very important stats.

* Vitality and Healing in ''[[Guild Wars 2]]'' are very niche stats that only see use in specific builds due to how the game works: everyone can heal, then investing in Toughness to reduce direct damage taken is often a better idea than increasing health, and the scaling of healing abilities with the Healing stat isn't always good enough to justify investing in it except for heavily healing-oriented builds. Only classes with very low base heatlth benefit substantially from Vitality if the player doesn't want to go full [[Glass Cannon]], and the Necromancer is a particular case due to its [[Multiple Life Bars|Death Shroud]] scaling with maximum health and being generated in percentage amounts. Vitality even becomes detrimental in the Fractals of the Mists due to the Agony debuff that deals unmitigated damage based on maximum health, then investing in any other stat becomes mandatory to succeed.

 

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