Musing on the idea of making abilities matter more, it occurred to me that intelligence shouldn’t be a dump stat for fighters. It should pay to be a smart fighter.

Now, an obvious but clumsy way to make this work would be to say that you don’t add your strength modifier to your attack roll but rather you add your intelligence modifier. But if we also want a dexterity-based fighter to be viable, we might do the same thing. Now we’ve created essentially the same character with two different ability scores. “Oh, you get +1 to attacks for being smart? I get +1 to attacks for being agile.” Okay but lacking flavor.

Instead, we should create class features that are only available to fighters who are smart and others only available to those who are agile–and maybe even those who are charismatic. Then, from a warrior’s point of view, the abilities look like this:

• Strength: bonus to damage rolls.
• Dexterity: bonus to armor class and many saves; perhaps add a precision strike maneuver.
• Constitution: bonus to hit points and many saves.
• Intelligence: bonus to certain saves vs magic; add some smart maneuvers.
• Wisdom: bonus to certain saves vs magic.
• Charisma: bonus to reactions; and some exhortation and morale maneuvers.

The idea is that, if your dexterity, intelligence, or charisma is high enough, you get a special maneuver or two that’s helpful in combat (or helpful to a fighter outside combat). In fact, certain maneuvers should even be limited to warriors with a particularly high strength.

In addition to this, a high intelligence should, at certain levels, allow an additional feature that a dumber fighter wouldn’t get.

Would a smart fighter be too powerful? We’d need to keep the bonus feats down to a reasonable level, but if you somehow managed to become a genius and a powerful fighter who got to high level, I’d say you should be plenty powerful. And a warrior is unlikely to ever outstrip the reality-altering capabilities of a wizard at high level. In 2e, a 15th-level wizard gets 28 spells every day.

The danger with such an idea is that, if certain features rely on characters having very high ability scores, players will nag GMs for very high ability scores. That certainly happened back in the day, when the only way to have a decent fighter was to have a very high strength (for attack and damage bonuses) and constitution (for hit point bonuses).