The Five Ability Scores
Strength
Strength measures your character’s physical power and endurance. Strength is useful if your character plans to engage in hand-to-hand combat wearing heavy armor. Your Strength modifier influences your melee damage rolls, your Hit Points, your Fortitude saving throws, and how much your character can carry.
Dexterity
Dexterity measures your character’s agility, balance, coordination, and reflexes. Dexterity is useful if your character plans to engage in hand-to-hand combat wearing light armor or use stealth to surprise foes. Your Dexterity modifier influences your melee damage rolls, your AC while wearing light armor, and your Reflex saving throws.
Intelligence
Intelligence measures how well your character can learn and reason. A high Intelligence allows your character to analyze situations and understand patterns, and it means they can become trained in additional skills and might be able to master additional languages. Your Intelligence modifier may be added to your Will saving throws.
Wisdom
Wisdom measures your character’s common sense, awareness, and intuition. Your Wisdom modifier is added to your Perception and may influence your Will saving throws.
Charisma
Charisma measures your character’s personal magnetism and strength of personality. A high Charisma score helps you influence the thoughts and moods of others. Your Charisma modifier may be added to your Will saving throws.
Ability Score Overview
Your character’s ability scores will generally range from a low of 6 for the frailest human specimen up to a high of 22 at the pinnacle of human ability. A score of 10 represents the human average. Your starting ability scores will range between about 8 and 15, but as you make character choices and gain experience, you’ll adjust these scores by applying ability boosts, which increase a score, or ability flaws, which decrease a score. As you build your character, remember to apply ability score adjustments when making the following decisions:
Ancestry: Each ancestry provides ability boosts, and sometimes an ability flaw.
Background: Your character’s background provides two +2 ability boosts.
Class: Your character’s class provides an ability to the one or two ability scores most important to your class.
Generating Ability Scores
To determine your starting ability scores, roll three 6-sided die (3d6) and convert the lowest die to a result of 3. Add the results together and record the sum. Repeat this process until you’ve generated five such values. Decide which value you want to assign to each of your ability scores.
Ability Boosts
At character creation and when leveling up, you will have occasional opportunities to improve your ability scores. An ability boost gives you ability points to spend towards increasing your ability scores. The cost to improve an ability score is equal to your current modifier in that ability score (minimum 1). For example, boosting your Strength score from 15 to 16 costs 2 ability points, because your current Strength modifier is +2.
During character creation you get ability boosts from your ancestry, background, and class. Each grants you ability points towards specific ability scores. Add together your ability points from all sources before increasing ability scores. If you have leftover ability points in an ability score that aren’t enough to get you to the next score, you may transfer those remaining points to another ability score of your choice.
At 4th level and every 4 levels thereafter, you gain 5 ability points to spend towards increasing your ability scores. You can increase a given ability score by a maximum of 2 at each opportunity.