I'm putting an RD tag on this to prevent joke stat replies (joke replies themselves are fine, just not when offering your own stats; so no "1, 1, 1, 1, etc" or "20, 20, 20, 20, etc" replies pls). I will rat on you to the cops. Snitches get medals.
What stats would you give yourself in an honest self-assessment?
Assume you can pick between 1 and 20, with 1 being the lowest percentile of your peers and 20 being the highest. For example, a 1 in Strength would mean you are largely physically incapable, while a 20 in Intelligence would make you one of the smartest people alive.
(While this does not necessarily mean you think the actual average of your peers is 10, also assume that 10 is middle of the pack. If you think everyone else is dumb as rocks, a 10 in intelligence is pretty good even if it goes up to 20.)
Base stats:
Strength
Dexterity
Constitution
Intelligence
Wisdom
Charisma
Feel free to add more stats (like endurance) to your list. Even broad skills, if relevant! (For example, if you have generally low charisma but you're particularly good at persuading people, give us a persuasion stat.)
It would be great if you explain why you think you rank where you rank, but it's not mandatory.
It's easier to think of these as 3d6. If you think of it as 3d6+2, that gives 5-20, which is a reasonable range. The D&D manuals don't give people with lower stats much chance of anything anyway (either very young children, very sick people, dying people, etc.)
For attributes, the
Unearthed Arcana manual adds
Comeliness to the standard six. The reason for this is because not all charismatic people are physically attractive (and the reverse).
Whenever I've designed a campaign, I use a mix of D&D, Fighting Fantasy, and whatever I think is lacking and might be especially relevant to that campaign. One of my own preferences is
Awareness (of one's surroundings, perceptions that something is wrong, or at least not quite right... handy for giving people a "sixth sense" of danger or that maybe that enemy is too close or is about to do something really sneaky). In Fighting Fantasy, this attribute is included in Skill (which is mainly used for fighting ability, but also for things requiring dexterity, balance, and so on).
As for my own stats... I'll have to think about it. What I'd have said 25-30 years ago is mostly not how I would describe myself now.
It may be too late, but the classic 3d6 3-18 range produces a much more natural distribution than just a 1-20 range. It's really easy to say "I score in the top (or bottom) half of a percentile makes me a one in 200 case, and a 3 or an 18 is in fact a one in 200 "roll."
Using the standards of D&D for what these characteristics mean...
Strength is a raw thing, so even if you are a total muscle ball if you are undersized it won't be very high. I knew this female competitive body builder who was absolutely furious at the world that despite all her efforts being barely over five feet and a hundred pounds meant that a two hundred pound fat lazy slob (not to name any names) would still be a serious threat to her in a brawl and in fact the almost certain winner.
Intelligence is the ability to take in and recall information. If you read things three times and the next day you can barely string together three sentences of it that's low. If you can read a book, listen to music you've never heard before on your headphones, but have them turned low enough to hear the professor's lecture, and three days later you can reproduce the majority of all three that's high.
Wisdom is the propensity to make good decisions in a heated moment. Being incapable of coming up with apt descriptions to fit this trait is a large part of how I know I score pretty low here. I am good for following a plan, and I can recall plans I've made in advance for a whole lot of casualties, but when confronting genuinely unexpected situations I will invariably do something that turns out to be crazy.
Dexterity is a combination of hand-eye coordination, foot speed, and basic balance. To score exceptionally high requires being heavily gifted in all three.
Constitution is a combination of basic health, endurance, and pain tolerance. If you have never been sick a day in your life, have the wind of a marathon runner, but will quit working over a splinter you aren't at the top of this heap. Similarly, unless you quit at the first splinter because you are guaranteed to get an infection that may well cost you your hand and have to stop for breath on the way to the first aid kit you aren't at the bottom.
Charisma includes raw physical attractiveness, the hard to define 'likeability,' and the often inexplicable "leadership." If you have good ideas that you can't talk people into, and continuously find yourself as the "odd man out" in groups, and actually find people stopping and staring but quickly averting their eyes when you notice you may be exceptionally low here.
As I noted before, charismatic people are not necessarily physically attractive. For instance, the chief medical officer of my province who gives the daily briefings about coronavirus has gained a fan following on social media. She has a calm, reassuring manner and a clear speaking voice, and people respond to that.
But while I'll concede that attractiveness is in the eye of the beholder, most people agree that she has funny-looking bangs (they're crooked, and that tends to be one of the first things people notice about her before she even says a word).
