unfocused thoughts on Wisdom

By: Unknown on 07:18

The Wisdom stat is bugging me this morning.  The elimination of the Cleric from my Holmes Basic powered campaign has left Wisdom with no explicit mechanical function, i.e. a high Wisdom score does jack squat for a PC.  I'm not prepared to bring back the cleric class, so I thought I'd write down a few tentative ideas on how to address this situation.  Let me know what you think.

• Eliminate the stat - simple, painless, but seems like a bit of a cop out.
• Replace it - I like Basic Role Playing's extra stats (Education, Magical Power and Size) as well as Tunnels & Trolls's Luck (I guess BRP uses that, too) and Empire of the Petal Thrones's Psychic Ability.  Heck, I could see just outright using my 3-18 EPT adaptation instead of Holmes for all 6 stats.
• Give Wis something to do - My first thought is that a high Wisdom gives you some sort meta-game of do-over ability.  Like anyone with a Wis of 14+ can take back one stupid/deadly blunder per session.  But then what does a low Wis do?  Another idea would be to tie Wisdom more directly into religion somehow.  Maybe use Wisdom when dealing with angelic or demonic beings in the same way that Charisma is used when roll reactions from normal creatures.
• Make a Wis-powered class - A non-kung-fu Monk class would really help bring in some additional medieval flavor.  But what the heck do they do?  I don't want to just re-invent the cleric and the magic-user is already the class of the learned.