So a dump stat is in essence, a stat which has no intrinsic use to the playstyle/class/choices you've made. For example, a barbarian berserker has no need for Charisma or or Wisdom in a hypothetical system.

That's simple enough. But what about skills you'd avoid selecting unless you've got no other choice or is just a bridge to better things?

Like Dim Vision from Diablo II. As a Necromancer, you've got access to hand things like amplify damage or an army of skeletons. Why would you waste the points on this skills which doesn't make numbers go faster?

Eschalon has a lovely variety of worthless skills, depending on your playstyle. And due to the way the game exists, some which are outright useless no matter what.

I recently finished Arcanum as a magic-focused character, and quite a few of the spells seemed pretty useless to me, e.g. "Magelock" (lets you magically lock chests or doors...might have its uses in a pen and paper roleplaying session, but in Arcanum it's utterly useless imo)...but you still have to take them as a precondition for good spells you want to get. Bad design imo.

An inverted knock spell. How clever. Completely useless and esoteric even to tabletop ideas.

I'm curious, what is it the bridging skill for?

The other temporal spells. Why is it in the same college with slow, haste and paralyze is a good question.

Wasteland and Dragon Wars both have skills that are useful early on, but become obsolete later.

(For Wasteland, I'm thinking Clip Pistol, Rifle, SMG, and Medic; for Dragon Wars I'm thinking Fistfighting (which is actually pretty good until late-game weapons start showing up), Low Magic (which is a pre-requisite for the other magic skills) and High Magic (whose spells are easier to get but weaker than comparable Sun Magic spells).)

I almost always play rogues who are more envisioned as spies or assassins. So for me "strength" is often a dump stat, because I rely on dexterity, and often I'll dump endurance as well if I need the points. Dexterity and charisma are essential. I almost never play magic users, so in a game like D&D I would dump wisdom and to a lesser extent intelligence. It depends on what intelligence effects.

Currently replaying the Fallout series and with its SPECIAL system I dump strenth and endurance and leave luck on default, then max agility and put perception and charisma up to 7ish.

A few other examples:
* Final Fantasy 2 has some dump spells, which you don't want to level up because they're either useless (Dispel doesn't work in the Famicom (FC) version) or because there's better spells that do essentially the same thing (Berserk > Aura (and it's not even close), most instant-death spells (Toad and Mini are best in FC (and I believe WSC/PSX) while Teleport is the best one in GBA and later, making many other spells pointless).
* Etrian Odyssey does the pre-requisite thing, where you may need to level up a weaker spell to learn a stronger one (for example, learning Salve II requires leveling up Salve I).
* Lords of Xulima also has you put points into individual spells to upgrade them, and weaker spells are useless later on.

I also note that all three of these examples have a mechanic where leveling up a skill/spell increases the cost, so there are situations where you explicitly *don't* want to level up a skill/spell, which can be a problem if it's a pre-requisite for another or if simply using the spell is enough to level up (the latter applies to FF2 but not the other examples).

Most of Skyrim.

This is such an awesome and timely thread title for me.

+1,000 internet points for whoever can find me this "meme" (it was created back before memes were called memes - it was just a "JPEG I found on the internet" then ;) ).

It was an image of Sir Sean Connery as Double O Seven, surround by babes, with a caption "Charisma - it's not just a dump stat."

My God, thank you for that memory from my youth, with a man I loved in a role I adored. To this day, and I feel dirty saying it, Roger Moore is still my favorite Bond but deep down, I know Connery is the best ;)

...

...

... and my favorite.

Pickpocket because it's so binary; either you succeed or you reload.

If you had a pickpocket skill with a value that could be increased, and stealing worked the way it did in Final Fantasy games (and some other JRPGs), then it would make sense to increase that skill.

Thing is, JRPG-style stealing (as I call it) works differently from the way it tends to work in WRPGs. In particular, you have:
* Stealing can only be done during battle. (As a rule, saving during battle is not possible in JRPGs.)
* Stealing uses up the character's turn; if you fail, you can try again next turn, as long as the target is still alive and your thief is still able to act.
* Each enemy has a number of items to steal. 2 is typical, with one common steal and one rare steal; in some games, including Final Fantasy 5/6/7, once you steal either of the items the enemy doesn't have any more to steal. (By contrast, in FF9, each of an enemy's 4 steals will remain until it specifically is stolen, so it's possible to get all the steals from a single enemy.)
* If you kill an enemy before you steal from it, you can no longer get the item from that enemy; it will not drop the item on death (unless the enemy happens to have the same item as a possible drop and drops it; this can result in you getting 2 of the item from the same battle).

Given the way stealing works in JRPGs, improving your ability to steal could have some benefit if you like to steal a lot, or if you want to steal from an enemy whose most common steal is rather rare, so in such a game, if there's a pickpocket skill, it would make sense to increase it.

Another approach would be to have pickpocket be non-random. either stealing is guaranteed or it's impossible to steal at your current skill level.

(By the way, I believe I saw a Baldur's Gate 2 speedrun where the main character started as a mage, dual-classed into thief, gained a bunch of levels as a thief, and spent all the skill points into pickpocket. Note that this would not be a likely build for a casual playthrough.)

Oh, I do recall this, ages and yonks ago.

I'd just consider worthless skills that are prerequisites of useful stuff as simply making the useful stuff more expensive.

The worst enemy of dump skills is the expansion pack or carry-hero-forward sequel. Your decision to min/max your dump skills/stats ends up ruining the enjoyment of the new content.

Take Baldurs Gate 1 for example.
Intelligence was of no value to a fighter or paladin. I expect may people rolled 18/00 Strength, 18 Constitution,, 16 Dexterity, 3 Intelligence fighters.

It made no difference in the first game, but the second game had "special" dialog options for low intelligence player characters.

It makes it rather difficult to romance NPCs when you were limited to "Grunt! Me Tarzan, You Jane, You pretty"

I think in Gothic 2 the success was based on skill level only so you either was able to pick the pocket or not. Furthermore you received EXP for success so it was a important skill for power gamers.

You mean this one?