Abilities

You can read the manual on what these mean and how they affect gameplay.

In CoA, since the emphasis is on role-play, it is important to realize that you need to

play your character's abilities. This can be a bit of learning experience if you're transitioning from the single player campaign or a hack-n-slash server. Basically this means that if you choose to lower a statistic extremely low so you can raise another extremely high, you must play the negative effects of the low statistic as well as the positive benefits of the high statistic.

The basic example of this is a character who to gain an 18 Strength lowers his Intelligence to 6. While great in combat; playing this character as an eloquent speaker, brilliant problem solver and with a Forgotten Realms Encyclopedic knowledge is not playing his abilities correctly. This form of Min/Maxing of statistics is inappropriate play in CoA.

Rerolling your hitpoints at level up is also considered cheating.