Since we were talking about Ability Scores in the past few entries, I thought I’d review each of the individual scores, while providing a few bad takes and tweaking everything. Let’s break this as though I were developing my own hack.
It starts, as with every edition of the game, with Strength. This is the ur-ability, the stat that reaches back to Arneson’s Blackmoor. (As this won’t be a history of the scores, go here if you want to learn more about the origins.) In AD&D, Strength is described as the “measure of a character’s muscle, endurance, and stamina.” This vague mandate results in the huskiest ability score table of the lot, with 30 scores and 6 derivative values.
As you can see, there’s a lot of bizarre specifics here, so let’s look through them column by column.
Column 1. Score Values and Exceptional Strength
Introduced in the OD&D Greyhawk supplement in 1975 (beginning a half century of purchasable errata), Exceptional Strength was a hack to provide stronger Strength bonuses to fighters within a scaled system that couldn’t go above 18; characters that roll an 18 for Strength during character generation get to roll percentile dice, append the results to their Strength score, and get the benefits listed. By the time you get to 2e, the cap on ability scores has risen to 25, but Exceptional Strength persists because my god it’s in all the old adventures and compatibility must be maintained! There’s a 0.5% to 1.6% chance of any PC using this fiddly mess, and that’s assuming they’re playing a warrior, who are the only class group that can use it. It’s a kludge and one of the most absurd features of AD&D.
All of this results in putting the higher end of the scores into looney tunes land. If your Constitution score goes from 18 to 25, you add an extra 3 hp per level (if you’re a warrior) and you can’t roll below a 4 on the die when rolling for hp. If it’s Dexterity, you’ll get an additional +3 bonus to missile attacks and a -2 bonus to AC. These are pretty beefy, but not absurd. With Strength, moving from 18 to 25 grants a comparative +6 to hit and +12 damage bonus, with a 1300% increase in carrying capacity. The ability to perform superhuman feats of strength moves from roughly 1 in 6 to virtually guaranteed. If we’re at the point where a creature can deal a base of 15 damage, I’d say we’ve left the Ability Score behind us as a reference tool.
Dark Sun '95 took a stab at removing Exceptional Strength and smoothing out the scores, as seen here.
It’s a pretty good start if we’re going to do the same. It aligns the upper tier bonuses to be in line with the other scores; still significant but not god-like. To use it, a solution is required to get past 18 without resorting to the percentile roll. Dark Sun uses 4d4+4 to generate ability scores, relying on racial ability adjustments to poke into the low 20s. That’s more change than I’m looking for, especially if we want to reserve exceptional scores for warriors. I’ve toyed with giving warriors an extra d6 on scores at or above 16, but I’ve got nothing concrete. That’s a problem for another day.
My issue with this table is that it still leaves the same dead zone between 8 and 15, where the score barely has an impact on play (outside of ability checks). This leads to the next two columns.