Strength – Part 1

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.

Column 2 and 3. Hit Probability and Damage Adjustment

Here’s the meat: how it affects hitting a guy. PCs in the mid-range get nothing. A fighter with a 16 in Strength gets a 10% bonus to XP, but has no bonus to hit? It’s only in AD&D that you find this pull back on bonuses (which is not isolated to Strength). In Greyhawk and in Basic, the floor to start earning hit bonuses is 13.

This adjustment only makes sense when you take into account ability score generation methods. OD&D and B/X both assume a roll of 3d6, which AD&D increases to 4d6 drop the lowest. This results in an increased chance of a PC having 13 Strength, from roughly 25% to 50%. If your goal is to gate useful bonuses to counteract your buffed score generation method, then pushing the bonuses further down the table isn’t a terrible choice. However, if you’re trying to give your players a feeling of having a strong character when they have above average scores, then I’d say it’s not the best way to go. If you’re creating a second edition of this game and decide to make 3d6 the default again, which is what happened, then it’s a bizarre decision to keep these bonuses so out of reach.

Why, Zeb?

We’ll make a table later and pull some of these bonuses back.

 

Column 4. Weight Allowance

This is nothing more than our encumbrance value. These values don’t increase linearly; they inconsistently jump by 5-15 lbs per level until hitting 18 and the Exceptional Strength scores, wherein they launch into space. While the 2e weights in pounds map roughly to 1e weights in coins (1e really is a different country), this goes out the window from 19 and up.

The main issue here isn’t the values; it’s their utility. Deathtrap offers a better deep dive into encumbrance systems than I’m willing to attempt here, and I agree with the assessment: encumbrance is a necessary element to creating the type of play for which we came to AD&D, but the implementation is unwieldy. It requires detailed record keeping (and sometimes a calculator!) and most DMs and players can’t be bothered. While the results of its use create fun and thoughtful challenges, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

The OSR troupe and other TTRPGs have a variety of unique ideas which are worth exploring, including slot-based, point-based, and other innovations. Simulacrum does a pretty good analysis of how some of the D&D clones handle this and is worth a read.

The simplest solution I’ve seen is to make the ability score (or a fraction of the score) equal the number of items a player can carry, with minor adjustments for how much an item ‘counts as’ depending on its size and weight (i.e., heavy armor is counted as two or three items). This is probably overly simplistic, but given that I’m not looking to invent an entire encumbrance system in this post, we’ll use it for now. Which conveniently eliminates the need for the column.

 

Column 5. Maximum Press

Speaking of columns to be eliminated, I think we can throw this out. It provides the amount a character can lift over their head. In what game, ever, have you needed to know if you could lift 220 pounds versus 195, specifically over your head? What about a dead lift? Is this taking into account if the PC is using their legs? The values are completely divorced from actual play, where anything a character may need to lift is generally going to be described in a range of ‘a bit heavy’ to ‘extremely heavy’. The granularity found in this column is therefore useless; a whiff of simulationist mechanics in our fantasy dice game. We’ll scrap it, relying on the ability score value itself and the readily available ability check mechanic, to adjudicate lifting questions.

This has become quite long, so I’ll dive into Open Doors and Bend Bars/Lift Gates next time.