Strength – Part 2

I was busy in the last post being critical of AD&D’s Strength table and ruining it at the same time, so let’s keep going and really break some stuff.

 

Column 6 and 7. Open Doors and Bend Bars/Lift Gates

We round off the Strength table with skill checks. While certainly not advertised as such, it’s just a modified check based on the ability score, which was not uncommonly used to determine the success of difficult non-door actions. Whichever way you swing it, it looks like the AD&D equivalent of Athletics. It’s also extremely specific and weird.

Open Doors is noted as the “chance to force open a heavy or stuck door.” Ostensibly, this is assumed to be a big ol’ dungeon door, swollen with moisture and warped with time. What’s wild here is the values: a character with a 18 Strength has a chance of opening stuck doors only 55% of the time, a veritable coin flip. They’re only 25% better at opening these doors than someone with a 10 in Str. At 18/00, the peak of human ability, they’ll fail to open a big, moldy door 20% of the time. Why does Conan have a 1 in 5 chance to whiff on opening a stuck door? It’s not even locked.

So what are the odds of making the stuck door explode?

 

For locked or barred doors, there’s a parenthetical value slapped onto the side of the standard check, starting at 18/91-99 (or 22 if you’re still on the Dark Sun table). Weaker warriors can’t even attempt it. If the door is bolted to the wall, only Conan can even try to break it down, he only gets a 30% chance, and he only gets one try. The values here are also odd when you compare it to the Bend Bars/Lift Gates values: the chance to crack open a secure door is 10-30% lower than the chance to go Hulk-mode on a portcullis. Whether this series of hurdles is appropriate for a locked door becomes complicated by the fact that magically locked doors are lumped into the same check; these are vastly different ends of the ‘locked door’ spectrum.

Defeating magic with your bare hands would be more applicable to a check that measures a ‘feat of enormous strength’ which is how the Bend Bars/Lift Gates check is described. This is another one-time-and-you’re-out mechanic (which I don’t hate, we’ll come back), which has no functional use until Strength 16, where it crawls to a 10% chance. A Hill Giant, at 19 Strength in the PHB, has a 50/50 shot at lifting a vertical gate. The numbers feel weak here, too.

To make matters messier, Open Doors uses a d20 roll and Bend Bars/Lift Gates uses a percentile. I understand that Cook was trying to not kill many sacred cows, but Open Doors moved to a d20 in 2e, whereas in 1e it had been a d6, and that doesn’t seem to have broken anything. Why not do the same with Bend Bars/Lift Gates? Would it have made a massive difference if Str 18 had a 15% chance to perform He-Man level feats rather than a 16% chance? It steps up by 5-10% once you get to Exceptional Strength anyway, so why not just flatten it to a d20 roll?

I don’t think these checks need to exist at all. Or at least, I don’t think it requires these specific door-based sub-abilities. If we’re dealing with three stages of difficulty (stuck doors, barred doors, portcullises), then I propose naming those stages (Normal, Hard, and Heroic – or whatever) and applying modifiers to a simple Strength ability score check to determine success. Normal difficulty requires no modifier, Hard gets a +5 penalty, and Heroic get a +10.

Comparing this simplistic system to the book, you get the following:

 

Ability Score	Open Doors	Locked/Barred	BB/LG		Normal	Hard	Heroic
1	5%	–	–		5%	–	–
2	5%	–	–		10%	–	–
3	10%	–	–		15%	–	–
4	15%	–	–		20%	–	–
5	15%	–	–		25%	–	–
6	20%	–	–		30%	5%	–
7	20%	–	–		35%	10%	–
8	25%	–	1%		40%	15%	–
9	25%	–	1%		45%	20%	–
10	30%	–	2%		50%	25%	–
11	30%	–	2%		55%	30%	5%
12	35%	–	4%		60%	35%	10%
13	35%	–	4%		65%	40%	15%
14	40%	–	7%		70%	45%	20%
15	40%	–	7%		75%	50%	25%
16	45%	–	10%		80%	55%	30%
17	50%	–	13%		85%	60%	35%
18	55%	–	16%		90%	65%	40%
19 (18/01-50)	60%	–	20%		95%	70%	45%
20 (18/51-75)	65%	–	25%		100%	75%	50%
21 (18/76-90)	70%	–	30%		100%	80%	55%
22 (18/91-99)	75%	15%	35%		100%	85%	60%
23 (18/00)	80%	30%	40%		100%	90%	65%
24 (19)	80%	40%	50%		100%	95%	70%
25 (20)	85%	50%	60%		100%	100%	75%

The restriction on multiple attempts can be left in place, for Hard or Heroic attempts. The purpose of the restrictions is to ensure that the check doesn’t become meaningless; if the player can just take however long to attempt it, then only urgency matters. With something like bending iron bars or getting past a door with a 4x4 strapped to the other side, it seems fair to say you get one go, regardless of how long you’ve been sitting in the cell. This also ensures that thieves maintain their primacy for locked doors, and keeps the party with the bruiser in tow from bulldozing through the dungeon. But with Normal checks, we’re bashing in old doors, which in any good fantasy tale might take a few kicks. As per the PHB, let the players kick until every Orc in the dungeon can hear it.

The argument against this alteration is that it makes exceptional feats of strength more commonplace in a system designed to emulate a range of mundane ability. I disagree with the assumption. AD&D is a system which includes characters throwing fireballs, making requests of gods, and becoming one with shadows. In that light, I find it completely fair to beef up the beefiest PCs so they can split wood more reliably.

Addendum: In reviewing my own suggestion as written above, I begin to wonder if even this is necessary. After all, we’re just talking about modifiers to the roll; there is no reason that a DM cannot make a call concerning the appropriate modifier without adding a mechanic on top of another mechanic. It’s also quite rigid, making it so that breaking through a door with a rusty lock and breaking through one with a comically large lock is the same check. This concept may be better served as a description of how to use all ability checks, offering DMs a range of -10 to +10 modifiers and a choice between one or multiple attempts. Then we could do away with having to call out these specific, set-in-stone rules within the explanation of Strength, or any score for that matter. As you can see, this blog really is just me hammering out my own thoughts.

If'n you ain`t the grandaddy of all liars!

 

Column 8. Notes

The only table of the 6 abilities to get a notes column, and it’s used to tell you how strong giants are. What a way to end the table. This is only here because it was listed in the original source for these 19-25 scores: 1e’s Deities and Demigods. Since the Monstrous Manual already provides these scores, I think we can safely remove it.

 

Final Table

Strength is the most bloated of the available stats, yet gets the short stick when it comes to bonuses. In the attempt to ‘fix’ it, the ability gained fiddly score adjustments and odd addendums. If I were to take the knife to it based on the preceding thoughts, I think I’d make it look more like this:

Ability Score	Attack	Damage
1	-5	-4
2	-4	-3
3	-3	-3
4	-2	-3
5	-2	-2
6	-1	-2
7	-1	-1
8	–	-1
9-12	–	–
13	–	+1
14	+1	+1
15	+1	+2
16	+1	+3
17	+2	+3
18	+2	+4
19	+2	+5
20	+3	+5
21	+3	+6
22	+3	+7
23	+4	+7
24	+4	+8
25	+5	+9

*If we’re using the low roll attack mechanic proposed here, then flip those Attack Bonuses.

These bonuses are more generous than what you see in AD&D; they’re more in line with the benefits provided in OD&D and B/X. Basic D&D starts bonuses at 13 for most abilities, and I think it’s the better way to go. Even with 4d6 drop the lowest, the chance of rolling a 13 in the ability is still slightly less than half. Yes, this does make more characters hit more often and for more damage, but on the flip side it means that the ‘average’ warrior is going to see more benefits from their score during play, and that’s awesome.

Add a small sidebar in the Strength description explaining Normal, Hard, and Heroic checks (if we don’t want to make it a general rule), along with a note on encumbrance (which I still haven’t ‘solved,’ I promise I’ll come back at some point) and a system for climbing above 18 during warrior chargen (again, we’ll return another day), and you’ve got yourself a Strength ability section.

Perhaps this is too simple, and I’m missing something essential, but I think it works. If you vehemently disagree with this proposal, or have another idea that could make it better, please yell at me in the comments.

Next time we’ll look at Dexterity.