raysdnd5e

[raysdnd5e]

Making Sense of Ability Scores

One of the things that often comes up in my games are questions or comments like “Well my character’s ability score is X so I should just be able to do/know/sense a, b, or c.”  This is kind of intuitive and I get where my players are coming from, but what I don’t like about this line of thought is it subtracts from the randomness that adds a splash of reality to D&D. I don’t know about you but it seems like the most memorable moments from the campaigns I’ve run or played in over the years are due to sheer randomness. Whether it be from someone crit failing or succeeding, and the wacky or epic descriptions of how that happened.

So how exactly should we be interpreting ability scores, and more importantly should you make your players do more of them? I’ll preface this by saying that making too many ability checks is probably a bad thing.  It could slow down the game and make things perhaps too random. Striking the right balance is something you’ll need to just practice as a DM. With some trial and error (and some note taking – you’re taking notes, right?) you’ll get to the right place.

Strength is probably the easiest score to tie to reality so it’s the one I’ll be starting with, and will likely have the most concrete examples. Let’s start by looking at some basic rules and interpretations and expand on them later. Having a strength score of 10 is considered average for a normal human in the D&D multiverse. This means your average guy hanging out in a tavern, threshing a field of wheat, or sitting behind a desk, on average has a strength of 10. Perhaps someone with a with a very sedentary lifestyle such as a priest or sage would have a strength of 8, and someone who does hard physical labor, say a blacksmith or a miner may have a strength as high as 12. I like to keep these ideas in mind for thinking about what my characters can and can’t do automatically – vs what they might want to roll for, or what they absolutely need to role for.

Now on page 176 in the PHB we get a break down of the strength score. It tells us that

·         One can carry weight up to 15x your strength score

·         One can push, drag, or lift, up to 30x your strength score – going up this reduces your move to 5ft a round.

·         Size matters. Every size above medium these stats double, and at tiny they are halved.

These rules are very general and probably aren’t used very often, in the PHB when talking about carrying capacity it literally states “This is the weight (in pounds) that you can carry, which is high enough that most players don’t have to worry about it.” This makes sense to me from a development standpoint. 5e tends to be optimized for a high fantasy world, Faerun in particular. Most people running games like that probably aren’t worrying about this. The people who prefer to play in games like that also most likely dislike encumbrance rules. WOTC is not wrong with its thinking that most players HATE encumbrance rules, and that most DMs are too busy doing other things to police encumbrance bookkeeping. I plan on writing a post later, on my modified and simple encumbrance system, but that is for another day.

What doesn’t make sense to me is that this in some simple ways makes the strength score a bit irrelevant. If I have a strength score of 12 I can carry 180lbs around with me, at all times,  with no problem. That’s kind of crazy. When I make a strength based attack score however I only get a +1 to hit/damage? That just seems wrong. Now I am not advocating for a revamp of the mods on ability scores. What I am suggesting is rethinking when to make players make ability checks, and putting some solid logic behind that to give your players some context. This all started for me with the following thought experiment.

Who do you think failed to pick up a heavy object more times in their life, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Woody Allen?

Think about that for a second. The answer might surprise you. I think it would be Arnold.

You get why right? Arnold literally tried to pick up something heavy every day. Woody, well I don’t know the guy but I’m guessing not. So why make your strength 18 Barbarian make a strength or athletics check to pick up a 200 pound statue? Should he be able to pick up 200 pounds? Yes of course. Everyone gets why the strength 8 Wizard needs to make a strength check to pick up the same statue, but the Barbarian? This goes back to the idea of Arnold vs. Woody. Woody has to make the check because well it seems improbable he could do it, Arnold has to make the check because he’s not used to picking up 200 pound statues. If the strength test was to bench press 200 pounds of weights – Yeah Arnold the barbarian could probably just do it with no check. But picking up a 200 pound stone statue is different, it’s probably awkward to move, the center of gravity may not be where he thinks it is and that makes him drop it. Maybe the statue is of a humanoid and Arnold picks it up by the arm, and it breaks off, again dropping the statue.

You see where I’m going with this right? Think about how this can be applied to the other ability scores. Let’s say our friend Woody is a wizard with an 18 intelligence. He finds a book in a language he doesn’t know. He goes to the library in a big city, finds a book on translating that language, and sits down to decipher what’s in the book. Should he be able to do this? Probably – but perhaps the book is written in code, or in a dialect of that language not covered in his translation manual. Maybe he can translate the basic words but it’s a book with lots of Jargon, a medical treatise or what have you. I think you get where I’m going with this.

Now apply this to the four other ability scores, think of some reasons why a skilled acrobat might fall off a ledge, or a charismatic negotiator fails to convince that stubborn noble etc. It’s actually pretty fun and as a bonus can engage people in some interesting RP opportunities. After a while your players may learn to think about doing things that will probably require ability checks a bit more tactically. They’ll come up with interesting and descriptive ways of doing something other than just - “ I try to lift rock, roll a 12, did I do it?” These more elaborate descriptions and ideas help to make the world we’re playing in more colorful and real. Getting your players to help build the world you’re running makes your job easier and makes your group feel like more of a team. It increases immersion exponentially, and when it happens enough you’ll notice the level of play increasing at your table.

So, should your players be making more ability checks? In my opinion – yes. But that’s just my opinion. I hope that at the very least you have found a way to think about or explain to your players, why they may have to roll to do something they are supposed to be very good at.