Don Durito
Hero
Strength and Dex are increasingly weird.
To hit and damage are based around Strength because the game was based on chainmail and the attack roll assumed the Strength part wasn't about whether you hit or not but whether you got through armour.
A lot of games in the 80s and 90s thought using Strength to hit things was silly and instead used Dex (or agility or equivalent). A lot of people began noticing that this made Strength somewhat of a lesser attribute as it covered very little whereas Dex (or equivalent) covered a lot.
3.0 designers were clearly aware of this so as well as keeping Strength to hit they also linked Strength to certain skills. (But they threw a bone to the expectations of much of the role-playing community with finesse).
D20 games seem to have been very influential and now Strength covers athleticism in a lot of games. At the same time, the general public understanding of Strength has broadened with the popularity of things like Crossfit and ideas like core strength and functional strength, so that it feels more plausible that a high strength doesn't automatically equate to body builder (this was more of an complaint in the 90s - people didn't want attack rolls to depend on Strength because they thought it was silly that every warrior should look like Arnie in the Conan movie).
But how this actually interacts with Dexterity is odd. If Strength covers functional strength then it should definitely cover acrobats and martial arts (which requires a lot of functional strength) and of course there's the fact that scrawny rogues are likely to suck at climbing, which is traditionally a rogue thing.
It feels like if they're going to be separate things than they should be concrete things - but we're told now that Strength is not really so much a concrete thing as an abstract representation of a whole lot of forms of training and body types.
To hit and damage are based around Strength because the game was based on chainmail and the attack roll assumed the Strength part wasn't about whether you hit or not but whether you got through armour.
A lot of games in the 80s and 90s thought using Strength to hit things was silly and instead used Dex (or agility or equivalent). A lot of people began noticing that this made Strength somewhat of a lesser attribute as it covered very little whereas Dex (or equivalent) covered a lot.
3.0 designers were clearly aware of this so as well as keeping Strength to hit they also linked Strength to certain skills. (But they threw a bone to the expectations of much of the role-playing community with finesse).
D20 games seem to have been very influential and now Strength covers athleticism in a lot of games. At the same time, the general public understanding of Strength has broadened with the popularity of things like Crossfit and ideas like core strength and functional strength, so that it feels more plausible that a high strength doesn't automatically equate to body builder (this was more of an complaint in the 90s - people didn't want attack rolls to depend on Strength because they thought it was silly that every warrior should look like Arnie in the Conan movie).
But how this actually interacts with Dexterity is odd. If Strength covers functional strength then it should definitely cover acrobats and martial arts (which requires a lot of functional strength) and of course there's the fact that scrawny rogues are likely to suck at climbing, which is traditionally a rogue thing.
It feels like if they're going to be separate things than they should be concrete things - but we're told now that Strength is not really so much a concrete thing as an abstract representation of a whole lot of forms of training and body types.
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