Ability Bonuses: Causation or Correlation?

[LurkAway]

For years, I've always imagined that when you add Str bonus to hit, that the PC was using their high strength to swing a sword harder, making it more likely to cut through armor and flesh. I assumed there would/should also be causation between Dex (or Int in 4E) and AC, ability bonuses to skill checks, etc. And as per several threads, questions of plausibility arise for some: why would Con or Cha confer a bonus to attacks, why don't 2 relevant ability scores confer a cumulative bonus to attacks, etc.

What if I've made the classic mistake of confusing causation with correlation?

What if a high strength fighter is more likely to get noticed and train under the best offensive-style swordmasters, thus earning a higher bonus to attacks? What if a charismatic PC was more likely to engage in social situations, and that extra experience is modelled as a Cha bonus to diplomacy? (Does that add to the 'player advantage' threads?) What if charismatic paladins are highly favored by their god and/or clergy, and receive a boon to their powers during their training? (It doesn't mean that additional ability scores don't correlate, but that statistically, one ability score is usually the bottleneck for that talent or training.)

Did/do you view ability bonuses as a correlation or cause-and-effect? Does it affect the game if raw ability initially gets you better training or access to x, and it's the extra training or enhanced skill that's now fundamentally more important than the raw ability itself?

 

[Nagol]

Correlation only works for beginning scores and should be demonstrable if scores improve during the game without conferring the benefits expected by causation.

Since getting a wish to increase your strength (without any other requirement like gaining a level for extra training) from 15 to 16 does in fact offer a bonus to damage in AD&D identical to starting with a 16 instead of a 15, I'd have to say causation is established.

Same with using Gloves of Ogre Strength or Belt of Giant Strength: wear them get the bonus, take them off lose the bonus.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I think it was always meant to be some of both, but like "Cure Light Wounds" not exactly making sense in the hit point model at various levels, it breaks down in places by trying to be both causation and correlation.

You get this in part because of what it is trying to model. The easy way to think of it is not correlation, but that the cause and effect runs the other way. That is, the fighter isn't a fighter because he was strong and thus took up arms. Rather, he is strong because he took up arms, got good at it over several years, and in the process became a fighter, strength thus becoming a byproduct of that. But no doubt, having become strong and learned arms, he began to value those things for their own sake (i.e. did some exercises to boost his strength, looked for strength boosting magic, etc.) and this fed back into being a fighter.

When cause and effect develop feedback loops, it starts to look a whole lot like mere correlation on the surface. In an inexact game model, this is even more true.

This actually works better in Basic than in later versions, where it is not at all uncommon for a good fighter to have a mere +1 to hit and damage, a +2 being very nice, and a +3 limited to a small fraction. You'd have to be pretty darn weak naturally to pick up a sword, learn how to use it, and not get close to a +1 Str in Basic terms.

The bigger the bonuses and penalties from ability scores, the more the model breaks down in this respect.

 

[Umbran]

Did/do you view ability bonuses as a correlation or cause-and-effect? Does it affect the game if raw ability initially gets you better training or access to x, and it's the extra training or enhanced skill that's now fundamentally more important than the raw ability itself?

I think of it as cause and effect. The correlation comes in with the BAB of the fighter-type class that the strong guys tend to have.

Yes, you can make arguments for other cause and effect chains, for Dex and even Charisma-based attacks in a heroic game, at least for some genres. But there's only so much flexibility you should expect from a system.

 

[DEFCON 1]

These are exactly the kinds of points that make me just stop concerning myself with them and play the game as it was designed. There is no right, absolute or complete answer to the causation vs correlation question, and thus it doesn't make sense to me to try and creates justifications to not use game rules.

 

[LurkAway]

These are exactly the kinds of points that make me just stop concerning myself with them and play the game as it was designed.

Well, one person's annoyance is another's delight!

Edit: Well, maybe you're not annoyed per se, but it's the phrase that popped to my mind.