D&D 5E Do you miss attribute minimums/maximums?

[Hussar]

IME, cheating was pretty much the norm. I know there are groups out there that insisted on "what you roll is what you get" but, I certainly never met them.

And they obviously never generated any of the pre-gen NPC's in any TSR module.

 

[cbwjm]

We never cheated on stat rolls but then our character gen was pretty lenient. I also allowed players to raise a stat to meet a class requirement but they had to put their highest ability into that stat. This meant that if a player wanted to play a paladin and their highest stat was a 16 that it was going into charisma.

I don't think we used 3d6 in order since we moved from the RC and started 2e and I read about alternate stat generation.

 

[Maxperson]

While I agree that there were differences, most of them only applied to you if you were a class that cared about the ability score. That is you really only cared about chance of clerical spell failure if you were a Cleric, or the maximum knows spells if you were a Wizard, or changes in the thief abilities if you were a thief. For most classes though, if you had 16 in your prime requisite, everything else was basically gravy. And having an 18 was a huge advantage over a 16, but really only if it was your prime requisite. A cleric might love an 18 Str, but it would be largely wasted on a cleric, as the bonuses from 18/XX strength were massive compared to the difference between a 16 and an 18. Unless you were a fighter, 18 Con was about as good as a 16 Con.

There are really a short list of 'playable' builds for 1e once you become familiar with it:

Qualifies for Paladin. Lucky you. Play a Paladin.
Has at least a 17 strength and at least a 17 constitution, and no stat of 5 or less. Play a human, dwarf, or half-orc fighter. This is a power gamer's dream build. You have one of the most powerful characters you can get, and post Unearthed Arcana such a character can be game breaking.
Has at least two 16s not in Charisma or Constitution, and no stat of 5 or less. You have a lot of flexibility, and really can make almost anything work. Plan a human dual class build, a cavalier, or play a straight classed human with extra advantages, or play a multi-class humanoid where one of the classes is thief or assassin.
Has at least one 16+ not in Charisma or Constitution, and no stat of 5 or less in a conflicting attribute. Play a straight-class with the appropriate Prime Requisite.
Has at least a 16+ on Constitution and strength is 9 or higher. Play a Dwarf fighter.
Qualifies for Bard. Begin a Bard build.
Has at least two 15+ not in Charisma or Constitution. Plan a dual-class human character.
Qualifies for Ranger. Play a Ranger.
None of the above. Roll up a new character, or commit suicide if you can't.
Two or more fives or less. You can't make a character. Roll up a new character.

While there is some small granularity between 9-14, unless you qualify for Ranger, there is no point in playing that character even with above average rolls, because the gap between a 17 and an 18 and an 18 and higher than an 18 is just massive. A fighter with 18+ strength, or a dwarf fighter with 19 Con, or a Wizard with 18 intelligence is just massively more potent than anything with no scores above 14, and even multiple 15's is barely playable unless you qualify for a 'prestige' class.

Sure, but the stat still has an impact. If you roll a 9 dex, you are impacted by that roll by likely not choose to be a thief. The impact doesn't have to be an ongoing penalty.

 

[Maxperson]

Wow. "You can have a high strength so long as you don't play your own gender" isn't sexist? Seriously?

You seem to have missed the part where an 18/50 is incredibly strong.

Imagine, just for a second, that you were told, in no uncertain terms, that your character could never, ever have an 18 Wisdom unless you were female. The greatest clerics in the land MUST be female. You'd have no problems whatsoever with this?

I have no problem with it, although I personally don't use gender limitations. It's certainly not sexist.

Or, better yet, you can only play a paladin if it's one gender. Pick one, doesn't matter. All paladins in AD&D needed an 17 or better Cha. So, only men can be paladins since men are natural leaders, or some such argument.

I know! Let's make it so that only humans can be paladins. Oh, wait, that's how it was. It wasn't racist, either.

 

[Lanefan]

A lot of people say this, and for most of my AD&D career, I would have felt the same. But that's a feeling, and it was largely based on ignorance, and whether you felt it or not you were massively penalized. Looking back, it is even more obvious.

It took me years of playing before I realized how imbalanced the game was and how favored a good build could be over one that wasn't. Contrary to you intuition, having high stats in 3e is generally less important than good stats in 1e, because in 3e a 14 is actually a pretty good number and the gap between a 14 and an 18 is there but its not infinite.

Yeah, but in 3e a stat isn't considered high until it reaches at least the mid-twenties...

In 1e, the gap between a 14 and an 18 is mind-blowing. The fighter with 14 strength is barely playing the same game as the fighter with 18/XX strength. The fighter with 14 Constitution is barely playing the same game as the dwarf fighter with 19 Con and an average of about 11 hit points for HD, doubly so because the Dwarf bonus to saves that makes a low level dwarf so potent also scales with Constitution. You're playing an elven fighter/M-U with no ability scores above 14 and thinking you are cool for the first couple of levels, until the someone else with 16+ in Strength and Wisdom transforms his fighter into a dual-classed human fighter-cleric build and gains like 8 levels of spell casting faster than you can gain your next level, and on top of that you realize you are level capped at 5/9. Or someone does a Bard build and suddenly gains like 16 levels while you are gaining 2. Pity you if you are playing a single classed thief or if you wasted your decent stats playing a monk because it sounded cool.

It's not that odd in 1e to find parties where certain individuals can by themselves carry 5, 10 or even 15 times the weight of other party members in combat because of gaps in ability scores and optimization. You don't feel picked on, until you start doing in the math and realize that your thief will probably never have the combat ability of even a 5th level fighter, nor will his abilities out of combat ever be as reliable and useful as a wizard or clerics.

Assuming, of course, that pure combat ability is the be-all and end-all of why and how one creates a character.

In the game I play in, the heaviest damage-dealer is a Fighter-Thief who kills outright on backstrikes and merely hurts very badly on frontstrikes. The biggest problem with him sometimes is getting him to engage at all, as he's not the starchiest of creatures: the term 'glass cannon' comes to mind.

And a party without a competent Thief is at quite a disadvantage. Scouting? Good luck with that, unless you're outdoors and the Ranger can take the slack. Traps? Sure; these can be overcome by summoned idiots, but that chews up the MU's spells. Locks? Again, the MU can take care of a certain number of these per day but after that she's done, and no other 2nd-level slots either. A Thief can just keep on picking 'em all day...

Lan-"fair to say we ditched the 'two-class' rule for Humans about 1983 and replaced it with Elf-like multiclassing"-efan

 

[Lanefan]

Agreed. But the random nature of chargen guaranteed this would happen eventually, and the longer groups played, the more they realized that if you weren't playing one of those characters with a 16+ in a primary stat, you were basically playing into a dead end and therefore wasting your time.

Or were you?

Sometimes - once in a while - one of those 'nothing' characters hangs around long enough to become a star...and there's nothing I like more than seeing this happen.

Other times...well, just keep in mind it's a rogue-like game and pull out those d6's.

Not at all. Front line characters without Con bonuses simply cannot survive for long in 1e/2e AD&D. Generally speaking, 90 hit points is considered a good safe amount, though more is achievable and desirable.

I've been playing 1e for well over 30 years now. In that time I've gone through about 55 characters (which seems odd, I thought it was more; but that's what my records tell me) and none of them has reached anywhere near 90 h.p. Nor even 80 h.p. Best I've had are a couple in the low to mid 70's (a F-10 [that being Lanefan the character] and, I think, a Dwarf C-11).

Now in fairness, of course most of them didn't get to that kind of level range...but of those that did I have or had a MU-10 in the mid-30's (would be mid-20's without a device), a C-10 in the 60's I think, another Dwarf C-9 in the mid-50, an I-10 in the mid-20's. And both the Dwarf Clerics I mentioned were War Clerics, and thus not only expected to be front liners but often to lead the charge.

I did have one Part-Orc Fighter for a while who had the potential to get to stratospheric h.p. numbers due to his Con having ticked over 20 (!) but alas, he died the death far too soon.

And I'm not alone. The first campaign I played in went for over ten years, got to about 9th level, and the highest character h.p. total we saw was something like 85...and that was an outlier.

Now in the current campaign - and this brings up a balance question - we have the opposite problem: too many h.p., and more of a problem, too much disparity in h.p. Recently we had a group where the high h.p. was something like 110 and the low was in the low 20's...and how on earth does a DM even threaten something with 110 h.p. (and the constitution of a bus) without wiping out someone with less than 25?

Lan-"this last question is relevant to me as I'm the one who had the <25-point wonder"-efan

 

[cbwjm]

Actually, looking at the numbers. A warrior would have to roll, in average, 6 hit points per hit die and have an 18 constitution to end up with 94 hit points at level 9. That's some good rolling, stats and hit points.

 

[Lanefan]

That assumes dead characters are immediately dropped and the player is free to immediately bring in a new randomly-rolled character (rather than, for example, promoting a henchperson to PC status). It also assumes that the difference in stats is enough to span the gap between death and survival, such that a fighter with 18/00 is likely to survive indefinitely where a fighter with 14 is likely to die quickly.

A guy in my game, who had been playing for 15+ years, rolled 18.00 a while back for the first time in his life. We all saw it. We all cheered.

What happened next was that bit of good luck got severely cancelled out by some bad luck, and the character was dead and gone within the real-world month.

That assumes you will eventually encounter a dragon or powerful spellcaster who wants to kill you, which isn't necessarily the case.

Oh, I don't know - IME it's pretty much inevitable.

Lan-"and sometimes the dragon IS the powerful spellcaster"-efan

 

[Lanefan]

IME, cheating was pretty much the norm. I know there are groups out there that insisted on "what you roll is what you get" but, I certainly never met them.

We have a table rule that all rolls must be witnessed by someone - doesn't have to be the DM, as long as someone's watching. Most of the time it gets followed...

We still see some things now and then that don't quite seem right, but it's nowhere near as bad as it could be.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

Actually, looking at the numbers. A warrior would have to roll, in average, 6 hit points per hit die and have an 18 constitution to end up with 94 hit points at level 9. That's some good rolling, stats and hit points.

6 per hit die isn't much of a stretch when you consider that the average on a d10 is 5.5.

Oh, and I forgot to mention - we use something we call body points as well (the 'wound' in our equivalent of a wound-vitality system) which gives everyone about another 3 or 4 h.p. in total.

Lanefan