Why does STR affect Attack Bonus?

[Bernardus]

I'm telling you from my personal experience this isn't true. Perhaps in an extreme case where you're comparing a Str 100 guy against a Dex 100 guy. But in every swordfight I've seen and participated in, strength is key. Strength is speed in swordfighting.Have you ever watched the Ultimate Fighter? It was a TV show for a while that pitted various fighters in a cage match, any style goes. Not sure if it's still on. It was an amazing thing to watch. Basically, the big strong guy always won. The fancy martial arts guy would try and kick or punch the muscle brute, who would take the blow (or blows), rush up to the martial artist, grab him, throw him to the ground, and beat the living crud out of him. That show shattered a lot of illusions about real hand-to-hand combat.
I'm afraid it is true, regardless of your opinion. :\

Lord Pendragon,

I agree that strength is the key for wielding and using a weapon.
I'm trianing Ninjutsu now for about 10 years and sometimes we use a katana for training, the samurai weapon. It is heavy and you need strength to lift it and to control it while you swing it. But for practise we also use the bokken, because it is safer than the live blade.
Within our dojo there are some security guys, who are very strong. There biceps/triceps are very big, that my arm almost fits twice into them.
But when I train with one of them there speed is terrible and I can do much damage is I want. But if I was slow or my block is not good, there damage is much and it will hurt much.
I think I have seen Ultimate Fighting and I have seen a lot of damage being done by strong guys. It is true that the strong guy almost always wins.
I never have seen it on tv, because it is not on tv here in the Netherlands.

But if the nimble guy can hit (crippling strike) the stronger guy, it has a change of winning if it knows where to hit and how to hit it.

 

[monboesen]

If you look to real life and take a bodybuilder who's pumping iron to make him stronger, if he hits it really hurts, becuase he is strong.
But he also is much slower than a nible person

The bodybuilder analogy is just dead wrong.

You should not be comparing a smal and nimble guy with a body builder. A body builder is not a fighter. You should be comparing him to Mike Tyson (or any other heavy weight boxer).

He is not going to be slow and ungainly. He is going to be damn fast and hit as hard as a freight train.

The reason that some body builders are slow is that they don't usually train to be fast.

Additionally in any fight that draws a bit out strength is vital. If you don't have it even keeping your defenses up will be hard.

 

[Bernardus]

The bodybuilder analogy is just dead wrong.

You should not be comparing a smal and nimble guy with a body builder. A body builder is not a fighter. You should be comparing him to Mike Tyson (or any other heavy weight boxer).

He is not going to be slow and ungainly. He is going to be damn fast and hit as hard as a freight train.

The reason that some body builders are slow is that they don't usually train to be fast.

Additionally in any fight that draws a bit out strength is vital. If you don't have it even keeping your defenses up will be hard.

True strength is vital.
But in my opion if you can run from a fight, do it. It is not worth it.

 

[argo]

If you look to real life and take a bodybuilder who's pumping iron to make him stronger, if he hits it really hurts, becuase he is strong.
But he also is much slower than a nible person, so the nimble person wil go in for a strike,

Yeah, bodybuilders are not good examples of "fighters", espically the ones of the "riped and pumped" variety. I hear tales of those guys actually decreasing their flexibility and range of movement because of excessive muscle mass. Anybody ever hear the old urban legend of the bodybuilder whose triceps were so tight that he could no longer reach around to wipe his own ***?

Now look at say a heavyweight boxer or somebody from the afore mentioned UFC or heck even a modern NFL linebacker. All of these guys weigh anywhere from 220-300lb or more and not a bit of it is fat. But they can all move, and fast, and assuming that their skill level is even with the skill level of their weaker/more dexterous opponent they will usually have the advantage. There is a reason why boxing and most other competitions are segregrated by weight catagory.

Anyway, getting back to game mechanics Str as the attack attribute makes perfect sense, reinforces the archtype of the strong warrior and is balanced against dexterity in the core rules. Though I will mention that alternate systems, such as the Conan RPG, have variants that make interchanging Str and Dex as melee attack stats fairly balanced.

Later.

 

[glass]

But in every swordfight I've seen and participated in, strength is key. Strength is speed in swordfighting. I'm afraid it is true, regardless of your opinion. :\

I agree that the nimble guy doesn't beat the strong guy in real life (after all- boxers aren't segregated by weight to protect Tyson from MacGuigan), but he quite often does in literature and mythology. It's not as if D&D models reality all that closely!

Also, it could be argued that in D&D terms the heavyweight fighter has high Str and Dex, while the body builder has high Str only.

I can see good arguments for both Str and Dex modifying the attack roll, so why not allow either (without burning a feat)? It may not be terribly realistic, but then neither are dragons


glass.

 

[Shin Okada]

I can see good arguments for both Str and Dex modifying the attack roll, so why not allow either (without burning a feat)? It may not be terribly realistic, but then neither are dragons


glass.

Game Balance.

Dexterity affects on AC, Ref Save, Ranged Attack Bonus and a lot of skills. If a character can use Dex mod for melee attack without taking feat, for every weapons, we will start to see truly a lot of characters which invest all the point cost (assuming point-buy) to Dex. It is not a good idea to make one ability score overly important.

 

[Sado]

Ok, I'll buy that it makes the weapon easier to control and punch through armor, but does it seem to anyone else that you are getting the bonus twice? Once to your attack bonus and then again to the damage you inflict?

And now a question. Just thinking out loud here (relatively), how would it work if you did use Dex to modify the attack bonus, and had each weapon have a minimum strength score to be able to use, a la Dungeon Siege? If your strength score wasn't high enough you could still use the weapon, but for every point your strength was lower than what was required for the weapon, you subtract 1 from your attack bonus.

This way you take both strength and dexterity into consideration. Just a thought. What do you think?

 

[Shin Okada]

Dex to modify the attack bonus, and had each weapon have a minimum strength score to be able to use, a la Dungeon Siege? If your strength score wasn't high enough you could still use the weapon, but for every point your strength was lower than what was required for the weapon, you subtract 1 from your attack bonus.

This way you take both strength and dexterity into consideration. Just a thought. What do you think?

Your system may work. But I think current system is fine and I feel no need for the change.

As already said by many people, using strength for melee attack bonus is reasonable at least. Strong combatant can swing fast. And it is much harder to protect you from a stronger blow (I mean, parrying or blocking). And, when in need, there already be a rule to simulate "agile combatant using his speed" style (weapon finesse feat).

Also, I think using strength is better for this game.

Combats in D&D involves not only Human or near-human combatants, but various monsters of various size. 10 foots-giants or mountain-like Dragons with high strength should be formidable opponents. By using rule, those monsters will become much weaker.

And I emphases it again. It is not a good idea to make one ability score work both for attack and defense (at least for a main combat style in the game). In many games, designers made dexterity (or similarly named stat) too useful. And we see to many "maximized dexterity" characters in those games.

 

[pbd]

I would just like to point out that most of the examples that have been given, from UFC etc., relate to a quick but small person (high dex lower strength) fighting a quick AND strong person (high strength AND dex). In this situation you are skewing the example in favor of the strong and fast person wins, unless the small guy is VERY fast.

I think the comparison is between the quick, small guy vs. the strong, slow guy is actually better seved by the comparison to the body builder or some "fighter" that sacrifices speed for strength...

 

[TimSmith]

The fencing angle

As an experienced fencer (but sadly less fit than when I was younger and had more time to train before starting our family), I can chime in with some observations.

In fencing, muscular strength IS important, but not in the way you are thinking of. It is more to do with endurance to keep going and also strength in the legs to lunge swiftly. So, my arm might get tired quicker when holding my epee/rapier out in a forward guard position if my strength is less, BUT my accuracy of attack is not affected at all (unless I am too tired to continue to fence well due to my endurance waning). Most D&D fights are over well before I would be too tired to fence properly, at 6 seconds per round.

So, if my accuracy is not improved by brute STR (as opposed to lithe DEX strength), is my attack harder to parry if I am a very strong fencer? The answer is "not at all" because a skillful parry does not rely on opposition to the opponents blade, but deflecting it. (This is made even more effective because you ideally parry the top third of their blade with the bottom third of yours, so you have superior leverage). Admittedly, their are maneuvers which use opposition in both attack and defence (especially in epee) but these still rely on leverage, not strength. Arnold Shwarzenegger could not successfully avoid his blade being easily parried in this way by a 10 year old child (as long as they did it right).

Now obviously this depends on the style of swordplay. Others have spoken eloquently of their Kendo experiences. I wouldn't fancy trying to parry a Katana with my epee, but with training in the appropriate techniques I am sure the appropriate deflection parries, feints, or even just keeping out of the way whilst waiting for the right moment to strike could work.

To answer the original question, though, I am for keeping things as they are, even if one sometimes wonders. As others have said, the strength helps you get through the armour, which is represented abstractly as AC score. As for weapon finesse requiring a feat to use the fencing type of style , whereas plain bashing away doesn't, I think that is correct. After all, the intuitive untrained type of fighting is beating at the other. Strength IS more important there. If you want to learn sneaky combat maneuvers letting you use your DEX, you need to learn Weapon Finesse.

General skill and experience at fighting is represented already in the Base Attack Bonus too, lets not forget. THAT doesn't require good strength and will be quite significant for fighter types, such that a skilled fighter will be better at hitting than an equally strong rogue, for example. That should probably take care of the skill vs strength argument anyway!