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

[Igwilly]

[MENTION=6683613]TheCosmicKid[/MENTION] -sama, I think you're only digging yourself a little deeper.

*Bonus points for those who know the quote.

But indeed, it all comes down to: "is this worth the work and the trouble?"
Honestly, I should think deeply about the possible effects of a male/female mechanical distinction before using it in my game [emoji3]

 

[Coroc]

Or a weirder one - I could imagine a setting where the Dragons are all female, and the Dragonborn are all male - and they are the same race. The Dragons lay many eggs and abandon them to be raised by the Dragonborn, and most of the eggs hatch into dragonborn. Every few thousand eggs, one hatches a female who grows into a Dragon.

Dragonborn champions adventure so they can grow powerful enough to seek out a Dragon and impress her enough to be taken as her mate.

Or you could flip the genders, but with size differences that extreme it makes more sense (in a biological context) for the female to be larger.

Ahm that leaves open a lot of technical questions ... and strange pictures in my mind

 

[Caliban]

Ahm that leaves open a lot of technical questions ... and strange pictures in my mind

All solvable - anything from "Snu Snu" to limited shapeshifting during the mating season, to any number of imaginative solutions proposed by various manga artists. But this perhaps not the best place to go into detail...

 

[jasper]

All solvable - anything from "Snu Snu" to limited shapeshifting during the mating season, to any number of imaginative solutions proposed by various manga artists. But this perhaps not the best place to go into detail...

Q Xanth with magic love spring and the adult Conspiracy fade to black.

 

[Lylandra]

With all the standard races, the physical and mental differences between the sexes are minor enough that it's really not worth trying to model. Especially since PC's are generally exceptional examples of their race.

However, I think it would be interesting to have one or more races in the game with a more extreme sexual dimorphism. For example, one where the females of the race are built like Goliaths (i.e. Medium, but with Large build), and have bonuses to Str and Con, while the males are Small with bonuses to Charisma and Dexterity. The males also favor much more brightly colored clothing.

Hah, that's just like one of those Sci-fi races I spun for the "lets design some races" thread

The dragon one is great as well. That's what I mean with "fantasy doesn't have to follow RL expectancies".

 

[Caliban]

(There's no ability score for "power to create life".)

Well, the Clone spell creates life, and it's wizard/sorcerer only. So either Intelligence or Charisma would be the ability score for "power to create life".

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Hah, that's just like one of those Sci-fi races I spun for the "lets design some races" thread

The dragon one is great as well. That's what I mean with "fantasy doesn't have to follow RL expectancies".

This is deep into the realm of subjective preferences, but I like my fantasy races more... restrained... than my SF races. In my mind, fantasy echoes the familiar and illuminates aspects of the human experience. It's not just that elves and dwarves are peoples we've been telling stories about for thousands of years: it's that they have characters and cultures which are recognizable to us as humans, simply idealized. For big, radical, speculative "what-ifs" like extreme sexual dimorphism or a hive mind or a parasitic life cycle or whatever, that's when you turn to SF, which strives for the novel and alien just as fantasy strives for the resonant and familiar.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Well, the Clone spell creates life, and it's wizard/sorcerer only. So either Intelligence or Charisma would be the ability score for "power to create life".

Ah, but clone is one of those spells that doesn't actually use its spellcasting ability in any way.

 

[guachi]

And from personal experience on the ground.... I'm a moderately trained Judoka, I've been doing the sport for about 6 years, training twice a week. I'm a 45 year old male, not exactly in my prime. I never go to the gym, and don't do much exercise apart from Judo.

One of our club's best athletes is a woman in her 20s, she narrowly missed out on fighting at the London Olympics in 2012. She's a 3rd Dan, and at her peak was training 7 days a week, a mixture of Judo, fitness and weights.

We're a similar height, I weight about 20lbs more than she does - significant but not excessive.

While she absolutely hammers me at Judo due to her speed, technique and agility, if I do somehow manage to get a firm grip on her she can barely move, as I am physically so much stronger than she is.

The MMA point made earlier is nonsense - of course a highly skilled female MMA fighter would destroy most normal male opponents - due to their skill level. In terms of raw strength though - you'd be surprised.

My wife's cousin is a female powerlifter (and former Highland Games competitor - she's taller, younger and heavier than I am - much heavier. Again she trains much more than I do. But the amount she can lift is only fractionally above what I can.

I find your usage of judo to be illuminating. The NIH report specifically called out judo as one of the sports that requires high grip strength and, presumably, used top female judo athletes in their studies.

5e ability scores are in a tricky place. You can increase your ability scores by gaining experience in your class. It seems odd to me that this is possible so to some extent I view ability score improvements as general skill and technique boosts and not actual physical ability increases.

Another possibility is to model something like strength as raw ability and then you're back to something like 1e to model the vast strength differences in sexes.

However, when it comes to races I think the racial bonuses do a good job of leading players to the kind of physical ability distribution we might expect. Races that don't get at least +1 in Strength are rarely given (if using array/point buy) priority over Dexterity. Only a few races in the PHB, rock gnomes and tieflings and hill dwarves don't have the capability of boosting one or the other at character creation. So you'll end up with elves and halflings boosting dexterity at the expense of strength.

 

[Caliban]

Ah, but clone is one of those spells that doesn't actually use its spellcasting ability in any way.

I'd argue that you wouldn't live long enough to learn the spell if you aren't exceptional in one or the other.