Your thoughts on monsters having six Abilities

[uzirath]

Honest question: is there a scale for ability scores that includes above 20 in any of the core books (or elsewhere, really)?

I’m not an expert on all of the available D&D books, but other RPGs have certainly managed it. In GURPS, for example, strength and hit points can be arbitrarily high. Other attributes rarely need to go much beyond the standard scale. It doesn’t resolve all questions for exotic builds, but it provides a simple baseline for comparison (and to calculate striking damage, lifting ability, etc.).

 

[aramis erak]

Honest question: is there a scale for ability scores that includes above 20 in any of the core books (or elsewhere, really)? If a dragon's strength is 26, we know the bonus progression and can do the calculations for how much they can lift, but where does that 26 lie on the scale of how strong a thing can be? A Strength 30 creature can punch roughly twice as hard as a Strength 20 creature, going by the unarmed combat rules, but a Stength 20 creature punches 5 times as hard as a Strength 10 creature.

I guess my point is that getting a sense of scale above 20 is hard, so I'm not sure how useful abilituy scores are above 20. In normal "human" ranges up to 20 the comparisons are pretty easy to understand, but above 20? [shrugs]

Most editions of D&D have had attribute scales well above 20. AD&D 1E had Str stats to 24 (stats 19-24: DMG, p. 145, §Girdle of Giant Strength). D&D Cyclopedia only goes to 18, but the Wrath of the Immortals supplement takes that table to 100. (WotI, Bk 1 p 52)
AD&D2e PHB (Don't have page number, working from the RTFs on the Core Rules CDROM) goes up to 25. D&D 3/4/5 all have strictly formulaic mods, and so the table is irrelevant, tho' 5E limits the maxima for PCs. (20, 24 for barbarians)...

 

[Staffan]

But WHY!?

Because the designers wanted it to work that way, and that's the best answer you'll get. D&D Hit Dice have never been exclusively about toughness, but have always included all the other nonsense about fighting skills (attack matrix/THAC0) and defensive prowess (saves). Connecting skills to it as well was logical, because it's already at the core of the system for monsters.

The first priority of monsters out of the MM is that they should work straight out of the MM.

In 3e, a second priority was that they should integrate with class levels. In AD&D, you'd often see phrasings like "There are four minotaurs here, lead by their shaman who has the spellcasting abilities of a 4th level cleric of Baphomet." In 3e, that'd instead be a minotaur cleric 4, and the system is designed to tell you exactly what that means.

But when 3e was first published, making a minotaur work as a PC was by no means a priority. Making it work like a PC was.

1. It results in the preposterous implication the the CR of mirror fight against a creature with the same stats would not be an ECL appropriate encounter

CR and ECL are nowhere near the same thing. In an ideal world, CR measures how difficult a monster is to fight for a few rounds, while ECL measures how strong this creature would be as a PC under ideal circumstances. Just to take a really easy example, say you give a monster Fast Healing 1. That's pretty much a non-ability for a monster, because at best they'll get something like 5 hp more out of it over the course of a fight before being brought down. But it's an amazing ability for a PC, because it means you more or less enter every fight at full hp without taxing the healing abilities of your party (now, you pretty much did that anyway due to the unintended consequences of wand of cure light wounds, but I don't think that was ever intended by the devs).

IME, the PF2/4e approach is better, but it does basically boil down to making variants into entirely different monsters mechanically.

 

[Jer]

They were basically trying to use the same rules for monsters as for PCs, in the interests of "fairness" or simulationism. It didn't work out as well as well as they thought, but I can see what they were trying to do.

I don't think it was out of "fairness" or simulationsim - from what I recall at the time it was mostly about consistency and balance. They wanted to have frameworks in place that were consistent. The lead designers were Jon Tweet, Skip Williams and Monte Cook and while I'm not as sure about Williams, I can say that Tweet's previous crunchy design of Ars Magica was very interested in consistent rules while Cook's previous (and subsequent) work has shown him to also be in the camp that the rules should be consistent.

So moving from a 1e/2e framework where there was very little consistency in monster design and it was more of a freewheeling approach to a framework where things were more laid out mathematically and consistently led to, I think, an overcorrection in the case of monster types. They had come up with the approach for consistency with PC class design and applied that to monster design by subbing in the monster type as a kind of class for the base stats. It doesn't work because monster type is more of a narrative descriptor than a game class - they eventually figured it out but by that point were stuck by 3e's design. It's one of the things that 4e fixed by creating monster roles for base stats that were separate from the type of the monster.and actually giving the monster a kind of "class" to build around.

 

[aramis erak]

I don't think it was out of "fairness" or simulationsim - from what I recall at the time it was mostly about consistency and balance. They wanted to have frameworks in place that were consistent. The lead designers were Jon Tweet, Skip Williams and Monte Cook and while I'm not as sure about Williams, I can say that Tweet's previous crunchy design of Ars Magica was very interested in consistent rules while Cook's previous (and subsequent) work has shown him to also be in the camp that the rules should be consistent.

Mr. Williams was also on the DL5A dev team, and that's another late TSR consistent mechanic game, low on simulation, and not worried about fair. And, despite the frequent descriptions of DL5A as more storygame than other TSR games, it's still crunchy. (There are 8 sheets worth of defined tasks across the line, 2 of them from the corebook alone.)

I'd say it's likely Mr. Williams is on board with the consistency.

 

[Jer]

Mr. Williams was also on the DL5A dev team, and that's another late TSR consistent mechanic game, low on simulation, and not worried about fair. And, despite the frequent descriptions of DL5A as more storygame than other TSR games, it's still crunchy. (There are 8 sheets worth of defined tasks across the line, 2 of them from the corebook alone.)

I'd say it's likely Mr. Williams is on board with the consistency.

Ah yes - the Dragonlance 5th age game - I'd forgotten he was involved in that design. One of my favorite systems, actually, when it gets simplified down later into the Marvel Superheroes Adventure Game. And you're right - I think the reason that it gets lumped in as an early storygame is that it's very much trying to do a theater of the mind style game but it's actually quite crunchy once you dive into it. but for a 90s game the mechanics are so consistent people considered it "rules lite".

(I like DL5A well enough but my groups have never really been into the Dragonlance setting so we only played it a few times back in the day. MSHAG, OTOH, we played the heck out of - it's still one of the easiest pick-up-and-play superhero games I think I've ever run).

 

[Willie the Duck]

I do agree about the zombie charisma thing though. That should probably be locked at one.

Also, 3e did have some monsters that didn't have a full array of ability scores, and none of them made any sense. None of 3e's rules for non-abilities made any sense. Lack of strength scores for incorporeal creatures ignored the fact that ghost touch items were in the core rules. Lack of consitiution scores for undead was based on a questionable philosophical point and not on any game design consideratio , it actively caused problems from a gamist and simulationist perspective and made no difference at all from a narrativist perspective. Lack of intelligence score had rules attached to it that didn't logically follow from it, like lack of skill points from monster hit dice, despite those being inborn traits. And charisma couldn't be a non-ability, despite the fact that, as noted earlier, it would make at least as much sense for most mindless monsters not to have it as it does for them not to have intelligence scores

I disagree on the score of one. Having all 'horrible' entities stuck there at the 1 zone (kinda like most animals in most editions being limited to an Int of 1) just makes the number meaningless. This is one of those 'floor' issues that games have when they set the range based on the PCs (similar to the housecat who can kill a TSR-era wizard because there is no damage under 1 hp). Personally I would prefer animals to have a 3-18 intelligence range (just 'raven: Int 12 (animal)' or the like) and similar for monstrous entity charisma (which can we please go the Hero System route and rename the thing 'Presence'?) so we can compare which one is more behavior-changing than the other.

I’m not an expert on all of the available D&D books, but other RPGs have certainly managed it. In GURPS, for example...

Most editions of D&D have had attribute scales well above 20.

It's a 5e-specific question (obviously it can in other systems, as they don't have rules keeping it from happening). 5e has a soft cap of 20 and a hard cap of 30, which makes balancing PC abilities easier as there isn't an open-ended design space with which to work. It runs headlong into the issue that that makes the maximum anything built with stats can have as an encumbrance limit be 30x15=450 lbs, baring additional rules (like 'powerful build') and making monsters that have strength scores need to leap through a bunch of hoops to be reasonable (and in most cases the MM entries don't bother, because apparently the carrying capacity of non-standard draft animals will never come up).

 

[aramis erak]

It's a 5e-specific question (obviously it can in other systems, as they don't have rules keeping it from happening). 5e has a soft cap of 20 and a hard cap of 30, which makes balancing PC abilities easier as there isn't an open-ended design space with which to work. It runs headlong into the issue that that makes the maximum anything built with stats can have as an encumbrance limit be 30x15=450 lbs, baring additional rules (like 'powerful build') and making monsters that have strength scores need to leap through a bunch of hoops to be reasonable (and in most cases the MM entries don't bother, because apparently the carrying capacity of non-standard draft animals will never come up).

There's a multiplier for size for carrying capacity (PHB 176, LC).

But noting that the strength table is formulaic, only the prohibition in the DMG section on monster statblocks (275) caps it at 30. And the 20 cap for PCs (24 for barbarian PCs) is pretty much a hard cap. One can, easily, write up an "illegal" but perfectly serviceable stat block with a strength of 50, for example. And, as noted in some racial writeups, it is possible to have off-scale encumbrance limits (the half-giant ones... Medium critter, carry as large). Nothing but the math for Bounded Accuracy breaks from over-limit, and the progressions remain obvious, except for XP by Challenge rating.... where it looks like 4 jumps of 15K, then 1 of 20k... so say 4 of 20k, then 4 of 25K then 4 of 30k, and so on...

 

[Willie the Duck]

There's a multiplier for size for carrying capacity (PHB 176, LC).

But noting that the strength table is formulaic, only the prohibition in the DMG section on monster statblocks (275) caps it at 30. And the 20 cap for PCs (24 for barbarian PCs) is pretty much a hard cap. One can, easily, write up an "illegal" but perfectly serviceable stat block with a strength of 50, for example. And, as noted in some racial writeups, it is possible to have off-scale encumbrance limits (the half-giant ones... Medium critter, carry as large). Nothing but the math for Bounded Accuracy breaks from over-limit, and the progressions remain obvious, except for XP by Challenge rating.... where it looks like 4 jumps of 15K, then 1 of 20k... so say 4 of 20k, then 4 of 25K then 4 of 30k, and so on...

Yep. Spoke too quickly and was mentally including size and powerful build together. Thanks.

Agreed, it is just the bounded accuracy that is at stake, and it is easy to control. There's truly nothing keeping someone from giving the Colossal Ant creature they are making a 5 million strength and letting it carry away small buildings, but then still give it only a +9 or so to attack (although at that point, a prudent DM will think about things like opposed Athletics checks and saving throws. Some of these the creature should auto-win, and most others it should stay in the bounded acc range; so I might have just talked myself into saying that the creature should have a 30 strength, and then a carrying capacity divorced from that).

 

[Bohandas]

Because the designers wanted it to work that way, and that's the best answer you'll get. D&D Hit Dice have never been exclusively about toughness, but have always included all the other nonsense about fighting skills (attack matrix/THAC0) and defensive prowess (saves).

Having it boost attack makes relative sense compared to the other things it's tied to. Since attack rolls in D&D seem to be less about hitting a thing and more about hitting hard enough to damage the thing you've struck (and thus the roll being keyed to strength rather than dexterity) it makes sense that being built like a tank would contribute to that as well. Or, at any rate, it doesn't make any less sense than that plilosophy for attack rolls does to begin with (edit: except as it pertains to ranged attack rolls)

It also admittedly makes sense that it would contribute to fortitude saves. (although it doesn't make sense for it to contribute to will saves, and if anything it should detract from reflex saves, since those don't follow the same paradigm)