D&D 5E What Does a Strength 20 Look Like (In Real Life)?

[GreyLord]

How far you jump in the long jump is how strong you are?

I had no idea I had around a 22-23 STR in High School.

 

[Vaalingrade]

How far you jump in the long jump is how strong you are?

I had no idea I had around a 22-23 STR in High School.

Max is 20 (for no reason). So you are misremembering and the high school sports... coalition? League? Council? is lying.

 

[GreyLord]

How about Dexterity?

There's not a real-world analog described in the Player's Handbook entry for "Dexterity," so we have to look at skills. The first that comes up, obviously, is Acrobatics. Now, according to the PHB, "you can use the Acrobatics skill to make jumps or to soften a fall. The base DC to make a jump is equal to the distance to be crossed (if horizontal) or four times the height to be reached (if vertical). These DCs double if you do not have at least 10 feet of space to get a running start."

Also, it has a bit of clarification about modifiers, which is helpful. "The only Acrobatics modifiers that apply are those concerning the surface you are jumping from."

And the rules also have this bit: "Creatures with a base land speed above 30 feet receive a +4 racial bonus on Acrobatics checks made to jump for every 10 feet of their speed above 30 feet. For a running jump, the result of your Acrobatics check indicates the distance traveled in the jump (and if the check fails, the distance at which you actually land and fall prone)."

Alrighty then.

Spoiler: Math and Other Silliness

So it's safe to say that Mike Powell has a base speed above 30 feet. But how much? In the video, he is traveling 8.95 meters in 2.02 seconds (using the timestamp of the video to time his jump.) That's 14.54 feet per second, or 145 feet per round. He's clearly Dashing, so that means his base speed is 73 feet per round...let's call it 70, because YouTube's timestamp isn't exactly a stopwatch. That's 40 above 30, so he has a +16 racial bonus, according to the PHB. (It's rare to find one of those.)

Clearly he's proficient in Athletics, as a professional athlete. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he's also proficient in Acrobatics, even though he's not on the US Acrobatics team. (And we could complicate this even further, speculating on everything from class levels to Expertise, to sabotage any analysis...but I'll show in a minute that it's already sabotaged.)

In the video, he lands and falls prone...so according to the rules, he "failed" this Acrobatics check. (That's right, he broke the world record on a fail. Anyway...) This gives us the Acrobatics DC and the Acrobatics roll result. The result is the distance crossed, in feet...so it was a DC 30 Acrobatics check, and Mike "failed" it with a result of "only" 29.

We don't know what he "rolled." We know the result was 29 because that's the distance in feet that he traveled, and we know that he was rolling with at least a +12 based on his speed. So he either rolled a nat-20 and has a -3 modifier to Dexterity, or he rolled a nat-1 and he has at least a +18 (or +20 if proficient, or +24 if proficient and 20th level, or etc.)

So in game terms, Mike Powell's Dexterity score would be somewhere between 4 and 46.

-----


Yes, I know this whole exercise is ridiculous...that's where the fun comes in! But it illustrates an interesting point. (At least, I think it's interesting. Some folks feel personally attacked for some reason, and that's just weird to me.) But since I started this thread, I've been thinking a lot about game mechanics and physical modifiers.

Many players really enjoy the optimization aspects of their characters...fiddling with the different options and features to squeeze out every last bonus, gain every possible synergy and advantage. And it's a great way to play the game...better than playing Solitaire anyway...just fiddling with characters on D&D Beyond for hours, coming up with cool combos and synergies. (Or maybe it's just me.) I have dozens of characters that I can't wait to unleash upon my DM's game world.

But I think that kind of hyper-focus makes me overvalue my characters' stats, especially the ability scores. Missing out on a +1 here or a +2 there, or not taking certain proficiencies, isn't going to render my character unplayable, any more than starting the game with a 20 in Dexterity is going to make my character a god. Because in almost all cases, I'm going to roll a twenty-sided die and add it to these numbers on my character sheet, and a random number between +1 and +20 is going to swamp any -5 or +8 I might have. Yes yes, probabilities and averages and linear distributions, sure, but my DM isn't letting me roll infinite d20s with every Athletics check and take the average. The days of the "Take 10" and the "Take 20" are long gone. In the moment, with my single d20 roll, my character's Strength is either going to feel like a 12 or a 50, depending on if the d20 hands me a +1 or a +20.

Mike Powell didn't roll any dice. He is a real person on a real running track, and he was relying purely on his real training, and discipline, and physical power alone to determine the results of that that long jump. That's really our first clue that game rules aren't modeling the real world. And in the game, that d20 is going to be the biggest deciding factor of a character's performance. Not the only factor, but it's far and above the largest. Rolling a d20 truly decides the outcome. And that's probably the best part of the d20 System: it's a lot harder to 'game the game' and eliminate that uncertainty.

A character with a +10 to Acrobatics who rolls a 2, will get the same result as a character with a -5 to Acrobatics who rolls a 17...and the odds are identical for both. I can't game my way around that, it's built into the system. (And I think this is a feature, not a bug.)

Anyway. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

One more shout-out to Mike Powell, who broke the world record for long jump without rolling a single d20. That is super impressive, no matter how much D&D you overthink play.

Of course, one of the things that is missed is that in 5e, DMs are encouraged to actually NOT make players roll all the times for things their PC's should succeed in normally.

You are a rogue skilled with Thieves Tools, and you are picking that lock over there without any real pressure...you pick the lock...no roll necessary.

You are climbing that cliff and are skilled in athletics and it's not an inverted sheer cliff...you climb the cliff just fine.

I think too often we are forcing players to roll for skill checks in 5e when we don't need to be.

(of course, it would be hard to criticize 5e as completely about the problems of slow bounded accuracy if we didn't, and I'm as guilty, if not more so than any for making these types of arguments, but in theory, for most things the PC's do they shouldn't actually be rolling to do. Only when it is actually a real challenge or such should they be rolling in 5e, or at least that's how I interpret the rules).

 

[GreyLord]

Max is 20 (for no reason). So you are misremembering and the high school sports... coalition? League? Council? is lying.

Or, unbeknownst to me, I must have been a Barbarian at the right level at that time...savage brute...

 

[Vaalingrade]

Or, unbeknownst to me, I must have been a Barbarian at the right level at that time...savage brute...

Has to be an ability that give you an actual bonus. Remember: Advantage just gives you another chance to utterly fail at something of a DC you can't hit with your numbers.

 

[CleverNickName]

Also the 'abstraction' defense doesn't help with the issue that the rules are designed to prevent you from doing in a fantasy world what normal, pathetic humans are capable of with the apparently ancient mystic arts of diet and exercise.

Ooof, I know right? This is an actual conversation that I had with a coworker a few years ago. (A bit of background: this coworker had been out of town for almost a year on a field assignment. While he was gone, I had lost 60 pounds in 5 months.)

Coworker: Woah, CleverNickName! You lost a ton of weight!
Me: Yep, about sixty pounds.
Coworker: That's amazing! What's your secret?
Me: Grapefruit enemas.
Coworker: . . .
Me: . . .
Coworker: Really?
Me: No, of course not! It was diet and exercise! Months of diet and exercise!
Coworker: Aw.
Me: Were...were you actually considering shoving grapefruits--
Coworker: It sounds better than diet and exercise!

 

[Flamestrike]

I think it is reasonable to give Hafthor (and other world class strongmen) a strength score of 22-24.

No that's highly unreasonable. That's supernatural, It's beyond supernatural. It's literally stronger than a Grizzly, and is stronger than an Elephant.

 

[CleverNickName]

No that's highly unreasonable. That's supernatural, It's beyond supernatural. It's literally stronger than a Grizzly, and is stronger than an Elephant.

This.

I think the trouble is with the way that the rules describe Strength. If we wanted Strength to model the real-world, and I'm not saying that we do, the amounts given for lifting and carrying capacity would need to change. At the very least.

Spoiler: More math and absurdity

If Hafthor has the highest strength humanly possible (20), and it's safe to say he probably does, then the rules for lifting should be revised to "You can push, drag, or lift a weight in pounds up to twice your carrying capacity, or 55 times your Strength score."

That's all fine and good for the upper limit, but it doesn't really work for average. Since the average human can lift between 135 and 175 pounds (let's take the average of 155), everyone who isn't a highly-trained weightlifter would have Strength scores of 2 or 3. For Strength 10 to be the average, the rules for lifting should be "15.5 times your Strength score."

So obviously the function isn't linear. If we were to collect the data from hundreds of athletes and graph their lifting limits, it would probably resemble an exponential curve, something like "The amount your character can lift is equal to (long, convoluted polynomial)." And nobody wants that. At all.

 

[Mercurius]

Wait, you're saying that D&D stats don't accurately depict real life? Craziness.

 

[CleverNickName]

Mostly I'm trying to say that these athletes are incredible.

I'm also slowly realizing that my character's ability scores don't really matter as much as I like to think. A d20 roll is a huge amount of swing when most DCs are 20 or less. Maybe a 4d6 system really could be better, from a certain perspective.