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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Irlo" data-source="post: 8518825" data-attributes="member: 7028372">Strength as it affects combat is very abstract. No surprise, since D&D combat is abstract. How a big creature fights is largely narrative, not mechanical. There are probably a few existing mechanics to represent size in combat (the halfling's nimbleness trait, as an example) but not many, and that works for me. In this abstract combat-related capacity, it's easy for me to justify strong halflings -- if they need to be justified.But like most ability scores, Strength is a mess of abstraction and concreteness, and because of that there is some dissonance in the way we interpret it.It's easy to see a halfling as equal to or surpassing a goliath in certain Strength (Athletics) checks -- climbing, swimming, breaking free of bonds. (My son when he was four could climb a 25' rope without sweating. Now, he's four times older and nearly four times heavier and he wouldn't be able to pull that off anymore!) Put that halfling into contested Strength checks with a goliath, in a grapple or in arm-wrestling, and credulity gets strained. The advantage/disadvantage mechanic based on size discrepancies might be enough to bridge the gap of expectations there.I don't even want to talk about jumping. Ugh.Then there's the flat-out objective measures of Strength, carrying capacity and lifting limits. But even encumbrance is more abstracted than we might notice. Halfling-sized armor and gear weigh the same as the goliath's, so in some sense the halfling isn't really carrying the same weight, no matter what the tally on the character sheet says. For this purpose, I think powerful build covers the size differential well enough. I can't remember the last time it was important in my games to know if a particular halfling could pick up a particular boulder. I can shrug off the apparent incongruities of the push, drag, and lift limits for small characters vs. medium and larger.</blockquote>

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