Capping Ability Scores

[Michael Silverbane]

What I would suggest is a flat cap on all ability scores... Such as 30, or 24 or something, which can be exceeded ONLY by racial bonuses. So... If you cap all ability scores at 30, then the half orc (+2 Str) can have a Str of 32, but no higher...

Another thing that you might consider is using a stat generation method that will generat lower stats to start with, then stats will not get as high. For instance, if you use point-buy, start your players with 21 points. If you use Dice rolling, have them roll 2d6 + 3.

Later
silver

 

[librarius_arcana]

I personally think it's a bad idea.

With this, you make it a complete and utter impossibility for there to be such a thing as a Half-Orc Wizard

I don't see that as a problem, Half-Orc Wizard, nasty, don't you need a really good education to use magic, does the half orc culture support this?


I don't like saying no to almost anything players want to try and get, the key word there is "try" instead of capping can't you just make it harder to get?

 

[hafrogman]

I don't see that as a problem, Half-Orc Wizard, nasty, don't you need a really good education to use magic, does the half orc culture support this?

There is no half-orc culture. Shouldn't a half-orc raised among humans have access to the same education as a human raised among humans? He's not as smart, but race and culture are different.

edit:
Back to the thread at hand. I think that capping at a certain number assumes the same kind of problem that older editions had. Just because I'm very strong, I can't get any stronger? It seems that even the people who are pushing the boundaries of human ability are capable of improving themselves.

 

[librarius_arcana]

There is no half-orc culture. Shouldn't a half-orc raised among humans have access to the same education as a human raised among humans? He's not as smart, but race and culture are different.

Thats sort of my point, would there be any sort of support structure to allow an half orc to get the type of education you would need?,

just thinking half orc vs mage snobbery

 

[Syntallah]

What I would suggest is a flat cap on all ability scores... Such as 30, or 24 or something, which can be exceeded ONLY by racial bonuses. So... If you cap all ability scores at 30, then the half orc (+2 Str) can have a Str of 32, but no higher...

snip

When 3E first came out I got caught up in efforts to maintain most of the 'sacred cows' of AD&D. Capped stats being one of them. I limited stats to 23 +/- racial scores. The 23 number was calculated by assuming a player could roll an 18 at first level, and if he added all 5 of his level bonuses he could get that.

I have since scrapped most of those early day efforts. As others have pointed out. This is an entirely different Game...

 

[Narsil]

Thats sort of my point, would there be any sort of support structure to allow an half orc to get the type of education you would need?,

just thinking half orc vs mage snobbery

Mage snobbery varies from mage to mage. Just because one mage is a snob doesn't mean that all mages are snobs. That's very much like trying to say that since all Marxists were atheists, all atheists were marxist.

 

[librarius_arcana]

Mage snobbery varies from mage to mage. Just because one mage is a snob doesn't mean that all mages are snobs. That's very much like trying to say that since all Marxists were atheists, all atheists were marxist.

No not really, just trying to put within context the half orc position within a culture that would most likely not be supportive,

needless to say but that depends on the game setting, but I thought of half orc, as a more extreme version than half elves, being stuck in the middle, a no mans land, and it's got to be tougher when your half of what many would see as an enemy to humans,

 

[jeffh]

There is no half-orc culture. Shouldn't a half-orc raised among humans have access to the same education as a human raised among humans? He's not as smart, but race and culture are different.

That's a) a world-specific assumption, b) assumes all half-orcs come from a particular culture, never from one dominated by some other race, c) assumes a level of cultural determinism that c1) I, for one, think is just flat-out empirically false, and c2) even if it weren't, would be totally out of place in a game about exceptional, heroic characters.

 

[airwalkrr]

and most Epic Feats are now rendered unattainable due to the ability-score requirement.

I'm not at all concerned about this aspect. In the first place, I only played one epic level game and only for two sessions because I didn't much enjoy the save or die aspect of everything and the relative lack of challenge of most encounters. In the second place, just dropping the ability score requirements doesn't really hurt epic feats that much as many of them are now available as normal feats.

 

[airwalkrr]

I suspect you've seriously underestimated how much rebalancing would be needed to get this to work.

I don't think it would require that much re-balancing. Getting such high ability scores is not necessary in my experience. I've played characters with very balanced ability scores who never got higher than a 20 in any score well into the teens levels and they were perfectly fine. This was in the Shackled City campaign so it wasn't a specially tailored homebrew campaign either.