HTWMDS - Does Greater Strength Make You Better at Hitting Things?

[ProfessorPain]

PP, in case this was misunderstood, I personally never said strength was immaterial. Especially in hand to hand combat. I said it was not definitive when it comes to killing. Killing efficiency is.

Strength may very well be definitive in winning a brawl or a fight, which is a different kind of fight than a killing combat situation.

Strength also doesn't make you better at hitting if the other person is well trained in combat unless their movement is restricted in some way, or they are tied to a place, or voluntarily engage in a stand up fight.

From what I'm understanding of your examples you are saying strength tells after a blow (after someone has been successfully struck, someone can also successfully use speed and training to avoid blows), and that can very well be true. But it doesn't make you better at hitting, and especially not at killing, unless you know how to hit, which comes into play from skill, training, and practice.

Let me put it this way. The very first time you sparred, and that's a static fight compared to a lethal combat (you are purposely engaged with each other to fight in a face-off), were you very good at hitting your partner? Probably not. In time you practiced and learned proper technique. Then you became good at hitting the other guy. You learned how to actually fight.

Now once you learned to fight well, then you could apply your strength properly. Your strength had effect whereas before (even if you had been at the same relative level of strength) you would have been less than ideally effective.

Same thing with killing, and real combat.
First you have to know what you're doing, and then later you can better exploit your other talents, speed, muscle control, strength, power, movement, tactical knowledge, accuracy, even intuition, and so forth.

A novice may be fast, or strong, or anything else, but generally speaking he's probably not very good, or the strongest boxers, or fastest, would always be the most effective boxers. Or the strongest men the best killers. But they are usually not.

First a guy gets good at what he is doing and then he becomes dangerous. But he is not dangerous just because he is strong, he is potentially more dangerous if he knows what he is doing and is also strong. That is to say that every advantage helps once you know what you are doing, but almost none do if you don't know what you are doing.

I hope that better explains what I was saying.

I don't dispute that skill has a bigger role. And D&D's level system gives greater primacy to skill. But I am saying that Strength makes hitting someone effectively much easier than something like Dexterity. Since the original question here seemed to be "is strength the best stat to use for determining how well you hit someone". For me it is a toss up between str and dex. As I said, hand-eye (DEX) is important, but muscle power and explosive strength (STR) are equally, if not more, important. To be clear, in my example I am saying STR helps you land the blow in the first place, by making your movements more explosive and giving them more power to penetrate defenses (get through parries, blocks, armor and shields). In my experience, even if someone has great skill, if they don't train their muscles and keep them strong, they wont be able to use their skill effectively at all. In fact, in a boxing match between a veteran who has stopped training, and a novice who has been hitting the gym every day, my money is on the novice. I do not think this translates directly to modern combat with guns and night vision goggles. But I do think it translates into sword fights where people are going to worn down, and will need to blast their sword through things like parries or armor. Fighting is the most exhausting thing in the world. If your body isn't strong, it will tire more quickly, and your brain will start to make bad decisions. This last statement though can apply to all three physical stats I suppose.

On the subject of boxing, I do think, once you get someone to proficient skill level, things like raw talent start to matter much more. But that is a different debate than we are having right now. Especially when you fight outside of very narrow wieght categories. When someone has a significant mass advantage, even a highly skilled boxer can get creamed. This has happened to me. I had the opportunity to fight someone 60 pounds heavier than me, and no matter how skillfully my punches and slips were executed, at the end of the day, I didn't have enough mass to do any significant damage. But, like you say, this was a hand to hand boxing match, not a battle between two guys holding swords and shields.

 

[xechnao]

Jack7 have you heard about duels? In some cases of history it is believed that the outcome of various conflicts was decided on some kind of duel among the champions of the two rival sides. We know that in feudal Japan there was the warrior's code, Bushido. Then we know of battle stratagems that involve groups of people fighting to capture ground or people. We also know of massacres. We also know of professional killers and hit-men.

Thing is that anything is possible in combat. What seems to have mattered more at least historically IMO is the mental conditioning based on the social situation.

For being an efficient killer this means that you do not really need to be trained to know how to kill. You rather need to be trained to want to kill. Especially when killing is contrary to the social norm. And since this is almost always the case those that have wanted to kill have usually managed to succeed due to inferior resistance -inferior resistance because normal people do not bother with killing each other.

 

[S'mon]

For being an efficient killer this means that you do not really need to be trained to know how to kill. You rather need to be trained to want to kill. Especially when killing is contrary to the social norm. And since this is almost always the case those that have wanted to kill have usually managed to succeed due to inferior resistance -inferior resistance because normal people do not bother with killing each other.

D&D of course assumes that the combatants all want to kill, ie they belong to what in reality is a small minority of people among most cultures. The documentaries I've seen put the "naturally willing to kill people who look like them" figure at 2% of the population - 1% heroes and 1% psychopaths. Visible racial and possibly cultural differences can help overcome the natural aversion to killing. In a D&D world regular humans likely wouldn't be averse to killing orcs, but most might be averse to killing elves or halflings.

 

[xechnao]

D&D of course assumes that the combatants all want to kill, ie they belong to what in reality is a small minority of people among most cultures. The documentaries I've seen put the "naturally willing to kill people who look like them" figure at 2% of the population - 1% heroes and 1% psychopaths. Visible racial and possibly cultural differences can help overcome the natural aversion to killing. In a D&D world regular humans likely wouldn't be averse to killing orcs, but most might be averse to killing elves or halflings.

I do not think these percentages tell anything about the actual persons rather than perhaps how human societies have worked out so far in some instances-those with mental problems excluded. "Naturally" willing to kill is hard to understand what really means since humans are social animals and societal dynamics may complicate things here. They say that violence brings violence and to a certain extent this is understandable.