Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 5829760" data-attributes="member: 32536">My mistake then. I knew it was far short of the cubing of mass, but I guess I got it wrong about how much it did increase. I was fairly sure that it was different than bone strength, though, so is bone the one that only doubles?Of course, this is only talking about direct muscle power, which is a bit different from effective strength because of all the other factors...I'm more of the opinion that the game should move away from the idea that ability scores, particularly strength, shouldn't be treated as absolute empirical measurements. They should be relative quantities that admit that they are rough abstractions designed to differentiate characters. In other words, it is not a problem to say that a halfling and a human both have the same general Strength Score range, even if the range of weight they can bench press is totally different. The reason for this is because Strength is an abstract quantity created for game purposes, not an absolute measure of a single, easily-identified physical characteristic. It exists to make distinctions between individual characters, not model physics.Hmm, not sure if I'm explaining this correctly or just rambling, so maybe I'll explain my views a different way... Let's look at a different stat that makes this distinction a bit clearer. Dexterity is a good choice.Dexterity is a vaguely defined abstraction. It folds lots of totally different qualities, such as manual dexterity, flexibility, balance, reaction speed, and so on. It is pretty much impossible to come up with some system that measures it in an empirical way, especially since many of those qualities have very little to do with each other. Saying that a small creature should be more dexterous, while a large creature should be less dexterous, only makes sense for some of those ideas, but not others. Ability scores don't measure real physical qualities, so it is fine if they don't increase and decrease directly with real physical qualities. A halfling and a giant having the same strength score is perfectly acceptable within the level of abstraction provided by the ability score system.Well, this last statement you make isn't really true, for two reasons. First, the giant has to account for the increased mass of his own body and arm when swinging a sword, so it is impossible to swing "twice" as easily with a double-weight sword because his heavy arm would slow the sword down. Second, the change in leverage because of his longer arm further decreases the effective strength of his muscles (the human arm is a very inefficient lever, and gets less efficient the longer it is), dropping it even further.Simply put, the idea of "strength" is an abstract quality with a huge number of physical principles all colliding within it. For every factor you take into account there are two more affecting the situation that you don't. That's why oversimplistic approaches like "things get stronger when they get bigger!" are not the best basis for game rules. It's best to just accept the abstraction for what it is and not think about it too much.If you interpret ability scores as anything but the coarsest of abstractions, then even the idea of humans having a physical or mental ability range as wide as the 3-18 gulf becomes silly. Especially when a difference of merely 2 is the difference between human and halfling bench-pressing ability. If the total difference between humans and halfings is less than the difference between two random humans, then why do we need to differentiate races with stats at all?I suppose it is a bit weird that I got involved in this whole physics-based discussion considering that is my opinion, but there it is.</blockquote>

Verification