War Pick; ?d8

[TwinBahamut]

Common sense. They're tiny and aren't built out of hydraulic presses. The tiny size of their muscles means they should be weaker than races with human-size muscles. The same reason housecats should have lower strength than humans.

To be honest, I think they're pushing it with elves having the same strength as humans, when on average they're about 100 pounds. (considerably lighter than the average modern human, who come in at 175 pounds, but I suppose you could shave some of that off for a medieval human)

If you were at an arm-wrestling match (or any test of strength, really), and a 65-pound, four foot tall guy was squaring up to two six-footers, one a six-foot shrimptoast of 100 pounds and the other a beefcake of 150, you wouldn't think they were equally likely to win when you were placing your bet.

Muscle strength is based mostly on length of muscle, not mass of muscle. When you double a creatures height and keep every proportion the same, muscle strength increases by a factor of two, bone strength increases by a factor of four (cross-sectional area), and weight increases by a factor of eight. This is why you can't just increase or shrink the size of normal animals and get a creature that can actually survive well.

Too closely tying strength to weight or height is a flawed way of looking at things. Elves may be lankier than humans, but that should not affect muscle strength at all, since their height is pretty much the same as that of a human's. At the same time, Halflings may be much shorter than a human, but it results in a smaller decrease in strength that one might think, especially with the tremendous decrease in weight freeing up a lot of potential muscle power.

I think you are just confusing the differences between individual humans (developed muscle vs. undeveloped muscle) and the differences between different species (entirely different muscular and skeletal structure).

 

[tomtill]

I think you are just confusing the differences between individual humans (developed muscle vs. undeveloped muscle) and the differences between different species (entirely different muscular and skeletal structure).

I remember reading somewhere that a chimp is considerably stronger than a much larger human, a combination of dense muscle mass and bone and better leverage due to altered ratios of where muscles insert on the bone relative to the joint.

 

[jaer]

Common sense. They're tiny and aren't built out of hydraulic presses. The tiny size of their muscles means they should be weaker than races with human-size muscles. The same reason housecats should have lower strength than humans.

To be honest, I think they're pushing it with elves having the same strength as humans, when on average they're about 100 pounds. (considerably lighter than the average modern human, who come in at 175 pounds, but I suppose you could shave some of that off for a medieval human)

If you were at an arm-wrestling match (or any test of strength, really), and a 65-pound, four foot tall guy was squaring up to two six-footers, one a six-foot shrimptoast of 100 pounds and the other a beefcake of 150, you wouldn't think they were equally likely to win when you were placing your bet.

Actually, I would say common sense leads to logic more along the lines of

An elf has bonuses to wisdom and dex, which makes the race suitable to roles x, y, z. Roles x, y, and z are not strength dependent roles, and therefore most elves do not develope a high strength (shown not by some racial penalty but by the fact that the elf's stats are adjusted and placed according to need). This results in the average elf not having a high strength score.

However, there is no reason to give the race a penalty as a whole. By doing so you are saying the strongest elve, those that do focus on increasing their strength through exercise and martial training cannot be as strong as the humans that do the same. As a race, I see no reason, logically or biologically, that that would be the case.

I feel the same holds true for halflings. They seem like river-traveling merchants, for the most part. Most of them do not focus on strength training (and their attributes would reflex that by strength not being the main focus) but that does not mean there aren't some of them that really do take the time and effort to train up their strength over other skills. It might be rare, but I see no reason to penalize a whole race, thus saying they can never be as strong as other races.

 

[jaer]

As for the d8 in the stat block...I tend to agree with the idea that as levels increase, the number of d8 do increase.

I know that the old industry standard was that d8 meant 1d8, but didn't WotC stop doing that, at least in 3.5? I feel like I haven't seen "roll d6" or something in a long time, and anytime they meant 1d6, they specifically wrote 1d6. I could be wrong, but it does seem d8 is an indication of the type of die rolled, but should not indicate that only 1 is rolled.

Also, one thing that caught me in the critical hit article was this "Instead, when you roll a critical hit, all the dice are maximized." [Emphasis mine]

Course, this could simply be in reference to spells or sneak attacks and things being able to crit and those having multiple dice. But the article did deal mainly with weapon crits, so it struck me as odd.

As it is now, spells and sneak attacks deal more and more dice of damage, while weapon damage tends to increase with static +s to damage. The new crits favors things that have more dice to maximize. A 1d8+12, while better average damage, doesn't get nearly the benefit from a crit as, say 4d6, so if 4e continues the trend of adding more dice to damage as spells and special abilities scale, those with more dice get more benefit from crits.

 

[DogBackward]

For everybody that's still harping on the halfling's low strength, I'll just say it one more time and be done with it.

Halflings are small size. They get a -4/-5 penalty to just about every single Strength-related roll, their weapons deal less damage, and they have a lower carrying capacity.

This is more than enough to represent a halfling's lack of strength/bulk compared to a human.

Now, if anybody still wants to go on about it, I suggest a new thread, as this one is about weapons, and the possible meaning behind "d8". I still think the number of dice will be variable, myself, but I can't decide what would be the best way to do it. Either by level or proficiency, or perhaps by level with different classes having different progressions.