D&D 5E What Does a Strength 20 Look Like (In Real Life)?

[MPA2000]

Can I just add something to this incredible discussion? My understanding of what is inferred is that 18 means he can lift 180lbs as a matter of ease. That is to say he is so strong that he could walk for 8 hours and lift that 180lbs above his head repetitively. And if he has an 18 constitution, do so for the entire 8 hrs before needing a rest.

Again that's just me inferring. How does that mesh with the Olympian deadlifting 1100lbs? It's just a dead lift. can he walk down the street with 180lbs for several hours?

It's not just a max exertion. Again that's what I inferred from All D&D except AD&D which threw in 18/00.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I interpret 18 Strength to mean you get +4 on Strength-based rolls.

It’s an abstraction.

 

[Garthanos]

You are clearly not collapsing enough cliffside temples around the PCs.

Which means to me boring game play, cause without collapsing temples and gigantic pillars to knock over on bad guys heads and splitting ground and bridges falling out from under you (leaving huge gaps to jump) what is there?

 

[Garthanos]

What does Strength 20 look like?

Whatever you want. You can decide that your strength is not from muscles, but from magical manifestation, right? So you could have a beanpole body frame and a 20 strength.

I do that with Fae races as a matter of norms....

 

[Mannahnin]

Pardon the digression, as this classic Dragonmirth comic I recently stumbled across while searching through old issues of Dragon Magazine is not about a 20 score, but about scores of 18, but I thought others would enjoy.

 

[MPA2000]

In 30+ years of D&D I don't think I've ever needed to know how far a character could jump.

I blame video games. Kids see those guys doing all kinds of stuff and want to apply it to table top.

 

[CleverNickName]

I blame video games. Kids see those guys doing all kinds of stuff and want to apply it to table top.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

 

[MPA2000]

Talk about ability score inflation. The 2e Players Handbook lists 1,130lbs Maximum PRESS as a Str 23.

Page number?

 

[MPA2000]

What does 20 look like?

I know when D&D first came out (Basic), 18 was the max for a human right? The only way to increase your strength attributes, was temporarily with Gauntlets of Ogre Power or Girdle of Giant Strength (pg 240 Rules Cyclopedia). It didn't necessarily change the look of the user. They could be frail looking, but clear out an entire bar of bandits.

With 5e you get to build your attributes through leveling up. I suppose the rational is because the gods look favorably on you or have the blood of some unearthly being coursing through your veins.

Under Cygax AD&D 1e, he came up with 18 as max for a human, as either a minimum of lifting 180lbs or his body weight, which ever is greater (pg 15, AD&D1e). The limit was that humanoids couldn't lift more than twice their weight. So if you weighed 180, the max you lift is 180lbs, unless you had exceptional strength 18/01-18/00.

So a 20 strength, means the minimum you could lift is 200lbs, but no more than 400lbs if you weighed 200lbs.
Of course the discovery of using performance enhancing drugs, allows people to surpass those limits to an extent.

 

[MPA2000]

And to think all this time I've believed I've been having fun playing D&D. Now that I know that the attribute system is not realistic, I realize that fun must have been an illusion.

I suspect the more realistic attributes tend to be those of superhero games (not Marvel Superheroes!), if you like math.

 

[Garthanos]

A similar situation in 2e and 3e. 4e was more on powers they were using, but as powers were class specific...well...

I think you could just have said all of them... generalized level based skill advances up to 15 and since you start out closer to level 5 analog in general (and being trained in a skill is 5pts) If we are extrapolating to the levels that 4e did not represent while you were gaining that +5 that is like +20. very akin to the amount of skill gain in some earlier editions I think that was and instance of 4e staying closer to its heritage than 5e). 4e did however have many many other buffs for skill (and that actually sometimes created a few problems)

 

[Bill Zebub]

I find it odd/interesting that these discussions on how to translate Str score into real world metrics (jumping distance, deadlift, bench press, throwing distance, etc.) come up fairly often.

Sometimes Int gets discussed as correlating to IQ, probably because in a previous edition it was defined as IQ/10.

But what about Dexterity, Constitution, Charisma, and Wisdom? I'm sure I've missed discussions, but I've never once seen anybody try to correlate those scores to anything actually measurable. ("Your Dexterity modifier is the number of bowling bins you can juggle.")

It seems we all just accept those other four scores as more abstract. How nice if we could treat Str and Int the same way.

 

[Umbran]

So here's Mike Powell completing an 8.95 meter (29.4 foot) long jump. This is what a Strength score of 29 looks like in real life...

The world record for deadlift is 501kg, or 1104.5 lbs., set by Hafthor Bjornsson (1104.5/30=36.8) So here's what a Strength of 37 looks like in real life:

Late to the party, but this is an assumption that the character in question has no relevant skills, Expertise, feats, or special abilities?

 

[Quickleaf]

@MPA2000 Page 19.

The 2e PHB is accessible legally from the Internet Archive. You'll need to register an account for free to use the archive, because they use a controlled digital lending model, but it's a great resource for many things, both in the RPG sphere and outside.

 

[CleverNickName]

I find it odd/interesting that these discussions on how to translate Str score into real world metrics (jumping distance, deadlift, bench press, throwing distance, etc.) come up fairly often.

Sometimes Int gets discussed as correlating to IQ, probably because in a previous edition it was defined as IQ/10.

But what about Dexterity, Constitution, Charisma, and Wisdom? I'm sure I've missed discussions, but I've never once seen anybody try to correlate those scores to anything actually measurable. ("Your Dexterity modifier is the number of bowling bins you can juggle.")

It seems we all just accept those other four scores as more abstract. How nice if we could treat Str and Int the same way.

Well in my defense, I intended for this tread to be an athletics appreciation thread. I started out comparing real-world athletes to the fantasy dragons of D&D, and commenting on how much more powerful and impressive these athletes were than the game's most powerful monsters. But this is a gaming forum on the internet, so the thread quickly shifted to "let's create a Mike Powell character sheet."

Should have seen that coming.

I don't know how to do Intelligence...and I imagine all attempts would be deeply offensive. But I was able to map Constitution to a real-world analog, through the rule about holding one's breath. Check it out in Post #9. It's even more bananas than Strength!

But I think that the biggest take-away (if there can be such a thing) is that in 5th Edition D&D, your ability scores don't matter as much as you think they do. You are rolling a d20 and adding the result to your roll--effectively a "bonus" of +1 to +20--and that "bonus" will swamp all other bonuses most of the time. Or to look at it from the other side of the equation, that d20 result is going to remove anywhere between 30 and 600 pounds from that barbell. So, yeah. The dice almost always determine the result...not your ability score. I wrote that all out a few posts later.

I'm a fitness buff, and I'm a gaming nerd, and I'm a math geek...so this is one of my favorite threads. The discussions have been really interesting (and weird).

 

[CleverNickName]

Late to the party, but this is an assumption that the character in question has no relevant skills, Expertise, feats, or special abilities?

Yep, more or less. That's how the rule for long jump is written anyway...no dice are rolled and no bonuses are applied. Strength is directly related to the distance jumped...and since we know that distance, we can solve for the Strength.

Is it game-accurate? Yep. But it's not a satisfying answer for some.

 

[Haplo781]

Given that player characters can- by default, anyway- drag, lift, or push 30x their Strength score in weight for a stupidly long time (hours and hours and hours) before getting a chance (and only just a chance) of being exhausted, I've always found the idea of people taking the PHB numbers as absolute maximum numbers more than a little silly.



Nah. That's a natural 20 on a weightlifting check on a guy with 20 Strength and Expertise in weightlifting.

And yet he never fails the check. Not even 1 in 20 times.

But in 1DD he would.

 

[Mannahnin]

In 30+ years of D&D I don't think I've ever needed to know how far a character could jump.

I blame video games. Kids see those guys doing all kinds of stuff and want to apply it to table top.

Wow. Another fun example of how we all play different games when we play "D&D".

I've always seen how far characters can jump as an important thing to know, possibly relating to childhood memories of the description of cracks and crevasses in the tunnels of Moria, and how far the members of the Fellowship had to jump to traverse them. The little Hobbits needing to clear substantial distances for their height! I remember that my brother and I measured out the distances Tolkien listed on our cement basement floor and marked them in chalk, then practiced the run-up and seeing if, say, we could jump the same distance that the Hobbits were said to have managed.

A later influence might have been classic videogames like Super Mario Brothers and Prince of Persia, but even in Mentzer Basic D&D, which I started with, there were 10' pits to be traversed. I've often come up against pits and cravasses in other people's games and included them in my own, so knowing how far characters can jump has come up regularly.

 

[CleverNickName]

And yet he never fails the check. Not even 1 in 20 times.

But in 1DD he would.

And in 5th Edition, no check is ever needed. He can automatically lift X pounds, where X = 30 times his Strength score. Which is just wild.

 

[Cadence]

The comparing what a person with STR X can do compared to the world record holder in strength-related event Y strikes me as a bit problematic in that it often seems like the person with the maximum strength is expected to be at the human maximum in every such Y (or even multiple Y).

Long distance swimmers/runners don't typically win the short distances. Single athletes don't typically win every even in the de/heptathalon. Olympic long jumpers don't typically win olympic high jump. Weight lifters don't win wrestling. Fencers don't typically win gymnastics. etc...