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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 1405391" data-attributes="member: 3424">Actually, if I remember correctly, Fighters, Paladins and Rangers got to roll exceptional strength (18/xx) if they had a Strength of 18.  This was only introduced in AD&D 1st and 2nd editions, by the way - in "basic" D&D, there was no extra advantage for a fighter (or dwarf) with 18 Strength.  As such, it was a bit of a jarring adjustment for me when I switched from basic D&D to Advanced. While I could rationalize it to myself that only fighter-types could devote themselves to improving their Strength to such an extent, there were a couple of things that bugged me:1. All fighter-types with Strength 18 rolled for exceptional strength.  As such, they went directly from Strength 17 to Strength 18/01-50, completely bypassing one Strength category.  The bell curve of Strength for fighter-types suddenly looked a little wonky.2. A non-fighter type who had 18 Strength and increased it by one point (rare, but possible) suddenly went to 19 Strength, completely bypassing five Strength categories. If the bell curve for fighter-types looked wonky, this was even worse.3. Every fighter-type absolutely had to have exceptional Strength. Seriously, who would want to miss out on the chance for +3 to hit, +6 to damage for 18/00 Strength, compared to a "measly" +1/+1 for 17?In retrospect, fighter-types and pure fighters in particular needed the power-up just to keep pace with the spellcasters.  3.Xe balanced the classes better, and that allowed us to get rid of exceptional strength.The funny thing was, when 3e was first released, and I found out that exceptional strength was gone, I went into full "what were they thinking" mode - exactly same reaction that I had when it was first introduced.Interesting, huh? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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