AD&D 1E What is the best way to generate ability scores for 1e AD&D?

[jolt]

If your DM has you make a lot of stat checks then any stat that's super low becomes a weakness. Published modules rarely did that though so INT and CHR were easy dump stats for any class that didn't require them. The Basic line of games gave you bonuses starting at 13 but in 1E you generally needed at least a 15. STR is even worse in 1E; to get a +1 to both hit and damage you need a 17.

1E wasn't very stat dependent though. It's main purpose was class qualification. How does having an INT of 4 hurt you? Well, it means you're a fighter. Outside of that, it doesn't hurt you at all. There's no skill system and published modules rarely (if ever) ask for stat checks. If anything, modules would say things like, "The party has a 25% chance to notice X, 75% if a thief is present". The other main benefit of stats was qualifying for the XP bonus.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

It sounds like you'd do well surviving my games.

When playing a PC, the thing you should be asking is, "How is this character going to die?" and be mitigating against that. For example, it should cross your head in chargen, "What happens to this character if they fall into deep water?" If the answer is, "They drown", then that becomes a leading candidate for how the character will die. You should always be focused on avoiding the ways you can die and less on how you can get better at the thing you are already good at. Sure, being able to generate lots of damage reduces the chance of dying in combat, and that's great, but that's only one way to go out of the game. Sure, a great AC will help you survive combat, but if you insist on wearing heavy armor then you have to start looking at mitigating your issues real fast - you can't run away, you can't swim, you will slip and fall in rough terrain, etc. Not everything can be solved at chargen, but you should already be thinking about it.

The way I see it, if I'm wearing heavy armor and my character drowns, that's on me. But the thing about having a weakness is that you get that tension that makes a game exciting. In a con game, I narrowly avoided that very fate, and it was exciting and dangerous and part of what makes a game come to life. That was 12 years ago and I still remember it vividly, along with the critical hit that defeated the boss right before he was about to complete his evil ritual.

That said, I do not deliberately try to hammer on any character's weak points. I don't want to let my bias influence outcomes. It's just I am a hiker and a caver and I let my setting be influenced by my real world experience, as well as my general simulationist outlook. You will fight on slopes, rough terrain, in water, in incliment weather, and so forth at some point. You will probably need to plan out how to run away as a party so as to not leave stragglers, because if you split the party people will die.

The optimizers tend to die because they optimize only for combat, thinking if they are a big enough hammer than can solve all their problems by hitting it hard enough. They aren't paranoid enough. They aren't creative enough, they don't cooperate well enough, and most of all they aren't thinking about, "How can I die?" except in terms of not winning a combat. I'm not intentionally hammering them, they are just optimizing for the wrong problem.

Oh, I am generally a complete softie. It's not like I'll throw social challenges every session at a combat optimizer. Like combat difficulties, I prefer to mix things up (some fights will be easy, some moderate, some hard, and a very few downright deadly). Same goes for the stuff outside of combat. Sometimes it'll be stuff that's up your alley, sometimes you'll either have to figure out how to work around your weakness, or deal with the higher risk.

I haven't converted the Monk yet in these threads, and I've never allowed them in my games (except in my open table public games). One of the many many reasons for that is the class is optimized for leaving the rest of the party to die, and the players that play it tend to be asking the right questions ("How can I die?") but with a general solution being letting other characters die. If I do convert the Monk it will end up a very different class than the one people are familiar with.

That said, high stats especially in AD&D do make someone who is also a skilled player very hard to kill indeed.

The Monk is assuredly one of the weirdest AD&D classes, behind the Bard. I feel like it's channeling a series of very specific influences that don't always mesh together, nor fit in the game's mechanics.

 

[Celebrim]

The Monk is assuredly one of the weirdest AD&D classes, behind the Bard. I feel like it's channeling a series of very specific influences that don't always mesh together, nor fit in the game's mechanics.

It doesn't help that its mechanics are terrible. It's everything that is wrong with early D&D design wrapped in a toxic package that is worse than the sum of its parts while carrying a bunch of fluff along with it.