Ability adjustment tinkering

 Is the B/X ability adjustment scale broken? Are adjustments of +/-3 too hefty? Sometimes I do feel that they are. What to do about it, though? We could go the OD&D route of reducing to a -1/0/+1 scale, but that means that being in the top quartile (a score of 13) is just as good as being among the best of the best in the top 0.5% (a score of 18). Another way I've seen is to use a similar scale, but bump to +2 at a score of 18, but that leaves everything in between undistinguished, and may even make that 18 even more coveted, fueling ability score inflation and min/maxing. 

There might be another way, though. I've been poring over the AD&D rulebooks recently, and one thing that intrigues me is how that game handles ability adjustments. To be clear, I am not a fan of how everything meaningful is packed into the extremes, with high scores generally garnering no bonus until at least a 15. What is interesting is how they split adjustments into distinct categories and then stagger them. Strength adjustments, for instance, are split into Damage adjustments and To Hit adjustments, and alternate increases (or decreases). 

How can we hybridize and integrate this into a more B/X-friendly table? To start, we need two primary adjustment categories for each ability score (or at least most of them; it's not a deal-breaker to have an anomaly or two.) Strength has damage and melee attack rolls; Dexterity has Armor Class and missile attack rolls. We'd have to come up with things for other scores, but that's beyond the scope of my musings at this point. We'd also need to decide which is the primary and which is the secondary category.

Let's take Strength as our example. AD&D grants bonuses to damage before bonuses to attack, so we'll make damage the primary and melee attack the secondary category. The primary category follows the standard B/X scale, granting a +1 bonus at a score of 13 and a +2 at a score of 16; on the low end, it imposes a -1 penalty at a score of 8 and -2 at a score of 5. However, that's where those adjustments end; there are no +3s or -3s.

Now, for the secondary category, melee attack adjustments in this case, we slip adjustments in between the primary ones. So, a +1 to melee attacks at a score of 15, increasing to +2 at 18, and conversely, -1 at a score of 6 and -2 at a score of 3.

 

Strength Score	Melee Damage	Melee Attack
3	-2	-2
4	-2	-1
5	-2	-1
6	-1	-1
7	-1	0
8	-1	0
9-12	0	0
13	+1	0
14	+1	0
15	+1	+1
16	+2	+1
17	+2	+1
18	+2	+2

Spreading things out like this has the interesting effects of making smaller jumps in ability scores more meaningful, but also of making the highest and lowest scores less extreme relative to average scores and to each other. Instead of a difference of three points between average and superlative, and a whopping six points between the high and low ends of the spectrum, we're looking at a difference of two points from average to superlative and four points from lowest to highest. 

The cost, of course, is that it adds a bit more complexity relative to vanilla B/X. There are two sets of numbers to remember now, but if we can keep this scale uniform across all abilities, it's still less complex and fiddly than vanilla 1e AD&D. For me, this doesn't feel too bad; it adds some granularity while maintaining the elegance, symmetry, and consistency of B/X.