Gelatinous Icosahedron

 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...

 So, I'm doing some thinking about project Unlikely Heroes. Having made the decision to abandon the quixotic quest to create my ideal version of D&D, I'm feeling completely liberated from D&D's rules and mechanics. They may inspire, but the no longer bind me. And what better way to put the exclamation point on that newfound freedom than by jettisoning one of the most iconic features of the game, the sacred Six Ability Scores? It's certainly not a terribly radical idea. Despite ability score generation being the very first step of character creation, mechanically, ability scores aren't a core part of the old school D&D engine. They're a bit of color and flavor; that's all. The game would play just fine without them. It might even play better without them. You wouldn't have to worry about players who roll dismal or mediocre ones, nor those who hit the jackpot with every score above average. You don't have the player of the fighter with 13 ...

 In the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, ability scores had little function in the game but to act as prime requisites for the three (eventually four) classes, determining whether a character received a bonus to earned experience points. When they did affect resolution of actions during actual game play, the impact was limited to a bonus or penalty of + or -1. As the game evolved, ability scores began to apply more directly to in-game actions, such as attack and damage rolls and saving throws, and the range of adjustments was expanded. With the increase in the role of ability scores, they became important to all classes, not just the one for whom each is a prime requisite, and their relative importance and impact also shifted greatly, with some becoming very powerful and others much less so. In this post, I'm going to analyze the power of each ability in the B/X D&D rules, including factors such as which rolls or stats an ability modifies, the relative magnitude of modifie...

 You thought I was gonna get all political, didn't you? But no, I just want to talk about Constitution in basic D&D, and how it's at least a little bit broken. Constitution, as written in B/X and BECMI D&D, has a much larger impact, for good or ill, than other ability scores. These editions use a modifier scale from -3 to +3. Most modifiers are applied to a d20 roll, meaning they can have, at most, an impact equal to 15% of the die's maximum. That makes a + or -3 modifier nothing to sneeze at, but it's not big enough to render a character either unplayable or insuperable.  Constitution, though, tacks that -3 to +3 modifier onto rolls of d4, d6, or d8. Despite the huge disproportion, nobody ever complains about piling a +3 on top of a d4 at each level, even though it more than doubles the average hit points of such a character (2.5 base, 5.5 after +3 modifier) and it's not really a huge deal to have an exceptionally hale and hearty magic-user have more hit po...