The ability scores	Strength	Constitution	Dexterity	Intelligence
Wisdom	Charisma	Realism vs. you know what	-	Dragon

Jeff Swycaffer's article "The six main
skills" has practically nothing to do with the
AD&D® game from a strict rule standpoint.
That wasn?t his intent, nor was it our desire
to have the article include such discussion.
The purpose of this companion article is to
toss a few numbers out, flip a few pages,
and see if we can tinker with the AD&D
game rules so that they better reflect the
realities described in Jeff's article. Along the
way, we?ll run into some aspects of the rules
that already do conform to, or at least account
for, the facts that Jeff turned up in his
research.

The ability scores
Six of them are dealt with here ? not the
seventh, because comeliness isn?t the same
kind of quality that the other six are.
Strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence,
wisdom, and charisma are real abilities,
while comeliness is more accurately a
characteristic. In the AD&D game, ability
scores can be improved or lowered through
the use of spells or magic items, or by the
effects of advancing age. Comeliness, however,
is fixed; what you roll (heavily modified
by charisma, of course) is what you get.
The same is true of other characteristics
such as hair color, eye color, and height.
If ability scores can be raised or lowered
by increasing age, or by magic, then
shouldn?t it be possible for a character to
purposefully increase an ability score
through training? In keeping with the spirit
of Jeff's article, the general answer, obviously,
is yes. Let?s assume that increasing
one?s strength (for instance) is theoretically
possible if two conditions are met. First, it
should not be possible to raise an ability
score above the racial maximum by nonmagical
means; however, if a character isn?t
?topped out? yet some improvement might
be attainable.

Second; any player who wants to do this
with his character, and any DM who considers
allowing it, should realize they?re
venturing into a very subjective and critical
aspect of the game experience: What does it
mean to role-play a character in a game of
heroic fantasy? Is anything allowable, as
long as it somehow adds to the experience?
Picture a mid-level thief with a strength
score of 7 who has decided that his next big
goal in life is to be physically stronger. He
does all the right things, training for weeks
or months while supporting himself with
occasional jobs and showing unswerving
devotion to his goal. At some point (according
to whatever rules the DM has set up fo
how long it takes to gain a point of strength)
he deserves to have his new strength made
permanent ? assuming, of course, that he
maintains a regular program of conditioning
to keep from backsliding.

Hold it a minute. Does this sound like an
adventurer? Is this the stuff of which heroic
fantasy is made? You can ?role-play? a
character all the way down to which shoe he
puts on first in the morning, but that sort of
role-playing is not what the AD&D game is
all about. Anyway, how much fun can it be
to have a character who spends all of his
game time doing chin-ups while other players
are running their characters through an
adventure? And what happens to the thief's
professional abilities while he?s on his
strength-building program? Skills, like
muscles, will atrophy if they aren?t used.
Does this mean that a character should pay
an experience-point penalty in order to
improve an ability score? The questions
certainly outnumber the answers; the point
is that permitting the concept of ?ability
training? in a campaign can have deep and
long-term effects. Proceed, if you must,
with caution.

Strength

In the last two sentences of its section on
strength, Jeff's article briefly addresses the
issue of training to increase strength and
constitution. He suggests that no character
should be able to gain more than one or two
points this way, and you lose the point(s) if
you don?t stay in good shape by continuing
to train. It doesn?t take as much time and
effort to maintain a stronger or betterconditioned
body as it does to get one to
that point, so the. subsequent training sessions
don?t have to be as frequent, but they
have to be done with unswerving regularity
to bring the maximum benefit.
The drawbacks of an adventurer having
to do anything with unswerving regularity
should be apparent. In a world where wandering
monsters are a fact of life, how easy
would it be for a fighter to go out on extended
adventures and still maintain his
rigorous regimen of distance running? Does
he jog down dungeon corridors, armed and
armored? Does he go out alone in the wilderness?
Aside from the danger he?s putting
himself in, what might happen to the rest of
his party while he?s out taking a couple of
laps around the valley?
One practical solution to the conflict
between a life of adventuring and one of
strength training goes like this: The player
makes it known when his character would
like to undergo ability training, and the
DM effectively retires the character for the
duration of the training period. (Obviously,
this will only work well if the DM also
allows the player to run a different character

. . . or maybe the player was planning to go

on vacation anyway.) The player can interrupt
Character One?s training at any time,
but unless it is carried all the way through it
won?t have any effect.

That solution breeds more problems,
though. In the extreme worst case, every
player in a campaign could be shuttling
between various characters, playing one

group while another group did push-ups
and practiced public speaking. Even if the
DM was willing and able to accommodate
this game of musical character sheets, eventually
all of the campaign?s player characters
could boost their scores as high as
possible ? and the concept that seemed
important enough to include in the game
has lost much of its meaning by being overused.

I can?t dispute Jeff's statement that
?strength is also partially related to a person
?s capacity to absorb damage.? However,
the AD&D game rules don?t seem to take
this directly into account. The ability adjustments
that go with a certain strength
score are active benefits and disadvantages
? the ability to inflict more damage, carry
more weight, and so forth. Absorbing damage
is a passive ability, and is accounted for
under constitution, which can affect a character
?s hit points.
The differences in strength between males
and females have been built into the AD&D
game rules, and none of what Jeff says on
the subject conflicts with the strength maximums
for certain races and sexes. There
have been occasional outcries in favor of
allowing human females to have a chance of
getting 18/00 strength, just as males do, but
Jeff?s information suggests that it is realistic
to establish a lower strength maximum for
females ? all females except for half-arcs,
that is.

Constitution
Jeff says that ?someone with a high constitution
. . . will probably live to an older
age.? Interesting, but most player characters
die of something other than old age, or
else are retired from adventuring by the
time their age itself becomes a threat to
their survival. Nevertheless, it doesn?t
disrupt anything else if you want to reward
someone with high constitution by giving
him more longevity. You can apply a bonus

or penalty to the dice roll on the Maximum Character Age Table (DMG, p. 15), or you
can add or subtract a certain number from
the randomly generated maximum age.

If females have .a "natural advantage" in
constitution, why isn?t this reflected in the
rules for maximum ability scores? The
advantage seems to be a small one, too
small to quantify in a system that uses
increments of a full point. It would be a
misrepresentation of the difference to either
limit males to 17 or allow females to attain
19, yet these are the only two ways we have
of dealing with the issue by tinkering with
the ability score itself. One more equitable
way to compensate females might be to alter
the table of Adjustments to Occurrence and Severity Die Rolls (DMG, p. 14).
If the
hardiest women are hardier than the hardiest
men in your campaign, then you might
rule that a female with 18 constitution gets a
-5 modifier instead of -4. You can say
that if a female magic-user casts a permanency
spell, she will not suffer the loss of a
point of constitution, regardless of whether
the spell was cast on a living thing or not.
In these and other ways, a female?s natural
advantage in constitution can be worked
into the game without undermining the
foundation of the rules or getting in the way
of playability.

Dexterity
Now we leave strength and constitution
behind and enter a different realm of a
character?s abilities. Dexterity, although it
also encompasses physical skills, can?t be
improved by training the way strength and
constitution can. The main reason for this,
as Jeff points out, is that dexterity takes
many specific forms. You don?t get better at
dexterity per se by training to improve it;
instead, you train for and acquire the ability
to perform a dexterity-related skill better
than you could before.
This is where the AD&D game rules on
weapon proficiency come in. It is assumed
that a character?s between-levels training
sessions (not to be confused with training to
gain strength or constitution) include practice
that enables him to maintain his skill
with weapons he knows-; and other practice
to develop proficiency with weapons he
didn?t know how to use before.
The special abilities of a thief or thiefacrobat
are another way in which the rules
acknowledge improvement in dexterity, at
least for those classes where dexterity is a
principal skill. As a thief rises in experience
levels, he gets better ? more dextrous ? at
performing the activities related to his profession.
Because a character can?t take up ?dexterity
training? as such, the best way to
handle improvements to dexterity is to
award benefits in special circumstances. A
fighter who has just spent the last two hours
climbing carefully down an icy mountainside
is somewhat better at negotiating the
terrain than he was when he started the
climb.

If occasional checks against dexterity
are called for to see if the character slips and
falls, then after a certain amount of time the
DM might award a +1 or +2 bonus to the
character?s chance of not slipping because of
the ?experience? he has gained.

As Jeff would put it, there is very little
common skill involved in dexterity. It
means different things to different people,
and manifests itself in different ways. Spe-
cific skills that are related to or dependent
on dexterity can be improved, but the ability
score itself should be very difficult or
impossible to alter without magic.

Intelligence
Much of what is said above about dexter
also applies to the three "intangible" abilities --
intelligence, wisdom, and charisma.
A character can't train himself to be smarter
in all respects, but he can get better
at a specific task related to intelligence.

For instance, a character with average intelligence
finds a (non-magical) book that
contains a lot of detailed information about
red dragons. He knows the language the
book is written in, but even so he can't get much
out of the book the first time he examines it.
He puts the book in his sack of
equipment, takes it along on his group's
adventure, and spends every spare minute
reading it and studying it. After a time, he
will understand more of the book than
he did at first -- he will have made himself
more intelligent as far as reading this book
is concerned, and the extra time he's spent
should pay off in uncovering more and better information about red dragons.

Of course, there's a limit to how much
smarter someone can get in these circumstances.
No matter how long he studies the book,
a character with 12 INT won't
be able to understand as much of the writing
as someone with 18 INT could in the same amount of study time.
With the possible exception of the half-wits at the lower end of the INT scale,
anyone should be able to learn and retain more info about a subject through continued study and concentration.

The distinction may not be all that great,
but there is a difference between actual INT and the appearance of INT.
Jeff's article says that "INT
can depend on such factors as health, and
proper amounts of sleep, mental health, and
surroundings!" However, I think that
what he's talking about here is apparent INT.
Someone who messes up on an IQ test because he's in a crowded, noisy room isn't any less intelligent in those surroundings --
his INT simply hasn't fully manifested itself because his ability to concentrate was inhibited by the environment.
Compare this to a fighter with 18/00 STR who is teleported into a stone chamber the size of a telephone booth.
He still has the STR score of 18/00, but for all the good it's doing him at the moment, it might as well be a score of 3.
A character can be role-played so as to present the appearance of being more intelligent than he is,
but that has no bearing on what he can accomplish when he uses his intelligence.

Wisdom
"Wisdom, ultimately, can only be learned from experience."
That was a very wise thing for Jeff to say.
It fits with the commonly accepted definition of wisdom, and
also dovetails neatly with what the AD&D
game rules have to say about changes in this ability score.
Under the Age Categories table (DMG, p.13) we see that a young
adult loses 1 points of WIS from his initially generated ability score.
But he gains that point back when he reaches maturity,
and gains an extra point of WIS upon entering each age category beyond Mature.
Clearly, the intent of the game is that characters gain wisdom as they advance in age.

Aside from the nature of the ability itself,
another major reason why it's difficult to
incorporate "wisdom training" into the game
is the difficulty of separating the wisdom
of a character from the WIS of that character's player.
If a thief with a WIS of 5 comes to a decision point and
the player has the character leap before he looks,
both the character and the player may suffer for this lack of WIS.
If the same thief encounters a similar situation a week later,
he would quite likely make the same mistake twice if it was up to him to decide.
But it isn't up to the character.
Having been burned once because he made a decision that turned out to be unwise,
the player is going to take his earlier mistake into account -- and just like that,
our thief has suddenly become more wise.

The other way to deal with this set of circumstances is for the player
to use a lot of will power and choose to role-play the thief
in accordance with the character's ability --
to have the thief make a mistake "on purpose" because that's the way the thief would be likely to act.
But even if a player is willing and able to run his character this way,
there has to be a line drawn somewhere.
Even if his WIS score indicates he'd be
better off in an institution for the hopelessly foolish,
it isn't very thrilling to play a character who doesn't use
any common sense and who hardly ever makes a correct decision.
And a character who does act this way isn't long for the world anyway;
the tales of his stupidity will live on long after he's gone.

There's no conceivable way that a character can improve his WIS score through training or study,
but (as with DEX and INT) a character may be able to become effectively more wise in certain
situations as he experiences those situations more than once. In fact, as pointed out above,
this sort of increase in WIS is usu. unavoidable, because the player is
learning from experience even if the character isn't, and it's the player who's making the decisions in the first place.

Charisma
The primary function of charisma is to
define a character's ability to attract and
retain henchmen or other sorts of followers.
Again, the nature of this abiltiy and it's use
in the game make it practically impossible
to imagine a situation where a character
could raise his charisma score through
specific effort. Fortunately, the game rules
do provide a long list of loyalty base modifiers,
which produce the same effect.

Do you want to have a better chance of
keeping people in your service once you?ve
brought them into the fold? Give all of your
associated NPCs ?just, kind, and invariable
? treatment, with its attendant +15%
bonus to the loyalty base, and the effect is
the same as if you had a charisma of 15
instead of 13. Jeff is right on target when he
says that charisma ?can be improved simply
by being nice.? The improvement isn?t to
the charisma score itself, but is reflected in
the end result.

Realism vs. you know what
Logic dictates that certain ability scores
should be able to be improved through
training; the same logic suggests that others
are more or less immutable, aside from
changes wrought by magic or by factors
over which the character and player have no
direct control. In any case, how you define
?logic? depends on whether your ideal goal
is the logic of realism or the logic of playability.
Is something logical because it makes
sense based on what we know about the
AD&D game world, or is it logical because
it works within the context of the rules?
If you want to build in more rules about
the significance of ability scores and deal
with the question of whether any or all of

them can be altered through training, be
prepared to answer that question many
times as you balance benefits against disadvantages.
What you ought to end up with is
a system that?s easy to work with, doesn?t
mess up other important aspects of the play
of the game, and is as realistic as you can
make it under those conditions.
If that last sentence sounds like a thinly
disguised push for playability over realism,
consider that ?easy to work with? is a very
subjective quality. A Dungeon Master who
finds a super-realistic system easy to work
with, and doesn?t mind doing a lot of
record-keeping, could build all sorts of
detail into a system for training to raise
ability scores. (?Okay, this fighter has
trained three hours a day for two weeks,
which means he now has a strength of 15.2
instead of 15.?) At the other extreme, a DM
might decide that the whole idea of improving
ability scores isn?t worth special consideration,
especially since the AD&D game
rules already do address the concept indirectly.
In this context, the most easily playable
system is no system at all.

If you do decide to tackle the issue, here?s
hoping that you will have the intelligence to
know what your choices are and the wisdom
to make the right decisions for the sake of
the campaign and the players. And just in
case things don?t go right and your players
threaten to set fire to the map of your campaign
world, it might be good to have some
charisma to fall back on.
 

Q: How many points of strength or
constitution will a PC gain if he
spends nonadventuring time
exercising?

A: Officially, none. All character classes are
assumed to exercise to a degree appropriate
to their professions. The less-physical
classes fill in their nonadventuring time
with study and mental exercises. Note that
the cavalier class, as given in Unearthed
Arcana, can improve some of its characteristics
over time.
(126.81)

Howdy Joe!

the idea is a good one, but I wonder about the practicality of such a benison in regards the long-term aspacts of having so many PCs with truly exceptional stats--stats that are generally gained by adventure in which deities give such a boost to a single stat as a reward for outstanding performance, an artifact is gaines, or a wish used.

Perhaps the main application for training should be to boost stats to above average.
That is, make a character with some average stats move up to above average, qualify as a cavalier or paladin, etc.

As to your direct question, if indeed elven PCs are allowed to boost strength above the normal max, a human cavalies ahould be allowed to train to 19--or perhaps gain a girdle of storm giant strength 

Yrag has one of fire giant strength, but Robilar's is of cloud giant strength 

Heh,
Gary