D&D: Why 6 Ability Scores?

hello and welcome back to Daddy roll the one I'm Martin and this is another video on my series on the history of early tabletop role-playing games including Dungeons and Dragons and one of the companies that published them tactical studies rules and its later descended company TSR Hobbies today we're going to be talking about ability scores or attributes so why do we have attributes in role-playing games where do they come from and how do we end up with the six that we have in Dungeons and Dragons why those six how ability scores have impacted characters over time ability scores used to be much much less important than they are now and then I'm going to talk about a few other games some that came out right after DND and then some Modern games to just talk about why ability scores might change and we don't always use the standard six that D and D set as the precedent so before I dive in I'd like to ask if you could please like And subscribe to this video on the YouTube algorithm really depends on likes and comments to help recommend my videos to other people of from a smaller channel so the more likes and comments and subscriptions I get the more unlikely to be seen by other people so if you enjoy this I would really appreciate your help also if you want to help support me you can buy a little something from my shop there's links below you can get shirts hoodies notebooks mugs posters with exclusive designs from a designer that I work with a friend of mine that you can only find in my shop okay ability score so let's talk about where do you ability scores and role-playing games come from what was the idea of putting them in there well you might not be surprised if you're a fan of history and my history videos of early tabletop role-playing games they do come from war games so d d and role-playing games the genre of that was an offspring of um miniature war games so we're talking about Napoleonic Miniatures which is what the crew that helped develop dungeons Dragons Were normally playing there's a bunch of different styles but the idea of this is that you have different units of troops that have to have a different strength score a speed score a morale score just as an example okay those are three very common ones and you needed to be able to compare these units of troops so that you knew when they went up in battle who's going to win based on their numerical value that's assigned to that particular unit of true okay so Gary gigas would have been very familiar with this concept he loved to roll a war game that came out particularly in 1958 by Avalon Hill called Gettysburg so that game does have like strength scores for units and you know infantry versus Cavalry is different right so almost like a character class as an example but um and it has morale okay which is very important to war games but also early tabletop role-playing games so um Gary has this uh war game now another thing that uh war games have in common a lot of them do is the idea of saving throws so same throws a term pre-dates Dungeons and Dragons and goes all the way back to at least 1962 there's a book called war games and the idea is very similar to what it is today you're willing to avoid a negative consequence now the reason I bring up saving throws in a video about abilities courses because in the early days they were kind of intertwined characters and players players and and referees didn't necessarily distinguish one from the other so you were willing to avoid a negative consequence that you're saving through but it might seem like you know roll to save versus dexterity or world to save versus Constitution just like if you're a 5e player today that's how ability scores and saving throws are handled however uh same ethos were not always tied to specific ability scores in the history of a game that's actually a pretty modern Concept in 5e but it goes all the way back to these war games that helped influence the creation of Dungeons and Dragons so a couple of other war games that we should talk about one is hiboria 1957 it's a play by mail game now this is not a game when that you would go buy at a store and then bring home learn how to play and start playing this is a a campaign that is living and it's a uh between players who are playing uh by mail and so the game is evolving based on the needs of the players and the referees at the time okay so what would happen in this was that um over time things would change and evolve so we know that um this game didn't necessarily have attribute scores however there's an article or a letter written by one of the creators of the game Tony bath where he talks about drawing um playing cards and doing so in order to distinguish between some attributes or abilities or personality traits really for different players so you might be um uh like attractive and cowardly or you might be um you know ugly and loyal or things like that so different ways of viewing characters and playing their attributes up playing their personality however these are binary there's no numerical score and you're not comparing them to anybody else because no one has the same attributes you're drawing cards to see what you get and then you're you're using that to influence how you're going to run that character now this is not a role-playing game but you're starting to see role-playing elements come into this okay later on in 1970 Tony bath writes an article in a magazine called slingshot where he talks about needing to have a numerical score of one to five for different attributes for your character such as loyalty or ability okay so again we're starting to see these kernels of what we would consider to be ability scores and role playing in general come out of these types of games however it is still a war game it's not a role-playing game it's just starting to exhibit elements of role-playing another game is bronstein if you've watched my videos before you know bronstein so this is a war game run by Dave Wesley in the Twin Cities area era uh area but it has ability scores or I'm sorry it has um uh it's it's it's a game where you have a character a pre-gen character that has an objective however it uh it's not campaignable so it's not um your character's not necessarily developing over time you show up one session you have a certain sub-objectives and a pre-gen character you show up the next time and you have a different character and a different objective okay so um but that's how he's running that game however you have two descended games coming out of that the first is Brownstone this is by A Man Named Dave Jenkins the second of our four days that we're going to be talking about and he develops a wild west version of bronstein however his game is campaignable characters are developing over time you're using the same character game to game now while neither bronstein or Brownstone uh the consensus is they did not have attribute scores the way that we think of them today um when you have a campaignable game where your character is developing over time it's just natural to assume that their personality is also going to develop and that personality is what we could kind of consider being part of attribute traits right so you have Brownstone Dave Jenkins then our third Dave Dave arneson he runs a bronstein game and that one's kind of fun because um we have this very early artifact I found this on the playing at the World blog and this is uh there's also a book this is by a gentleman named John Peterson and he found this character sheet called it's now known as the Royal Spanish so this is a list of people that belong to the Spanish family this is for a Napoleonic bronstein game but you see these traits listed here which our brains looks sex appeal or it's just says sex guts health and miscellaneous this is a 2d6 role okay so you're going to generate a score from two to twelve and what they would do is roll a D12 and if you rolled over your score in one of these it was there was you know it means you didn't succeed or there's a negative consequence so this is um again we're starting to see this idea of having a randomly generated score uh for a list of traits that should be technically the same list of traits for everybody who's playing this game okay so this is his bronze Team game then he decides to run a medieval bronze Team game is how he advertises it it later becomes known as Blackmore he changes the name but in Blackmore we're going to have two different um we're going to have two different character sheets here so the first is by Dave McGarry so this is our our fourth Dave and uh this is his sheet his copyright I found this on the secrets of Blackmore documentaries website if you're at all interested in the history of early tabletop role-playing games please check out the secrets of Blackmore documentary uh I'll put a link to that in the show notes below so this is his character sheet and here you see this Litany of abilities that he's got brains leadership Woodcraft strength courage Health loyalty looks sex miscellaneous horsemanship flying throwing sailing and then weapons okay weapon proficiencies so as a modern player we're looking at this and saying he's mixing three different things together but the reason is because they didn't distinguish between these things this was just a suite of things that their character could do with a randomly assigned numerical score to that so that they can compare it to other players or when the referee asks them to roll die to figure out if they succeeded or something so again these these early ideas of what we were going to start calling attribute scores and role-playing games I talked about these being living campaigns though without a specific set of rules being written down you see here the next sheet this is for another player named um Pete Gaylord this is his wizard character and if you flip the character sheet over you see that he has his list of abilities are personality brains looks credibility sex health strength and courage now sex keeps coming up why is this again this is sex appeal the idea was that the characters in these games sometimes might want to to have made alliances with other people through marriage so they're going to make overtures to them as their character or maybe one of their characters has a son or daughter that they'd want to marry out to a son or daughter of another character and so you needed to know how that Overture is going to be received based on how Suave and Charming you or your sex appeal okay so erneston takes this game his Blackboard game he incorporates a few elements from uh chainmail uh this is the fantasy supplement for chainmail however there are no ability scores in here each character the only abilities that they really have are a morale rating and a point value okay so but Dave arneson takes his game to Gary gygax Gary uh takes that game works with Dave arneson and they create Dungeons and Dragons the first commercially available published and distributed role-playing game that you could like go to the store and buy okay so this is the first one so hence we're going to have our first list of official ability scores and a role-playing game this is the list strength intelligence wisdom Constitution dexterity and Charisma that's the original order that they were listed in now if you notice here Charisma affects your minimum number of higher links or your maximum and their loyalty base Constitution affects your hit points a little bit dexterity affects your rate of missile fire um whether you're good at it or or bad but that's it notice that strength intelligence and wisdom don't do anything except if you have high strength in your fighter if you have high intelligence you're in a magic user and you have high wisdom and you're a cleric if it's high you get a bonus to your experience points that's what ability scores were for in this version of the game so if you got a fighter and you were strength six or strength 18 in this game doesn't matter it makes no impact on your character except on 18 you get a bonus to your abilities scores Okay so that's the list of the building scores how do we end up with this six why this six of ability scores well Gary cogax is born in 1938 he writes in the appendix n for the dungeon Masters Guide see my video here um that he consumed copious amount of comic books as a kid and that influenced him when he was creating Dungeons and Dragons the most popular character by far in the 1940s and comic books was Captain Marvel or what we would Now call Shazam uh he debuts after Superman but quickly eclipses him and the hearts and minds of little kids and becomes the most popular character now if you're familiar at all with Shazam you know that his abilities are the wisdom of Solomon the strength of Hercules the stamina or constitution of Atlas the power of Zeus the courage of Achilles and the speed maybe dexterity of mercury so I have no proof of this I don't know that Gary gagax ever read a Captain Marvel comic book and he's passed away we can't ask him it's never been documented anywhere else I just think it's really funny that we have six ability scores here and four of these six are the same four of the six of Shazam okay so again it could just be a complete coincidence obviously Dave arneson's making a list that doesn't match this really at all um and Gary was influenced by that it's just that you know he condensed it and I just think it's coincidental that he condensed it to six um you know he takes looks sex pill and personality puts it into Charisma a big word he takes Health changes that to Constitution another big word because why Gary likes his high gigaxian as I talked about in my unjudge Masters Guide all right so you have those six ability scores um really quick here referees rolled the characters in this particular game prior to the character selection by players is necessary for the referee to roll three six-sided dice in order to rate each as to the various abilities really quickly this in order everybody thinks that this just means you roll them in the order that that it was so you roll 3d6 for your strength then you roll 3d6 for intelligence then for wisdom Etc I think that's what it meant however this is written so poorly that in order to could mean as as a means to you need to do this in order you know as a means to to figure this out and then you could assign them however you want it now it doesn't say you can assign however you want it's just not clear the wording in this is not clear and if you were new to the game back then trying to read that I think you'd have a really hard time figuring out what he was trying to say all right so that is original d d then in 1875 you have this supplement published uh greyhawk now we see Gary is assigning values to strength if you're a fighter you I get a bonus to hit in damage for your high strength and then magic users now intelligence affects your chance to learn a new spell and how many spells you're going to get and then he adds some details here on Constitution so Gary's starting to say that ability scores are more important than just for gaining experience points however in 1977 the Holmes edition of basic comes out and it backtracks it goes back to not really assigning a different ability to score bonuses and penalties uh he goes back to original d d however 1978 Gary creates the player's handbook for advanced Dungeons and Dragons and here you see that ability scores do have a lot of different bonuses and penalties so Gary goes back to kind of saying that like ability score is important in fact in the dungeon Masters Guide for advanced DND he talks about the different methods for Rolling ability scores in order to generate higher than average scores because he says that your players need to have higher than average scores and advanced D and that is the start of now this idea that like if you're playing a Fighter character and you don't have a 20 strength in fifth edition well you're not optimized you know if you're playing a 14 strength that's not optimizing your character is not effective okay that didn't used to be the case let's talk about some other games then 1975. we have the release of Empire of the pedal Throne also by TSR this game mechanically is very very similar to DND how her ability scores here uh wisdom is now psychic ability for this game and Charisma is comeliness if you want to know more about Communists watch my video on Unearthed Arcana okay um so this game however very mechanically similar to DND so the scores it's six scores on a range of 3 to 18. 3d6 okay but then also 1975 you have the release of Boot Hill also by TSR this is a wild west game however and it's really it's a role-playing game but it's really more about one-to-one like gunfights it's gunfight combat so the ability scores reflect that speed gun accuracy throwing accuracy strength bravery and experience how many gunfights you've been in before Okay so system matters the mechanics in this game are completely different because they are trying to model a different experience this is not about exploration and you'll see there's no social skills in here there's no Charisma there's nothing like that this game isn't about that okay so the mechanics of the game changed so I know if you're a fifth edition player um you know you might just be very familiar with the mechanics and say like oh any genre can be adapted to d d it can it totally can and it's the 3.5 Edition I did that all the time there were games for you know spies and post-apocalyptic cyberpunk science fiction superheroes um Wild West ran again all shoehorning it into an existing system that was just super popular at the time however the more time has gone on The more I've realized that like again the mechanics matter the system matters because it's designed to emulate a different type of experience so just something to think about so some other games that we have here just to show that example some more you have star Frontiers also by TSR this is released later okay but the ability scores here strength stamina dexterity reaction speed you have initiative intuition logic personality and Leadership completely different list of skills then we have Marvel Superheroes one of my favorites came out in 85 I believe so this is known as the face rip system because the ability scores here fighting agility strength endurance reason intuition and psyche so those are your ability scores and they're rated on a scale of feeble all the way up to class 1000 and all these fun descriptive words in between so completely different system different mechanics based on modeling comic book superheroes another game that I have a whole video on this that this is Savage worlds so this is a modern game so the ability scores here up to the right page so we have agility smart Spirit strength and vigor so that's for this game okay you've also got like the forged in the dark system and their ability scores that's based on uh three different ones okay so different games different Mechanics for emulating different kinds of things all right so that is our look at ability scores for a quick history of ability scores and tabletop role-playing games all right so I'm going to add in my little bit that I was talking about last time what was I drinking while I was working on making this video my notes uh well this is Angel's MV and sadly it's almost gone but this is a um uh bourbon whiskey aged in port wine barrels I just had a little snifter here it was quite delicious serve that to my dad on Father's Day and I was listening to this record this is Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers at the Jazz Workshop uh it's you know just five different um you know standards I really like jazz as you'll find out if you keep watching and I keep showing my videos or my records so that's it uh for watching uh for this video so I'd like to say thank you for watching and uh Happy gaming stay safe and I'll talk to you next time foreign

Channel: Daddy Rolled a 1

Views: 12,047

Keywords: ttrpg, tabletop rpg, dnd, D&D, Dungeons & Dragons, DnD History, RPG Ability Scores, Ability Scores, Advanced D&D

Id: OSa1fwcxsG8

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2023