Something that's been brought up before, is that it seems odd dex does not contribute to your climbing/jumping abilities. This is usually brought up when discussing dex based agile classes such as monks and rogues whose class fantasies often involve a lot of climbing and parkouring, but whose stat focus does not reflect that mechanically.
I understand and respect the reason to have climbing as atheltics and therefore strength based, since strength is most certainly an important part of the ability to climb and strength is not a very useful stat at is. However for climber and jumping, for this to make mechanical sense, you'd have a seperate strength score relative to your body size and weight.
This takes me to something that's been bothering me for a lil while, which is how the system treats the athletic abilities of small and tiny creatures. In a similar sense to how a agile rogue would probably need less strength due to their lighter body (compared to that of a barbarian fx) a small rat or cat needs far less strength to be effective climbers and/or jumpers.
This isn't reflected in the 5e system however.. Since strength is measured as sort of a global absolute, your athletic abilities are entirely dependant on your athletics number being high, and does not care about your weight or body size... This means that cats are absolutely horrible jumpers, and rats are terrible climbers... You can see the designers giving all thise smaller creatures a decently high dex, but that does doesn't actually help them do what they are good at doing in real life.
with the current system, we end up with smaller creatures generally being worse at climbing and larger creatures generally being better at climbing, which appears to be the opposite of how reality works out.
The game doesn’t correlate size and weight, with a few exceptions. Plate armor for a 7’5” goliath weighs the same as plate armor for a 5’ half-elf. Rations weigh the same for everyone. So, while your character’s body weight may be specified on its character sheet, it isn’t taken into account in a mechanical sense either unless the DM chooses to. Honestly, that’s a good thing. Why would you ever want to be anything but Small otherwise? If the Dex vs Str thing is bothersome for specific skills/situations/characters, the DM can simply - and within the rules - call for the other ability to be used. If it feels like a lithe halfling would use Dex for climbing, just let him.
Personally though, I prefer simply differentiating DCs. Cats and rats may not have good raw stats for jumping or climbing, but if I set the DC for a check at 5 for them (while it might be a 20 for a human character) they’ll likely make it anyway.
Yea setting the dc lower is certainly a way of dealing with it it... I just see some DM's not adjusting difficulty like tha tjust to compensate for strength not taking weight into account for climbing.
I do think that giving small creatures an easier time climbing would be reasonable, there are already disadvantages with being small (sometimes a slower movement speed aswell as disadvantage with heavy weapons) so a mechanical benefit to reflect their smaller mass would be fitting in my eyes.
I don't think it's a fair argument to bring up class fantasy to justify them being better climbers because...well all the thieves in fantasy are jacked. Go on pinterest and check out fantasy thief. Once you get past all the edgy masks, belts and satchels you start to see some outfits with some skin showing, and that they all show either lots of muscle or at the very least are incredibly toned. These characters ARE strong, rocking at least a 14 in the strength score, it's just that being nimble is what they use their strength for. The reason being is that people want their characters to be attractive so they more often than not will absolutely depict them as being stronger than what they are (I saw someone post art for their sorceror who had a strength score of 8 but would put Captain America to shame). This creates a loop where how a character should appear is substituted for a more fantastic version of them purely for gratification which in turn becomes the standard over time - just look at all the horny bard memes which people have ended up expecting to be the way a bard SHOULD be played
But in 5E, strength is a dump stat for a lot of people because it rarely comes up compared to DEX which covers so much of the game it should pulled back a bit. I wouldn't want to give more advantages to DEX and in turn less to STR because it needs all the help it can get.
with all due respect Seasoning, I think you missed the main point of my rant ^^. The first bit was a summary of previous discussions.. The thing that I'm trying to focus on here is the problem that strength is not taking body weight and size into account when deciding how good you are at things like climbing and jumping.
As a DM, I often let my players choose whether they want to use Acrobatics or Athletics in things like climbing or Parkour or what have you. I understand why the PHB states that athletics is used for specific checks, but I think a good DM will use their best judgment in cases like this. As a player, as well, I sometimes ask if I can use a specific skill other than the one the DM asked for if I feel like it should be relevant. That works sometimes... I've had the DM ask for Investigation Checks to examine a crime scene, and they've allowed me to use Survival instead as my character has some training as a tracker. But it's not guaranteed... with a bard character I once asked if I could roll for Performance instead of Acrobatics to avoid taking damage when tumbling down a hill, and I was told basically that I had to roll Acrobatics to see if I failed... but if I did fail I could roll Performance to make it look like I did it on purpose (I failed both checks, btw, which honestly was way funnier).
The thing that I'm trying to focus on here is the problem that strength is not taking body weight and size into account when deciding how good you are at things like climbing and jumping.
It also doesn't take body weight into account for things like shoving someone or blocking a door, or even how hard you hit with a weapon. As long as we stay in the Small-Medium range of characters I think it's all a wash in the end. It's just for Tiny and smaller or Large and larger that a DM should probably make some situational adjustments in most cases.
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The difference between your examples and climbing and jumping, is that for climbing and jumping, the weight you are carrying is only only your own weight and therefore is quite different from pushing a rock. Yes weight would obviously play a role in the other scenarios, but there's a decent reason in using sort of a universal "strength" stat since you are using your strength on something external... we end up in a funky situation where a rat can carry another rat, but the rat may not be able carry itself.
There's a reason I listed tiny creatures for my examples, because this is where the problem is the most noticable... It just feels like a pretty major oversight in how the system handles things like jumping.
This exact issue is why it gets me so mad when people constantly harangue and harass players who uses the Tasha's rules or anything similar to try and make Small characters with high Strength scores. I've explained at least half a dozen times on this forum what the difference between 'Power' and 'Athleticism' is, and why Small creatures are better at Athleticism than large ones, all else being equal. Athleticism is about defeating your own body weight, and Small creatures have so much less weight to defeat. Muscle power is a factor of cross-sectional area and increases linearly with size; weight is a function of volume and increases exponentially with size.
But nah. People keep bellowing nonsense about how orcs are strong and halflings are weak and That's Just The Way It Be without any attempt to understand why that simply isn't true. Using Dexterity for that check isn't the bloody answer, either. Acrobatics has nothing to do with the ability to swim, climb, run, or otherwise perform athletic tasks - Athletics is a function of physical training, conditioning, and fitness, while Acrobatics is a measure of balance, flexibility, coordination and an entirely different type of training. Acrobatics will not get you up a rock wall no matter how much tumbling practice you've had.
Sadly, the *proper* fix requires splitting Strength, or at least adding modifiers to Small critters to account for the difference between Power and Athleticism, but all of that is too komplukayted for the average 5e player to wrap their brain around. Nor is the average DM inclined to alter DCs the way Pang mentions to account for the much-reduced difficulty of a forty-pound body trying to defeat its weight compared to a three hundred pound body. And of course we all know from experience that any Small critter with a Strength score higher than 12 is basically outlawed at virtually every table known to man. So...yeah. Small critters just aren't allowed to be athletic. It sucks tremendous ass, and it's a great example of what you lose when you over-simplify rules the way 5e did, but 5e is also not really set up to let us fix this one.
This exact issue is why it gets me so mad when people constantly harangue and harass players who uses the Tasha's rules or anything similar to try and make Small characters with high Strength scores. I've explained at least half a dozen times on this forum what the difference between 'Power' and 'Athleticism' is, and why Small creatures are better at Athleticism than large ones, all else being equal. Athleticism is about defeating your own body weight, and Small creatures have so much less weight to defeat. Muscle power is a factor of cross-sectional area and increases linearly with size; weight is a function of volume and increases exponentially with size.
I guess this is why we have weight categories in weightlifting competitions, or why shotput, hammer, discus or spear throwing competitions favour bigger and in some cases plain bulkier athletes or why strongman competitions are dominated by athletes who look like they're nicknamed 'the Mountain' in non-ironic fashion.
No offense, Yurei, but it's quite a bit more complicated than that.
Something that's been brought up before, is that it seems odd dex does not contribute to your climbing/jumping abilities. This is usually brought up when discussing dex based agile classes such as monks and rogues whose class fantasies often involve a lot of climbing and parkouring, but whose stat focus does not reflect that mechanically.
I understand and respect the reason to have climbing as atheltics and therefore strength based, since strength is most certainly an important part of the ability to climb and strength is not a very useful stat at is. However for climber and jumping, for this to make mechanical sense, you'd have a seperate strength score relative to your body size and weight.
This takes me to something that's been bothering me for a lil while, which is how the system treats the athletic abilities of small and tiny creatures. In a similar sense to how a agile rogue would probably need less strength due to their lighter body (compared to that of a barbarian fx) a small rat or cat needs far less strength to be effective climbers and/or jumpers.
This isn't reflected in the 5e system however.. Since strength is measured as sort of a global absolute, your athletic abilities are entirely dependant on your athletics number being high, and does not care about your weight or body size... This means that cats are absolutely horrible jumpers, and rats are terrible climbers... You can see the designers giving all thise smaller creatures a decently high dex, but that does doesn't actually help them do what they are good at doing in real life.
with the current system, we end up with smaller creatures generally being worse at climbing and larger creatures generally being better at climbing, which appears to be the opposite of how reality works out.
Cats are a particularly bad example; their stat block is so different from an actual cat's, it reads like a deliberate attempt by WOTC to troll DnD players when you read the stat block for a cat and the description of Tabaxi side by side (Tabaxi darkvision is literally referred to as a cat's keen senses, but cats don't have darkvision and don't have advantage on visual perception - instead they're bloodhounds for some reason, with advantage on smelling).
Also, the specific examples you raise are bad ones. Cats are so good at climbing because of their claws. You're correct in general - in the real world, a smaller creature has a smaller volume to surface area ratio than a larger creature, which is why ants can lift so huge a proportion of their own body weight. Climbing is about moving your own body weight around, so smaller creatures genuinely are better at it - but that's not why a panther can climb a tree so much better than a human can.
As for Dex vs Str climbing, for a physically fit human, because you can credibly lift your own body weight, the big limitation is flexibility - you need to get your limbs into a position dictated by the rock face you're climbing. In DnD, flexibility is traditionally Dex, not Str. You're just plain correct. If you had to pick one skill for Climbing in DnD 5, Acrobatics would make way more sense than Athletics, just as Athletics makes way more sense for swimming and running and jumping, which are primarily about how much arm and leg muscle you have on tap to move you.
As others have discussed in this thread, one way you could try to address this is by reducing climb DCs for Small creatures by 5 and Tiny by 10. And cats should have a climb speed, in general (cheetahs should not).
Notice all those examples favor Power, Pang. Weightlifting requires you to defeat the weight of what you're lifting, not the weight of your own personal self. Stuff-Chucking contests are also about Power, since they're about defeating the weight of the thing being chucked as thoroughly as possible. And "Strongman" competitions are nothing but displays of raw power.
Look at Olympic runners, swimmers, biathletes, or other athletes in track-and-field type competitions. Are they all roided-out muscle mountains? or are they all generally as lean as they can reasonably get, shaving down body weight as much as they can while remaining healthy?
Yes, when it comes to exerting physical effort against a fixed object in the world - breaking doors, moving rocks, lifting or throwing shit - then larger creatures with a greater absolute mass of muscle are going to be better. But when it comes to endurance sports, track and field? The less mass you're carrying the better off you are. You still need strength, training and conditioning, and in some cases the lessened reach or stride length of a halfling track athlete will be an issue. But this whole "Small species aren't allowed to have Strength scores over 12 because it's just not realistic!" thing everybody's so goddamned keen on is garbage. Not to mention the issue Toast brought up of Tiny creatures known for being fantastic jumpers and climbers being actually extremely terrible at both those things, in 5e terms.
Do most DMs just ignore those numbers and let the critters do them? Sure. But why can a DM justify doing that whilst also telling the guy who wants to make a halfling rogue proficient in Athletics and second-story work that ackchualy, they can't do that because halflings are all universally weak and can't possess Strength scores above 12?
Acrobatics has nothing to do with the ability to swim, climb, run, or otherwise perform athletic tasks - Athletics is a function of physical training, conditioning, and fitness, while Acrobatics is a measure of balance, flexibility, coordination and an entirely different type of training. Acrobatics will not get you up a rock wall no matter how much tumbling practice you've had.
Flexibility is the primary issue when a physically fit person climbs a rock wall. If you can credibly get your ankle to your ear at will, you'll be a radically better rock climber than if you can't but you can squat twice your body weight.
Acrobatics has nothing to do with the ability to swim, climb, run, or otherwise perform athletic tasks - Athletics is a function of physical training, conditioning, and fitness, while Acrobatics is a measure of balance, flexibility, coordination and an entirely different type of training. Acrobatics will not get you up a rock wall no matter how much tumbling practice you've had.
Flexibility is the primary issue when a physically fit person climbs a rock wall. If you can credibly get your ankle to your ear at will, you'll be a radically better rock climber than if you can't but you can squat twice your body weight.
There have been discussions about this before, but since you said it twice I have to interject - this is just not correct, and you'd know it if you tried climbing yourself. It takes a lot of strength to climb. I am not that flexible, not that heavy and decently in shape and strength - specifically leg strength - is absolutely the limiter for me when I climb.
You get your ear to your ankle - what then? Are you trying to imply that actually pulling yourself up from that position would not take any great amount of strength?
As for the tiny creatures not being great at things, I think there are a lot of game issues going on here. Cats can be familiars, beast companions, wild shapes, etc. All of those game features have an expected power level that requires cats and rats and whatnot to be quite weak.
Notice all those examples favor Power, Pang. Weightlifting requires you to defeat the weight of what you're lifting, not the weight of your own personal self. Stuff-Chucking contests are also about Power, since they're about defeating the weight of the thing being chucked as thoroughly as possible. And "Strongman" competitions are nothing but displays of raw power.
Look at Olympic runners, swimmers, biathletes, or other athletes in track-and-field type competitions. Are they all roided-out muscle mountains? or are they all generally as lean as they can reasonably get, shaving down body weight as much as they can while remaining healthy?
They're usually tall and long-limbed, unless it's an endurance-based event (and even then you won't see really smal athletes perform well) . That's because it's not only about defeating your own body weight, it's about physics - and that usually favours reach and leverage. Climbing isn't typically pulling up your own body weight (plus whatever else you may be carrying) - it's reaching for handholds and finding the best purchase to efficiently leverage your strength. Jumping, similarly, isn't just lifting your own body weight - it's creating a maximum amount of momentum, which again is a matter of leverage, and longer limbs let you provide more leverage from the same amount of strength. Taller people also have proportionally more muscle mass: yes, they have more weight to overcome but part of that additional weight is additional muscle. Your size doesn't just determine your weight (less is more) but also how effectively you can transform strength into performance (and here more is usually more).
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One rule which is unspoken is that mundane tasks don't require rolls. Sure its possible to trip while walking down the stairs but we aren't rolling to check every single time unless that activity has been made more challenging than usual.
So when it comes to tiny creatures climbing that should be a mundane task that you don't even roll for. A cat wants to climb a tree? Done. A skink wants to run up a vertical wall and hang off the ceiling? Done. These aren't done because of str or dex stats but because the creature as a natural feature that makes it mundane (claws for cats 'n rats, sticky toes for lizards). If you declaw a cat it won't be able to climb at all.
I just allow Dex to be used with athletics for climbing as long as the character is not over encumbered, other then that I never really bothered to think about it as it is just a game.
Honestly, the reason for strength based climb and jump is mostly game balance, not realism -- strength is already something people take as a dump stat a lot, no need to make it even more tempting for that purpose. Realistically, climbing is more about strength to weight ratio than raw strength, jumping is also influenced by leg length and thus typically small creatures can jump further relative to their size but less distance total (a flea can jump a thousand times its body length, but a human can still jump farther than a flea).
However, on the scale of D&D, the average strength of a halfling should be 2, so we left reality far behind long ago. Easiest fix is probably giving small characters some benefit for climbing (no need to change jumping) and then some balancing penalty elsewhere, such as in grappling (I am tempted to toss all the cases where growth gives advantage on strength checks and just say "a character whose size is larger than the size of its target has advantage").
Well, if you want to fulfill the thief fantasy you shouldn't have less than 12-14ish strength anyway. Otherwise you're saying that your thief isn't stronger than a commoner?
I think people dump strength without realizing that they detract from the fantasy they try to play out. They then roleplay as having more strength than they actually do. I think it's important that we keep emphasizing strength as a stat and anything where a character fights gravity they use strength, not dexterity.
When I play strength martial classes it's very rare for me to dump dexterity for instance, even if they wear heavy armor and can't benefit from dexterity.
Daniel Woods is certainly very limber, and he's not bulky at all, but he's also freakishly strong for his weight. Strength matters for climbing. It's essential. Not how much you can bench press, no, but how long your core, arms and legs can sustain significant loads and keep repeating those exertions. It's possible (not probable, but possible) that I can deadlift more than Woods. It's completely out of the question that I could do as many pull-ups as him. I'm sure he can do more one-armed pull-ups than I can do normal ones.
This is D&D. It's a simplification. There is one Str stat, and it has to represent any and all forms of physical power. It's never going to be perfect, or even close to it. Personally, I'm convinced Str is the most suitable ability to be associated with climbing and jumping if we have to pick a single one.
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Something that's been brought up before, is that it seems odd dex does not contribute to your climbing/jumping abilities. This is usually brought up when discussing dex based agile classes such as monks and rogues whose class fantasies often involve a lot of climbing and parkouring, but whose stat focus does not reflect that mechanically.
I understand and respect the reason to have climbing as atheltics and therefore strength based, since strength is most certainly an important part of the ability to climb and strength is not a very useful stat at is. However for climber and jumping, for this to make mechanical sense, you'd have a seperate strength score relative to your body size and weight.
This takes me to something that's been bothering me for a lil while, which is how the system treats the athletic abilities of small and tiny creatures. In a similar sense to how a agile rogue would probably need less strength due to their lighter body (compared to that of a barbarian fx) a small rat or cat needs far less strength to be effective climbers and/or jumpers.
This isn't reflected in the 5e system however.. Since strength is measured as sort of a global absolute, your athletic abilities are entirely dependant on your athletics number being high, and does not care about your weight or body size... This means that cats are absolutely horrible jumpers, and rats are terrible climbers... You can see the designers giving all thise smaller creatures a decently high dex, but that does doesn't actually help them do what they are good at doing in real life.
with the current system, we end up with smaller creatures generally being worse at climbing and larger creatures generally being better at climbing, which appears to be the opposite of how reality works out.
The game doesn’t correlate size and weight, with a few exceptions. Plate armor for a 7’5” goliath weighs the same as plate armor for a 5’ half-elf. Rations weigh the same for everyone. So, while your character’s body weight may be specified on its character sheet, it isn’t taken into account in a mechanical sense either unless the DM chooses to. Honestly, that’s a good thing. Why would you ever want to be anything but Small otherwise? If the Dex vs Str thing is bothersome for specific skills/situations/characters, the DM can simply - and within the rules - call for the other ability to be used. If it feels like a lithe halfling would use Dex for climbing, just let him.
Personally though, I prefer simply differentiating DCs. Cats and rats may not have good raw stats for jumping or climbing, but if I set the DC for a check at 5 for them (while it might be a 20 for a human character) they’ll likely make it anyway.
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Yea setting the dc lower is certainly a way of dealing with it it... I just see some DM's not adjusting difficulty like tha tjust to compensate for strength not taking weight into account for climbing.
I do think that giving small creatures an easier time climbing would be reasonable, there are already disadvantages with being small (sometimes a slower movement speed aswell as disadvantage with heavy weapons) so a mechanical benefit to reflect their smaller mass would be fitting in my eyes.
I don't think it's a fair argument to bring up class fantasy to justify them being better climbers because...well all the thieves in fantasy are jacked. Go on pinterest and check out fantasy thief. Once you get past all the edgy masks, belts and satchels you start to see some outfits with some skin showing, and that they all show either lots of muscle or at the very least are incredibly toned. These characters ARE strong, rocking at least a 14 in the strength score, it's just that being nimble is what they use their strength for. The reason being is that people want their characters to be attractive so they more often than not will absolutely depict them as being stronger than what they are (I saw someone post art for their sorceror who had a strength score of 8 but would put Captain America to shame). This creates a loop where how a character should appear is substituted for a more fantastic version of them purely for gratification which in turn becomes the standard over time - just look at all the horny bard memes which people have ended up expecting to be the way a bard SHOULD be played
But in 5E, strength is a dump stat for a lot of people because it rarely comes up compared to DEX which covers so much of the game it should pulled back a bit. I wouldn't want to give more advantages to DEX and in turn less to STR because it needs all the help it can get.
with all due respect Seasoning, I think you missed the main point of my rant ^^. The first bit was a summary of previous discussions.. The thing that I'm trying to focus on here is the problem that strength is not taking body weight and size into account when deciding how good you are at things like climbing and jumping.
As a DM, I often let my players choose whether they want to use Acrobatics or Athletics in things like climbing or Parkour or what have you. I understand why the PHB states that athletics is used for specific checks, but I think a good DM will use their best judgment in cases like this. As a player, as well, I sometimes ask if I can use a specific skill other than the one the DM asked for if I feel like it should be relevant. That works sometimes... I've had the DM ask for Investigation Checks to examine a crime scene, and they've allowed me to use Survival instead as my character has some training as a tracker. But it's not guaranteed... with a bard character I once asked if I could roll for Performance instead of Acrobatics to avoid taking damage when tumbling down a hill, and I was told basically that I had to roll Acrobatics to see if I failed... but if I did fail I could roll Performance to make it look like I did it on purpose (I failed both checks, btw, which honestly was way funnier).
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It also doesn't take body weight into account for things like shoving someone or blocking a door, or even how hard you hit with a weapon. As long as we stay in the Small-Medium range of characters I think it's all a wash in the end. It's just for Tiny and smaller or Large and larger that a DM should probably make some situational adjustments in most cases.
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The difference between your examples and climbing and jumping, is that for climbing and jumping, the weight you are carrying is only only your own weight and therefore is quite different from pushing a rock. Yes weight would obviously play a role in the other scenarios, but there's a decent reason in using sort of a universal "strength" stat since you are using your strength on something external... we end up in a funky situation where a rat can carry another rat, but the rat may not be able carry itself.
There's a reason I listed tiny creatures for my examples, because this is where the problem is the most noticable... It just feels like a pretty major oversight in how the system handles things like jumping.
This exact issue is why it gets me so mad when people constantly harangue and harass players who uses the Tasha's rules or anything similar to try and make Small characters with high Strength scores. I've explained at least half a dozen times on this forum what the difference between 'Power' and 'Athleticism' is, and why Small creatures are better at Athleticism than large ones, all else being equal. Athleticism is about defeating your own body weight, and Small creatures have so much less weight to defeat. Muscle power is a factor of cross-sectional area and increases linearly with size; weight is a function of volume and increases exponentially with size.
But nah. People keep bellowing nonsense about how orcs are strong and halflings are weak and That's Just The Way It Be without any attempt to understand why that simply isn't true. Using Dexterity for that check isn't the bloody answer, either. Acrobatics has nothing to do with the ability to swim, climb, run, or otherwise perform athletic tasks - Athletics is a function of physical training, conditioning, and fitness, while Acrobatics is a measure of balance, flexibility, coordination and an entirely different type of training. Acrobatics will not get you up a rock wall no matter how much tumbling practice you've had.
Sadly, the *proper* fix requires splitting Strength, or at least adding modifiers to Small critters to account for the difference between Power and Athleticism, but all of that is too komplukayted for the average 5e player to wrap their brain around. Nor is the average DM inclined to alter DCs the way Pang mentions to account for the much-reduced difficulty of a forty-pound body trying to defeat its weight compared to a three hundred pound body. And of course we all know from experience that any Small critter with a Strength score higher than 12 is basically outlawed at virtually every table known to man. So...yeah. Small critters just aren't allowed to be athletic. It sucks tremendous ass, and it's a great example of what you lose when you over-simplify rules the way 5e did, but 5e is also not really set up to let us fix this one.
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I guess this is why we have weight categories in weightlifting competitions, or why shotput, hammer, discus or spear throwing competitions favour bigger and in some cases plain bulkier athletes or why strongman competitions are dominated by athletes who look like they're nicknamed 'the Mountain' in non-ironic fashion.
No offense, Yurei, but it's quite a bit more complicated than that.
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Cats are a particularly bad example; their stat block is so different from an actual cat's, it reads like a deliberate attempt by WOTC to troll DnD players when you read the stat block for a cat and the description of Tabaxi side by side (Tabaxi darkvision is literally referred to as a cat's keen senses, but cats don't have darkvision and don't have advantage on visual perception - instead they're bloodhounds for some reason, with advantage on smelling).
Also, the specific examples you raise are bad ones. Cats are so good at climbing because of their claws. You're correct in general - in the real world, a smaller creature has a smaller volume to surface area ratio than a larger creature, which is why ants can lift so huge a proportion of their own body weight. Climbing is about moving your own body weight around, so smaller creatures genuinely are better at it - but that's not why a panther can climb a tree so much better than a human can.
As for Dex vs Str climbing, for a physically fit human, because you can credibly lift your own body weight, the big limitation is flexibility - you need to get your limbs into a position dictated by the rock face you're climbing. In DnD, flexibility is traditionally Dex, not Str. You're just plain correct. If you had to pick one skill for Climbing in DnD 5, Acrobatics would make way more sense than Athletics, just as Athletics makes way more sense for swimming and running and jumping, which are primarily about how much arm and leg muscle you have on tap to move you.
As others have discussed in this thread, one way you could try to address this is by reducing climb DCs for Small creatures by 5 and Tiny by 10. And cats should have a climb speed, in general (cheetahs should not).
Notice all those examples favor Power, Pang. Weightlifting requires you to defeat the weight of what you're lifting, not the weight of your own personal self. Stuff-Chucking contests are also about Power, since they're about defeating the weight of the thing being chucked as thoroughly as possible. And "Strongman" competitions are nothing but displays of raw power.
Look at Olympic runners, swimmers, biathletes, or other athletes in track-and-field type competitions. Are they all roided-out muscle mountains? or are they all generally as lean as they can reasonably get, shaving down body weight as much as they can while remaining healthy?
Yes, when it comes to exerting physical effort against a fixed object in the world - breaking doors, moving rocks, lifting or throwing shit - then larger creatures with a greater absolute mass of muscle are going to be better. But when it comes to endurance sports, track and field? The less mass you're carrying the better off you are. You still need strength, training and conditioning, and in some cases the lessened reach or stride length of a halfling track athlete will be an issue. But this whole "Small species aren't allowed to have Strength scores over 12 because it's just not realistic!" thing everybody's so goddamned keen on is garbage. Not to mention the issue Toast brought up of Tiny creatures known for being fantastic jumpers and climbers being actually extremely terrible at both those things, in 5e terms.
Do most DMs just ignore those numbers and let the critters do them? Sure. But why can a DM justify doing that whilst also telling the guy who wants to make a halfling rogue proficient in Athletics and second-story work that ackchualy, they can't do that because halflings are all universally weak and can't possess Strength scores above 12?
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Flexibility is the primary issue when a physically fit person climbs a rock wall. If you can credibly get your ankle to your ear at will, you'll be a radically better rock climber than if you can't but you can squat twice your body weight.
There have been discussions about this before, but since you said it twice I have to interject - this is just not correct, and you'd know it if you tried climbing yourself. It takes a lot of strength to climb. I am not that flexible, not that heavy and decently in shape and strength - specifically leg strength - is absolutely the limiter for me when I climb.
You get your ear to your ankle - what then? Are you trying to imply that actually pulling yourself up from that position would not take any great amount of strength?
As for the tiny creatures not being great at things, I think there are a lot of game issues going on here. Cats can be familiars, beast companions, wild shapes, etc. All of those game features have an expected power level that requires cats and rats and whatnot to be quite weak.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
They're usually tall and long-limbed, unless it's an endurance-based event (and even then you won't see really smal athletes perform well) . That's because it's not only about defeating your own body weight, it's about physics - and that usually favours reach and leverage. Climbing isn't typically pulling up your own body weight (plus whatever else you may be carrying) - it's reaching for handholds and finding the best purchase to efficiently leverage your strength. Jumping, similarly, isn't just lifting your own body weight - it's creating a maximum amount of momentum, which again is a matter of leverage, and longer limbs let you provide more leverage from the same amount of strength. Taller people also have proportionally more muscle mass: yes, they have more weight to overcome but part of that additional weight is additional muscle. Your size doesn't just determine your weight (less is more) but also how effectively you can transform strength into performance (and here more is usually more).
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One rule which is unspoken is that mundane tasks don't require rolls. Sure its possible to trip while walking down the stairs but we aren't rolling to check every single time unless that activity has been made more challenging than usual.
So when it comes to tiny creatures climbing that should be a mundane task that you don't even roll for. A cat wants to climb a tree? Done. A skink wants to run up a vertical wall and hang off the ceiling? Done. These aren't done because of str or dex stats but because the creature as a natural feature that makes it mundane (claws for cats 'n rats, sticky toes for lizards). If you declaw a cat it won't be able to climb at all.
I just allow Dex to be used with athletics for climbing as long as the character is not over encumbered, other then that I never really bothered to think about it as it is just a game.
Honestly, the reason for strength based climb and jump is mostly game balance, not realism -- strength is already something people take as a dump stat a lot, no need to make it even more tempting for that purpose. Realistically, climbing is more about strength to weight ratio than raw strength, jumping is also influenced by leg length and thus typically small creatures can jump further relative to their size but less distance total (a flea can jump a thousand times its body length, but a human can still jump farther than a flea).
However, on the scale of D&D, the average strength of a halfling should be 2, so we left reality far behind long ago. Easiest fix is probably giving small characters some benefit for climbing (no need to change jumping) and then some balancing penalty elsewhere, such as in grappling (I am tempted to toss all the cases where growth gives advantage on strength checks and just say "a character whose size is larger than the size of its target has advantage").
Well, if you want to fulfill the thief fantasy you shouldn't have less than 12-14ish strength anyway. Otherwise you're saying that your thief isn't stronger than a commoner?
I think people dump strength without realizing that they detract from the fantasy they try to play out. They then roleplay as having more strength than they actually do. I think it's important that we keep emphasizing strength as a stat and anything where a character fights gravity they use strength, not dexterity.
When I play strength martial classes it's very rare for me to dump dexterity for instance, even if they wear heavy armor and can't benefit from dexterity.
Altrazin Aghanes - Wizard/Fighter
Varpulis Windhowl - Fighter
Skolson Demjon - Cleric/Fighter
Possibly the greatest boulderer ever:
Daniel Woods is certainly very limber, and he's not bulky at all, but he's also freakishly strong for his weight. Strength matters for climbing. It's essential. Not how much you can bench press, no, but how long your core, arms and legs can sustain significant loads and keep repeating those exertions. It's possible (not probable, but possible) that I can deadlift more than Woods. It's completely out of the question that I could do as many pull-ups as him. I'm sure he can do more one-armed pull-ups than I can do normal ones.
This is D&D. It's a simplification. There is one Str stat, and it has to represent any and all forms of physical power. It's never going to be perfect, or even close to it. Personally, I'm convinced Str is the most suitable ability to be associated with climbing and jumping if we have to pick a single one.
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