You are however still not addressing the thing we are talking about here, which is that the way strength affects athletic abilities is infact preventing smaller creatures from being athletic, aswell as making huge creatures unbelievably athletic. I don't understand why you find it necessary to disregard this very real flaw the mechanics. It is clearly an issue.
Help me understand you here. Is your position that the way strength works makes mechanical sense for creatures that are significantly smaller or larger than a human? If it is, please give an actual reason why you think that, because so far you seem to be dodging the issue.
If your position that the system is indeed broken for creatures that are not roughly human sized, but that other factors also play into your athletic abilities.. then yea.. noone is disagreeing with you.
I don't disregard it, I simply don't agree with it. Yes, my position is that the way strength works makes mechanical sense for very small and very large creatures - assuming were talking about physically anthropomorphic species. The larger you are, the larger your stride and your reach and your muscle mass is - relative to your size - the same as it is for smaller individuals. You don't see short athletes reaching the top in swimming, jumping or climbing competitions (there may be exceptions, but those confirm the rule). If you're half as tall as me you have to lift yourself up twice as many times to climb the same distance and you have half the leverage my legs give me to create jumping momentum (and your weight center is half as high up as mine to begin with). Weight only really becomes a consideration if we are not average for our height, and the game ignores that altogether.
PC races are humanoids. Thus, for PCs there is no problem. For creatures that aren't shaped roughly like a human, apply modifiers to the DC. Bringing up cats, rabbits and mammoths in this discussion is silly. What's the point? Leave it to the DM to make sure that things make sense for whatever's out of the hands of the PCs. The rules make sense as far as how they work for the players, and that's the main thing.
The fact is that mass, and therefore weight scales at a larger rate than the power of your muscles... WHich means that if we were to scale you up to elephant size, you'd have a much more difficult time carrying your own body weight than if you were scaled down to ant size..
Yea there's a golden zone where longer limbs may give you an advantage despite your increased relative weight, which is where a lot of medium creatures fall, but that would not be the case for a 7 meter tall giant for example.
As your weight increases, the proportional amount of muscles you need to move that weight increases, this is a big reason why animals such as the elephant and probably the T-rex are not very athletic, despite being able lift far more than we can.
And no, we are not just talking about humanoid PC's here... I specfically talked about cats and rats in my opening post for a reason.. If you don't want to have that conversation fine, but this is what the is thread is about, all creatures, from tiny to gigantic.
1) The fact is that mass, and therefore weight scales at a larger rate than the power of your muscles... WHich means that if we were to scale you up to elephant size, you'd have a much more difficult time carrying your own body weight than if you were scaled down to ant size..
Yea there's a golden zone where longer limbs may give you an advantage despite your increased relative weight, which is where a lot of medium creatures fall, but that would not be the case for a 7 meter tall giant for example.
As your weight increases, the proportional amount of muscles you need to move that weight increases, this is a big reason why animals such as the elephant and probably the T-rex are not very athletic, despite being able lift far more than we can.
2) And no, we are not just talking about humanoid PC's here... I specfically talked about cats and rats in my opening post for a reason.. If you don't want to have that conversation fine, but this is what the is thread is about, all creatures, from tiny to gigantic.
1) I also pointed out the advantages of size. If you need to jump to get over an 8' wall, a 6'5" character might not even have to get up on their tippy toes to grab the ledge while a 4"2' character will have to jump up close to 3'. During a climb a character with short arms will have to pull themselves up much more often to cross the same distance. For humanoids, I think it's close enough to a wash that it's not worth complicating things.
2) No offense to anyone who offered any suggestions, but none of the houserules or rules changes I've seen here address the differences in physiology between species. Str-relative-to-size is pointless if looking at turtles and hares, for instance. So either it's part of the conversation, and then we need a whole 'nother conversation, or it isn't and we don't need to bother.
Part of what you're seeing, Pang, is the inevitable recoil when attitudes like those so often prevalent in all the various multitudinous threads protesting Tasha's Cauldron are dominant at the table. You asked me earlier what I meant when I said Small characters were savagely penalized and prevented from being athletic. The game doesn't do so - players and DMs do so, because when someone shows up to the table with their 15+ STR halfling barbarian, they're laughed off the table. High-Strength characters of Small species are treated as either lulsy one-shot memes or annoying breaks in reality that need to be addressed - and by 'addressed' I mean filtered out.
Does every table do this? No, of course not - but if all the constant, vicious, and consistent backlash against Tasha's Cauldron taught me anything, it's that the overall D&D player base does not and will not accept any Small character having any sort of physical acumen. They can be nimble-fingered Dex folks, they can even be allowed to have decent Cons and be fairly tough, but the moment their STR mod goes north of +1 at the absolute maximum? Hell breaks loose and The World Must Be Set Right.
It's absolute horseshit, but that doesn't make it less of a problem.
... You asked me earlier what I meant when I said Small characters were savagely penalized and prevented from being athletic. The game doesn't do so - players and DMs do so, because when someone shows up to the table with their 15+ STR halfling barbarian, they're laughed off the table. ...
It's absolute horseshit, but that doesn't make it less of a problem.
I mean, I'm not sure what you hope gets done about this, if anything. I don't see a lot of ways to change that attitude at other tables through rules updates. If Tasha's floating modifiers had been the standard from the start, this same attitude might well have existed anyway. I've seen my fair share of musclebound halfling barbarians and gnome paladins in shiny fullplate armour at my table (and I don't allow floating modifiers), so it's not like I have any hands-on experience with this issue either. I don't intend to dismiss this as not a problem at all, but for me it isn't one.
And all that said, I don't think changing how Athletics works in relation to character size is going to affect this perception of Small creatures as unsuitable for high Str characters one bit either.
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In the end, my response to "the Strength stat is too important to climbing" is "yes, but it's way too unimportant for a lot of other things". Any rule that makes it less important should be paired with another rule that makes it more important in some other way.
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I don't disregard it, I simply don't agree with it. Yes, my position is that the way strength works makes mechanical sense for very small and very large creatures - assuming were talking about physically anthropomorphic species. The larger you are, the larger your stride and your reach and your muscle mass is - relative to your size - the same as it is for smaller individuals. You don't see short athletes reaching the top in swimming, jumping or climbing competitions (there may be exceptions, but those confirm the rule). If you're half as tall as me you have to lift yourself up twice as many times to climb the same distance and you have half the leverage my legs give me to create jumping momentum (and your weight center is half as high up as mine to begin with). Weight only really becomes a consideration if we are not average for our height, and the game ignores that altogether.
PC races are humanoids. Thus, for PCs there is no problem. For creatures that aren't shaped roughly like a human, apply modifiers to the DC. Bringing up cats, rabbits and mammoths in this discussion is silly. What's the point? Leave it to the DM to make sure that things make sense for whatever's out of the hands of the PCs. The rules make sense as far as how they work for the players, and that's the main thing.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
The fact is that mass, and therefore weight scales at a larger rate than the power of your muscles... WHich means that if we were to scale you up to elephant size, you'd have a much more difficult time carrying your own body weight than if you were scaled down to ant size..
Yea there's a golden zone where longer limbs may give you an advantage despite your increased relative weight, which is where a lot of medium creatures fall, but that would not be the case for a 7 meter tall giant for example.
As your weight increases, the proportional amount of muscles you need to move that weight increases, this is a big reason why animals such as the elephant and probably the T-rex are not very athletic, despite being able lift far more than we can.
And no, we are not just talking about humanoid PC's here... I specfically talked about cats and rats in my opening post for a reason.. If you don't want to have that conversation fine, but this is what the is thread is about, all creatures, from tiny to gigantic.
1) I also pointed out the advantages of size. If you need to jump to get over an 8' wall, a 6'5" character might not even have to get up on their tippy toes to grab the ledge while a 4"2' character will have to jump up close to 3'. During a climb a character with short arms will have to pull themselves up much more often to cross the same distance. For humanoids, I think it's close enough to a wash that it's not worth complicating things.
2) No offense to anyone who offered any suggestions, but none of the houserules or rules changes I've seen here address the differences in physiology between species. Str-relative-to-size is pointless if looking at turtles and hares, for instance. So either it's part of the conversation, and then we need a whole 'nother conversation, or it isn't and we don't need to bother.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
Part of what you're seeing, Pang, is the inevitable recoil when attitudes like those so often prevalent in all the various multitudinous threads protesting Tasha's Cauldron are dominant at the table. You asked me earlier what I meant when I said Small characters were savagely penalized and prevented from being athletic. The game doesn't do so - players and DMs do so, because when someone shows up to the table with their 15+ STR halfling barbarian, they're laughed off the table. High-Strength characters of Small species are treated as either lulsy one-shot memes or annoying breaks in reality that need to be addressed - and by 'addressed' I mean filtered out.
Does every table do this? No, of course not - but if all the constant, vicious, and consistent backlash against Tasha's Cauldron taught me anything, it's that the overall D&D player base does not and will not accept any Small character having any sort of physical acumen. They can be nimble-fingered Dex folks, they can even be allowed to have decent Cons and be fairly tough, but the moment their STR mod goes north of +1 at the absolute maximum? Hell breaks loose and The World Must Be Set Right.
It's absolute horseshit, but that doesn't make it less of a problem.
Please do not contact or message me.
I mean, I'm not sure what you hope gets done about this, if anything. I don't see a lot of ways to change that attitude at other tables through rules updates. If Tasha's floating modifiers had been the standard from the start, this same attitude might well have existed anyway. I've seen my fair share of musclebound halfling barbarians and gnome paladins in shiny fullplate armour at my table (and I don't allow floating modifiers), so it's not like I have any hands-on experience with this issue either. I don't intend to dismiss this as not a problem at all, but for me it isn't one.
And all that said, I don't think changing how Athletics works in relation to character size is going to affect this perception of Small creatures as unsuitable for high Str characters one bit either.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
In the end, my response to "the Strength stat is too important to climbing" is "yes, but it's way too unimportant for a lot of other things". Any rule that makes it less important should be paired with another rule that makes it more important in some other way.