When you start a new system and you dump the best stat

>when you start a new system and you dump the best stat

Why is the "Strength" stat dogshit for anyone but a melee beatstick no matter what game you choose? D&D, d20 in general, WoD, Exalted, Shadowrun, Traveller, real life...

>Not being autistic about carry weight

You'll want a High STR party member if you wanna carry that valuable gilded mahogany throne out of the dungeon; it was basically the only really valuable thing this particular Goblin tribe had.

>what are Muleback Cords
>what are Bags of Holding

smfh fambo.

My players are lucky if they get a magic potion; the reason they make me GM is because I'm a proficient storyteller.

I don't use D&D either, and magical items that I throw down are usually custom and significant to story hooks.

>real life.

In real life, Strength and Constitution are not separate stats. You want to be healthy and live long? Lift. Exercise. Work out.

That's an interesting idea. Do you think merging the scores in D&D would work?

It would half martials MAD and make clerics and druids even better as melee classes. So yes, if you want to make casters even more powerful.

I think that would be too much, since Constitution is already everybody's number-2 or number-3 stat thanks to the HP bonus.

However, what you could do is increase the amount of HP given by Hit Dice or levels as a replacement for the Con bonus, then merge Strength and what is left of Constitution. Thus the Strength score would be used for its normal things plus Fortitude saves and whatever else used to be a Con check.

It doesn't matter at this point

Caius?

>Roughly half of all skills in the game key off of either Intelligence or Perception
>MFW a player dumps both and maxes out the attributes it's ridiculously easy to buff to the cap
>Then he complains he has nothing to do and isn't as effective as the people who figured a scifi game would likely be biased towards smart PCs

Halving martial characters' Multiple Ability Dependency sounds pretty good. As for Clerics and Druids, I don't see how it would help them. After all, the number of points in the Point Buy would be proportionately lower to make up for the reduction in the number of scores, so Clerics and Druids investing in Strength would be spending more, proportionately speaking, than they spent before. Besides, druids usually do not invest in ANY of the physical ability scores, using their Wild Shape in melee instead.

Dark Heresy?

>However, what you could do is increase the amount of HP given by Hit Dice or levels as a replacement for the Con bonus, then merge Strength and what is left of Constitution.

How much more HP should be given by character levels in a D&D with no Con bonus to HP?

For games, it's because the designers don't think there's anything interesting about being strong - things that need high strength to deal with are rare or under-represented.
If designers wanted though, it could probably be more useful, or at least costed better (str boosts coming twice as cheaply as other stats, for example).

IRL strength is handy, but rarely directly useful on its own unless you work in a few select fields, and it needs a fair bit of upkeep.

Max HP minus 1 would be my first guess. Or max HP minus 2, but you get a big bonus on 1st level to make level 1 less of a crapshoot.

>mixed good and evil party

So +0.5HP to Magic-Users, +1,5 for Clerics, +2,5 to d8 classes (TSR Fighters, f'rex), +3,5 to d10 classes (WotC Fighter), +4,5 to d12 classes?

In other words, rounding down, kind of equivalent to WotC-era CON 10, 12, 14, 16 and 18.

Could work, I guess. Looks interesting enough, at least, although it really depends on the system - in BD&D and 5E the numbers look decentish at first glance, but they're way too big for AD&D and way too small for 3E. 4E is irrelevant in this case since it uses a completely different system for hit points/level, with constitution just being a flat number added to the total of a flat X/level.

Also, of course, it's way too good for OD&D but that should really go without saying. It's mildly powerful in the LBBs - like giving everyone the best CON bonus and then some - while in Greyhawk onwards it just gets even better and adds even more hit points since people have varied hit die sizes now.

Interesting idea, though! Definitely something to consider if I ever get around to hacking together an OSR system for my own use.

If you're going for an OSR, I'd recommend going even further and merging all mental ability scores into one.

The reason for this is in OSR, the Player's skills are used instead of the Character's in most situations. Thus mental ability scores are not very useful except in corner cases, and it does not make sense to have three of them.

So, something like Strength/Agility/Intelligence or Strength/Agility/Spirit. Mind, Motion, and Matter. Whatever. You still have a mental score for those few cases where it matters, but you do not have the confusing and unnecessary granularity of three scores.

Wouldn't that boost spellcasters too much?

Not if you're designing it right. Just like you can detach Hit Points from Constitution, you can detach Spell Slots from Intelligence. Decide on a fixed number of spell slots for each level of mage, and that's that. So a mage will have a good Will save or equivalent (which makes sense), but will not gain PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER from his mental ability score.