The Case Against AD&D - Ability Scores, pt. 2

God Stats?

It's slightly unfair to call Dexterity a god stat in AD&D, but only because it doesn't work like 5e's does where it adds to ranged weapon damage, which led to a situation in which Carlos managed to take out an entire encounter by himself by climbing a tree and playing Robin Hood. It's still a universally good ability score, and you'll want it to be as high as possible whether your wearing no armor, or wearing full plate.

Thankfully, unlike other editions, it does not add to saving throws or damage, so it's at least slightly more reasonable in that regard. But like all AD&D ability scores, it scales oddly and sharply at the extreme high end of the distribution, compounding the problem of AD&D's general policy of having ability scores define what characters can do rather than their class. The race to higher and higher ability scores does the game no favors.

A Rundown on Dexterity

There are only three mechanical benefits to Dexterity (aside from non-weapon proficiencies based on the score and raw Dexterity checks, which always benefit from a high score): Reaction adjustment, missile attack adjustment, and defensive adjustment.

Reaction adjustment is initiative. It's a useful combat ability that helps your side go first and decide the way in which combat will unfold in following rounds. At 18, it's only a +2, and there's no bizarre "scores within scores" like with Strength.

Missile attack adjustment is AD&D's rather verbose ranged attack modifier. This too is a reasonable +2 at 18 Dexterity, though you have to have a 16 or more to even qualify for a bonus, which empowers that "high scores or bust" mentality of munchkins, power gamers, optimizers, and builds enthusiasts. Only one of the play styles is terrible (munchkins), but each comes with their own attendant problems that are directly being influenced by how the game itself is built.

We'll come back to this, but just keep it in mind for now.

Defensive adjustment is the modifier to your AC. Because not everyone is familiar with how AC works in older editions, I think I'd better take a moment to explain.

Armor Class in older editions uses descending numbers to represent improved armor class, so a negative number on the chart is actually a good thing, because in this case, lower is better. I've written a up concise explanation of THAC0 since it's something I've had to explain a lot over the years, and it's actually much simpler than most would have you believe:

In any case, an 18 provides a very generous -4 adjustment to AC, which is as good as wearing brigandine, scale, or hide armor. If one had chain armor, they'd be comfortably sitting at AC 0, with the option to drop it to -1 with a shield.

Moving On

Dexterity is less insane than Strength, and is one of the more reasonable ability scores, but it still has that nagging problem of how it scales as it runs toward the high end of the natural distribution, and how it ramps up beyond that. My next post is going to discuss this feature of the system in more detail, so keep an eye out.