Non-Combat Uses for Str and Con?

[Maat Mons]

If you want some context for this question, I sometimes like to imagine governments in a D&D setting training up a portion of their Commoners into more useful classes. For these purposes, I tend to suppose that the governments need to scout out people with suitable ability scores, instead of being able to train people into having whatever ability score distribution suits their intended career.

For trainees that have a good score in Dex, Int, Wis, or Cha, I find it easy to come up with classes they could enter that would be useful both when the land needs to be defended, and also in the mundane, day-to-day activities of society. If you’ve got people with good Str and Con, but nothing else going for them, what are they doing when there isn’t a war on? Practicing for the next war? Guard duty? Manual labor? Being star athletes? Medieval society only has room for so many pro football players. Manual labor is all well and good, but it doesn’t influence class choice. Guards should have good perception and the social skills to deescalate situations.

So, do you train your soldiers only to be soldiers and nothing else? Do you train them also in other useful things, even though those things might not be good matches for their ability scores? Or are there some non-combat activities that requires Str and Con, which aren’t just things that everyone can already do anyway?

[Biggus]

I imagine you'd need them to go back to doing whatever they were doing before you took them away to go to war, there were lots of jobs in a medieval society which could only be done well by people with decent Str and Con. People who could do hard manual labor all day weren't low-value, quite the reverse.

Of course, if your society is full of other races with higher average strength than humans, this may diminish their importance somewhat.

What do you mean by "Manual labor is all well and good, but it doesn’t influence class choice"?

[Maat Mons]

What I meant by that is, I can’t think of any class that’s better at manual labor than other classes are. As best I can tell, someone’s ability to do manual labor is just a function of Strength, Constitution, and maybe Profession modifier. If a government was trying to decide between training up some Cavaliers, Barbarians, Brawlers, Fighters, or Samurai, I can’t think of much difference in terms of how members of those classes would fair as laborers after retiring from the military. All I can come up with is that classes with more skill points would make it easier to set some of them aside for a Craft or Profession skill.

[Peat]

You've pretty much nailed it. The uses for being strong and tough are combat, athletics, and manual labour/some crafting jobs. The only one I could think of outside that is travelling. Sailing or riding all day are physically strenuous activities. Messengers and sailors might be worth training. You could just use soldiers for the former though.

As for what you do with your soldiers in peace time... that depends on the government type, how much money it has, how much it controls the soldiers, how much peace there is. They can be full time professionals, they can be farmers when not fighting, they can be off building roads, they can be a landed gentry, they can be pursuing a craft or trade... anything really.

[Eurus]

...Incarnum? That's mostly stat-agnostic but technically Constitution dependent, and has a surprisingly large number of utility skill boosting soulmelds.

[zlefin]

Not all guard types need perception and social skills; some guards basic job is simply to assist someone else who makes the decisions, they're just the muscle. You can have a town guard type who's basic job is to reinforce the regular guards when they're facing something tough; they don't need to spot thieves or anyting cuz that's not their job.

blacksmithing, and probably some other kinds of smithing, are pretty strength heavy in reality, though iirc the rules don't support that. There's a basic issue that the rules simply won't support some of the uses of str/con. I'd imagine it helps a lumberjack, but I don't think there's a rule for that, despite it being pretty sensible. Also that there aren't any NPC classes designed to give bonuses, though if one were to more fully flesh out the system there could very plausibly be NPC classes focused on non-combat boosts.

I'd expect training to be a side thing anyways; some training is more like militia-enabling, it's to give them enough that they're moderately useful in a fight if it comes to that, but otherwise they just stick to their normal day job. It wouldn't be extensive training, because that requires enough time that it's hard to make a living.

High Con would help a medical assistant, as they'd be less likely to get infections from those they're treating.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by zlefin
High Con would help a medical assistant, as they'd be less likely to get infections from those they're treating.

I was thinking something similar involving poisons, since they’d be more likely to survive exposure to poison; but apart from test labs I’m not sure what a government could do with this.

For a slightly sillier idea, people with high Con could be used in live combat training, since they could take heavier lethal and nonlethal hits. Not sure how that would work in practice.