How high have you gotten an ability score in actual play?

[Schadenfreuda]

In theorycrafting ability scores can go arbitrarily high, but I'm curious how high you've actually managed at the table, looking at innate plus items (i.e. no spell or other temporary bonuses).

[Rebel7284]

I mean, I once made a character for my little brother to try D&D that combined Goliath with RAW Half Minotaur (so ability increases for size).
Fighter 1/Barbarian 1

I don't remember exactly what the strength score was, but he did have
+4 Goliath
+4 Half Minotaur
+8 Size

So somewhere between 32 and 34 base.
+4 when raging, but he never cared to rage since he one-shot everything with a huge keen Jovar anyway... the campaign didn't last very long, but that first session was enough for everyone to realize that I made a terrible mistake making that character for a low-op level 4 campaign..

[Maat Mons]

In a game that started at high level, used a generous point buy for ability scores, and handed out loot like cany, I recall I got my main ability score up to a +13 modifier. That was an 18 base, a racial +2, +5 from levels, a +6 magic item, and a +5 inherent bonus. I wasn’t going out of my way to get the highest score possible. I just took all the obvious bonuses in a game with ample resources.

I’m sure someone, somewhere, at some point, has used Shapechange to turn into a Titan. I haven’t myself, but I’ll be very surprised if the highest reported score in this thread is less than 43.

[pabelfly]

So our table typically plays up to level 12.

STR (42)
Point Buy: 18
Half-Minotaur Template, +12
Orc, +4
Levels: +2
Belt of Giant's Strength, +6


DEX (30)
Point Buy: 18
Giant Anthro Octopus, +4
Levels: +2
Gloves of Dexterity, +6

Other ability scores that are maxed out typically get into the mid-20s, it's mainly STR and DEX where we go a bit extra.

[Elenian]

I've played several monstrous characters, including a low-epic illithid, so certainly mid-40s (18, 8 racial, 6 levels, 8 enhancement, 4 innate, so that'd be 44 or so).

And yes, that was a weird game.

[Biggus]

In a game I'm currently DMing, most of the players had scores of about 32 in their key attribute at level 20, I think that's the highest I've seen. None of them are hardcore optimizers though (and I'm not especially cheese-tolerant even if they were) and they're all playing standard humanoid races.

[Kurald Galain]

My highest-level characters include a frontliner with 28 strength, and a sorcerer with 34 charisma. I also have a mid-level druid with 32 wisdom, because of the absurd amount of loot given out in that campaign.

[Clause]

I have played until 16th level , a class from book of erotic fantasy, that is like a monk with sexual fucused spells. A great class!! And i have 7 heartwire levels and two wanderer chaneller.

Was a inesquecible game.

The total charisma was hight as the sky!!

I have vow of poverty at level 1(human)
And the bonus from feats that gain if i make 6 hor of relationship with anyone, 4 feats in this one, 3 for charisma, and one for wisdow.. the class, give me 2 of that as bonus.
So i take wanderer( from magic of faerun, for cha in my armor class) and heartwire levels to up char.

I take some feats and 2 wis bonus from magical locations. An infernal location in avernus give me 2 wiss bonus for meditation in here. And iron will, dodge and spell focus, from other locals.

Total bonus i got 38 for charisma, and 26 wisdow,
At level 16. His ac and saves are glorious.
The campaingn takes his end, but the beauty of SVETLANNA WOLKOFF, NEVER ENDS



Where you read heartwire, is , in true HEARTWARDEN

[NichG]

In a very gonzo, heavily homebrewed campaign, briefly peaked around 800 Wisdom once. Usual was more like 300.

In a published sources only (but still with third party stuff) game, a party member did the 'all types of bonus slotless Magnificence' thing and had a Cha in the 50s iirc.

In WotC-only games, I don't think I've broken 26...

[King of Nowhere]

my only high level character is a monk, that split bonuses due to mad and didn't go insanely high in any single stat.
but with me dming, i think the cake goes to the wizard in the last campaign.
18 base, +4 racial, +10 enhancement (artifact), +5 from level, +5 from wish, +4 from demigod boost (plot, the party consumed the leftover energy of a dead god), if I remembered to add everything he totaled up at 46 int.

the most powerful npc in that campaign got even higher. he was the main villain of a previous campaign, now a prisoner turned unlikely ally of the party.
a clerid with 18 base wis, +12 enhancement (3 artifacts), +5 from level, +5 from wish, +3 for lich, +2 for age, +6 from demigod boost (like the party, plus another +2 from the previous campaign), he got to wis 51.

those are the most extreme examples. it's generally assumed that high level characters will have their main stat around 30, maybe 35. the party can expect to gain some plot related boosts over that. I do not use races with extreme bonuses, feels too cheesy.

[Fero]

I think I had an incubus get his charisma to the high 40s in an epic game.

[The Insanity]

In regular games we generally had the standard for fairly well optimized, but not min-maxed, PCs, somewhere between 30 and 40 in the main stat.
After a while regular games became boring-ish, so we started doing gimmick games, with a lot more being permitted and the DM getting more creative with NPCs and monsters. In those games more often than not 20 was the lowest stat any PC had, with their main going as high as 60 or 70.

[Paragon]

Well a Druid wildshaping in a Legendary Ape at 13 has 30 Str. Add Animal Growth (+8 Size) and Bite of the Werebear (+16 Enhancement) and you have 54 Str for 13 rounds.
That's the worst I did to a DM in a One Shot campaign haha

[Jay R]

In an Epic game, I had a 24th level pixie Ultimate Magus with an unadjusted INT of 35, and an adjusted one of 43.

He started at 18
+6 for being a pixie.
+6 for the adjustments every 4th level
+5 inherent bonus for a Tome of Clear Thought
He was also a Focus Caster for Transmutation, which doubled the value of spells that increase stats. Each day, he cast Chasing Perfection for +4 enhancement bonus (doubled to +8), and used his ultimate magus ability to add Persist Spell.

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

I've played a gish with Incantatrix 4 that would persist Draconic Polymorph and Bite of the Werebear by the end of the game. I typically used War Troll (31+8+16=55 Str) but could have used Firbolg (36+8+16=60 Str).

A friend of mine once joined an epic campaign as a hulking hurler with over 100 Str.

[Biggus]

Well a Druid wildshaping in a Legendary Ape at 13 has 30 Str. Add Animal Growth (+8 Size) and Bite of the Werebear (+16 Enhancement) and you have 54 Str for 13 rounds.


Sadly not strictly rules-legal, Animal Growth doesn't work on Wildshaped Druids as it specifies animals as the target and Wild Shape doesn't change your type to animal.

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

Sadly not strictly rules-legal, Animal Growth doesn't work on Wildshaped Druids as it specifies animals as the target and Wild Shape doesn't change your type to animal.

Prior to an errata it did, so this was doable in actual play.

[flappeercraft]

Depends on if as a DM or as a player. As a player I haven't really done too many insane things, but in a game I ran, one of my players ran a cancer mage so he had a strength score in the high 3 digits or low 4 digits by the end

[King of Nowhere]

In a very gonzo, heavily homebrewed campaign, briefly peaked around 800 Wisdom once. Usual was more like 300.


i'm curious, what was you supposed to do with that score? what kind of foes would you fight with it?


in a game I ran, one of my players ran a cancer mage so he had a strength score in the high 3 digits or low 4 digits by the end

i read the cancer mage, I found no hint on how to increase strenght score. how does that combo work?

[Fero]

i read the cancer mage, I found no hint on how to increase strenght score. how does that combo work?

The disease Festering Anger (BoVD) gives uncapped strength bonuses while simultaneously doing Con damage and giving anger issues. CMs suffer no "ill effect" from diseases. As such, the argument is that a CM with Festering Anger can accrue unlimited strength without ever losing con. Alternatively, you could invest in a Rod of Bodily Restoration and a high will save (to deal with the anger).

[Paragon]

Sadly not strictly rules-legal, Animal Growth doesn't work on Wildshaped Druids as it specifies animals as the target and Wild Shape doesn't change your type to animal.

Dayyyyyyuum.
Oh well, I guess that's a good point for WotC on this one. Thanks for pointing it out

[NichG]

i'm curious, what was you supposed to do with that score? what kind of foes would you fight with it?

Keeping in mind that there is so much context its probably hard to actually say everything going on here, but...

The 800 was specifically a breakpoint for a duel with Death itself - I needed a Will save high enough that basically I would only ever fail on a 1 because each round there was a save-or-permanently erase a part of your character sheet effect for being in the fight. This was a completely optional fight btw, a hidden boss battle sort of thing.

As far as hovering in the 100-300 range on a bunch of things, there were a lot of subsystems that extended DCs for things well past 'Epic uses of skills'. I needed Spellcraft and Knowledge(Arcana) checks above 250 to create some spells. Very high Craft checks let you enchant items 'for free', just using raw materials and not needing XP, so the group had workflows to boost a crafter up to +200 or +300 mods in order to hit +10 equivalents (and a lot of the really powerful custom stuff was multiplicative not additive, so e.g. +12 to stat item wasn't negligible even endgame) and later to break normal item caps and make our own Artifacts and such. At one point I got an ability that basically made 'math' have epic skill uses, but only at the very high end - it was like DC 200 or 300 or something to basically improvise between-setting teleportation, and it had the advantage of transferring between local rulesets better than e.g. 'spellcasting'. Extremely high Strength became relevant in doing things like catching an extinction level event asteroid that was going to land on a planet. In another case, there was a gimmick item that was a stick of gum where if you made cascading Con checks to blow the bubble bigger and bigger, you'd ultimately get a demiplane the size of the bubble you were able to blow, so hitting Con check DCs in the 100s would get you a qualitatively different result than hitting DCs in the 50s or 200s since the scaling was exponential. 'Can I blow a bubble big enough to store the entire population of a planet in it?' was a thing that came up once. There was other stuff, I think 1000 Wisdom was a breakpoint and while we never went over it, someone did manage to forcibly buff an adversary (not really a meaningfully combatable enemy) to that point due to a weird interaction with the enemy's special abilities and that allowed (or made?) them basically 'ascend and escape the setting'.

There were also things from around mid-game that you could use to be rolling d100s instead of d20s for stuff, so the variance actually did still matter if you went that route. Thats 200 points of a stat to totally erase the variance of your dice roll. The GM also had breakpoints on certain things where you'd get extra effects for doubling, quadrupling, etc the DCs (or ACs in a lot of cases), not to mention a lot of just optimization cheese to turn high results into scaling outcomes rather than fixed-range binary results (like Avalanche of Blades to turn an obscenely high attack roll linearly into extra damage for example). It was sort of fun because a lot of stuff that is considered kind of suboptimal or not worth it in standard D&D campaigns becomes MVP when you go outside of the normal ranges of things. Since you basically can't land save or dies (and there are so many ways to get out of a saving throw at that end of the pool), martial stuff actually ended up having a particular niche in the end. If for some reason I needed a few hundred thousand points of damage per round to tunnel through the Death Star or something, I could do that with a sword but not so easily with a spell. The other thing that happened of course was that 'how many times can you resurrect yourself per fight?' became like a secondary hitpoint track and things ended up looking more like 7th Sea's flesh wounds/dramatic wounds system in play.

Things we fought against were on our scale and with similar kinds of advantages, but the actual scope of play and impact and just the sort of stuff that narratively you did with those numbers shifted relatively consistently.. So if everyone had decided to play the campaign with mostly ignoring the optional stuff and keeping their stats in the 20s and 30s, I'm sure the GM would have gone with that and we'd be doing things like saving populations from an overly ambitious lich or whatever, and when the big stuff came down we'd be reacting mostly at the speed of plot. The ultimate 'challenge' of the campaign was a philosophical one anyhow so numbers didn't directly help - it was about making certain decisions and parsing certain very abstract circumstances. But since we went all in on the optional stuff, there were times when we were able to brute force our way into being relevant at a higher level of reality or force things to pay attention to us and work with us that would otherwise not have had a reason to, or just take really big actions to totally reshape the setting, like saying e.g. 'the afterlife here sucks, I'm going to do better, and I have specific mechanics that let me calculate how I'm going to achieve that and what properties it can have, and the GM's metaphysical framework is coherent enough I can reason about what that is going to actually do to things'.

Maybe to put it simpler, think D&D characters trying to play Nobilis but without being Nobles, if that helps. A usual Nobilis character can (at great personal cost) do stuff like 'I turn the sun into Tuesday' or 'I say everything except the one thing I swore not to say, so my friend can figure out what it was'. For this campaign, the GM had a mental map of those huge numbers to some of those mythological-level feats, and that made the numbers relevant.

It was actually one of my favorite campaigns if not my favorite. Like, drive four hours a week and stay overnight in order to attend after moving out of the area level of good. Absolutely wouldn't be to everyone's tastes though.

[rel]

For characters I've personally played;

I had a monk in a pathfinder mythic game with a few stats in the low 30's by the end of the game.

I've gotten strength to about that level as a side effect of boosting my CL with consumptive field (+6 or +7 CL increases, so +12 to +14 strength), but it wasn't really used for anything since the high CL for out of combat casting was the actual goal.

I've gotten dex to the high 20's with divine agility.

From other players at the table, I've seen higher numbers;

druids or MoMF rangers using polymorph effects and buffs had strengths in (at least) the high 30's

particularly SAD spellcasters using aging bonuses in addition to the usal tricks sometimes have mental stats in the mid 30's


And some of my friends play pathfinder games to a higher level of optimisation than I do, I think their primary stats reach the 40's fairly regularly.