How much would Strength actually contribute to weapon damage (read the OP)

[Kalmageddon]

Now, this is sort of a strange question that I've been thinking about, regarding a game mechanic that we basically take for granted.
Almost all game systems out there equates how strong a character is to how much damage he will be able to do in melee. On the surface this makes perfect sense, but then I thought: would being stabbed with a sword by someone of average strenght really be any less serious than being stabbed by a big hunk of a guy?
What about being smashed with a flanged mace? Would the strenght of the man wielding the mace change the outcome all that much?
Basically what I'm saying is... Don't weapons do most of the work anyway? A sword or a knife is made sharp exactly because it's able to cut into flesh even when not much force is put behind it, after all. And it's the weight of a mace that delivers the hurt.
Being strong doesn't affect much aside from your ability to wield the weapon without straining a muscle or getting tired, I would think.

Wouldn't it make more sense if the Strength score of a character represented his ability to ignore amor instead? Because that's basically the only instance I could think of when being really strong could help, when the enemy has an armor that the weapon you are wielding can't reliably penetrate.

D&D sort of does it, with Strength being your key ability score when making a melee attack to overcome the armor of the enemy, but then it also adds Strength to damage. I couldn't really think of any game that didn't work upon the assumption that most of the damage is done by the strenght of the attacker instead of being done by the weapon itself.
What do you guys think?

[DM Nate]

I see you've never stabbed a guy.

Depending on the weapon, the amount of force behind it makes a definite difference. Bludgeoning is self-explanatory; more force applied equals more force transferred to the entire body of the enemy. Slashing weapons are also fairly straight-forward; the more strength behind a swing, the further through the body the sword will cleave before it stops.

Piercing is the only one that you may be able to have an argument for. Still, poking a hole two inches deep is a much smaller injury than pushing it all the way through.

[Kalmageddon]

I see you've never stabbed a guy.

Depending on the weapon, the amount of force behind it makes a definite difference. Bludgeoning is self-explanatory; more force applied equals more force transferred to the entire body of the enemy. Slashing weapons are also fairly straight-forward; the more strength behind a swing, the further through the body the sword will cleave before it stops.

Piercing is the only one that you may be able to have an argument for. Still, poking a hole two inches deep is a much smaller injury than pushing it all the way through.

Chopped meat though and it's the cleaver that does most of the work. On a human body I'd say that anyone can stab a knife deep enough to make it fatal, unless there's bone in the way.
Depending of course where the knife hits.

The point I'm trying to make is that usually the Strength ability score does most of the damage in various systems, while in reality when it really would make a difference would be against something tougher than what the weapon can normally handle, as in, not human flesh.

[Vinegar Tom]

I have to admit that I've never stabbed anybody either, or indeed bludgeoned anybody with a flanged mace. However, it's a very basic law of physics that any object which hits you will do more damage if it's moving faster, meaning that more force was applied to get it moving in the first place. With a melee weapon, force means strength. It's true that a 2-inch stab-wound can kill you, but if for some reason you are forced to let someone stab you in a completely random part of your body, and it's a choice between a 2-inch and a 6-inch stab, which are you going to choose? That situation is already covered by the Critical Hit game mechanic. DEX may increase your chance of scoring a crit, but STR has a major influence on the damage you will cause with every weapon all the time, apart from things like crossbows and guns where it's totally irrelevant.

[Storm_Of_Snow]

A stronger person will be able to get an edged weapon to penetrate deeper into their target, even cutting through bone, or carry a cut further through the skin, causing more blood loss. They'd also potentially be able to smash through a defence, causing light injuries where a weaker person wouldn't be able to.

A stronger person would also be able to wield a heavier weapon, so you could potentially start multiplying the effects of higher strength - although you could then get into issues based around their own momentum.

Chopped meat though and it's the cleaver that does most of the work.

To an extent, but there's a lot of difference in how far you'll got through if you just drop the cleaver on it from an inch above, or bring it down with a reasonable amount of strength from six inches above.

On a human body I'd say that anyone can stab a knife deep enough to make it fatal, unless there's bone in the way.
Depending of course where the knife hits.

And for a stronger person, there's more potentially fatal areas available to them - some of which may have bone in the way.

[Waar]

The melee weapon that can reliably kill or injure its opponent, without any strength behind it, is quite rare. So it isn't unresonable to let strength affect damage in some respect. Now in most roleplaying games I have seen strength has a marginal but not critical effect on melee damage, but outside of high damage resistance cases, I have not seen any games (exept D&D) where strength matters more than the weapon (or the skill to use it) for any human level of strength.

[John Longarrow]

Kalmageddon
Two things to remember regarding strength and damage
1) Unlike a nice piece of meat that's stationary on a cutting block, most targets in combat are moving. This effectively reduces the amount of force from the blow by how much they move with it.
2) The piece of meat is actively trying to put stuff in your way. Strength overcomes the defenders blocking moves, once more adding more damage.

[Frozen_Feet]

Strenght does increase the force of impact and damage done, yes. I don't recall the exact equation, but putting more mass/raw strenght behind a strike increases the impact in direct proportion, while increasing velocity of a strike increases impact energy in a logarithmic (?) proportion.

So if mass of strike is doubled while velocity remains same, the energy is doubled. If velocity is doubled while mass remains the same, the impact energy is tripled.

Human body produces strenght in several way. When it comes to striking with weapons, we're mostly in the realm of plyometrics and explosive strenght - trying to extert as much force as possible, as fast as possible. Even a relatively small and thin person can accelerate a light weapon (such as a knife) into dangerous speeds, but after a point (or if switching to a heavier weapon) they're going to need more muscle mass to accelerate it faster, which also puts more weight and raw strenght behind the blow.

Now, you don't need all that much force to cause lethal injuries to a human with a weapon, especially if it's bladed or piercing. Rather the difference becomes sever "important arteries vs. sever a whole limb" or "cause lethal concussion vs. cave a man's skull in". Things change if the target is wearing some sort of armor - something tougher than human flesh, as you put it. If you're fighting someone in padded armor with a Bo stick, your stick has to move much quicker and with much greater force to inflict the same level of injuries. Likewise, a steel spike or a warhammer can pierce through steel armor, but it's not something achievable with a light tap.

[Seppo87]

I don't know about other systems, but in dnd you fight huge monsters that won't die in a single blow so it's appropriate to differentiate between average and high strength

[Angelalex242]

You're right, the weapon does do most of the work.

Greatsword:2d6+0 for average strength.
Greatsword:2d6+3 for above average
Greatsword:2d6+6 for max (18) strength

The weapon, doing an average of 7 damage...

Accounts for all, 70%, or 53% of the weapon.

With a longsword...

d8
d8+2
d8+4

And now it's all, 75%, or 50% of the total.

[jaydubs]

Hit points don't have to represent literal toughness. It's an abstraction of toughness, but also things like training, luck, and experience. When you hit harder, you're not just better at cutting flesh. But you can also knock people off balance, bruise them through armor, break through guards, etc.

And as has been mentioned, in d&d you're often fighting things that aren't human. Very often. For instance, if you're taking a swing at a larger sized earth elemental, you're literally trying to cleave through tons of rock and stone. How hard you hit is going to make a huge difference in that case.

[Jarawara]

I could see your strength bonus limited by the quality of the blow. I mean, if you just nicked it for a single point of damage, should you be getting +4 damage to that scratch? Yes, you *could* say that the +4 damage represents your ability to push your weapon closer to the enemy, and thus the scratch on the elbow instead was hitting center of his arm and cutting it off completely. But you could also say that the cut on the arm is just a cut on the arm, and your great strength was misdirected due to a poor attack.

Proposed rule, if you wanted to consider it:
Strength bonus to damage cannot exceed the actual roll for damage.

That way, the nick on the arm is a *teensy* bit worse, but it's still just a nick on the arm.

Alternate proposed rule, if you want to get messy:
Strength bonus to damage cannot exceed the die roll over the number needed to hit.

Therefore, if you exactly what you needed to hit, and no more, then you get no bonus to damage. If you roll 6 over what is needed to hit, you have room for up to +6 strength bonus. This rule could also be adapted for other types of bonuses, for obvious reasons.

Either of those two options could get you what you are looking for, IMO.

*~*~*

Or, if you want a third alternative:
Leave the system the f**k alone. Too many little rules make players unhappy. Unhappy players rebel, or at the very least lose interest and stay too focused on the rules, and not on the roleplay.

Of course... I've not been very good at following that advice... :)

[Kalmageddon]

I could see your strength bonus limited by the quality of the blow. I mean, if you just nicked it for a single point of damage, should you be getting +4 damage to that scratch?

This is more or less what I was thinking, in most systems the strength of the blow should represent how well you can overcome the toughness of an object or an enemy, but the entity of the damage itself should be determined by how accurate your hit was.
I feel this is a design decision that hasn't been explored all that much (at all?) in most games and it could have potential to spice things up, basically.

[Spiryt]

Quite a lot, I guess.

And most systems handle it decnetly, at least - strenght counts, but other things often count much more.

[Knaight]

Something that hasn't been mentioned here is that strength is useful in helping you move faster in general with the weapon. You'll be pulled less off balance by a lunge and able to recover faster, you'll be able to reverse the direction of a swing faster, you'll be able to do better winding, etc. Even if the weapon was completely unreliant on force of impact (e.g. a lightsaber) that would be useful.

[Jarawara]

The one thing I never liked about strength bonuses (a dislike which actually lead me to consider my previous proposal for my actual game), was that with even a modest bonus to damage, most level one humanoids died automatically in one hit. Since orcs and goblins were the mainstay of our game, having the autokill feature seemed... unrealistic at best.

That may be more of a product of my era - 1980 AD&D - since most people did not have strength bonuses at all (only 17 and up!), and when you did get a strength that high, you probably got yourself an 18 and rolled percentages for additional damage. As a result, most people had no bonus to damage, and a few had +3 and up. Most people required two hits to kill that orc, a few had the advantage of autokills. There was no gradual scale like there is now.

It did lead to a cool story where the 8th level Dwarf warrior Anakin Pitz was in combat with some gnolls, scored a hit, and *did not* kill it outright. It was the first time he had ever hit anything that did not die in the first blow. He was so amazed, he voluntarily skipped the next two rounds to represent his character's shock. :-)

However, nowadays hit points are higher, and strength bonuses are more gradual and thus more available. I just don't think my problem exists anymore, and thus no need to change it.

[draken50]

I would say that being stronger does always result in a more damage in melee.

Basically, I understand the concept of a maximal beneficial strength for a weapon. Lets say you wanted to hit someone with a piece of paper, being much stronger is not likely to cause you to be able to hit someone much "harder" with a piece of paper.

However, while this logic makes sense from a standpoint I would imagine this to be relatively worthless to consider from a game standpoint from a single hit perspective. The simplest reason is that yes. A being the size of a planet would potentially do less damage by hitting someone with a tree, than by just hitting them. So, it makes sense, but you're not really going to have your characters attacking folks with feathers or single pieces of paper, and if they are... its to play with the system and be silly, and if I was gm-ing, would probably get them killed.

The other factor is, that attack and damage roles in most systems, are described in the manual of the results of periods of fighting, 6 seconds I believe is 3.5s ect. Rather than the results of a single sword swing/punch/club smash ect.

In melee, from a martial arts perspective and having practiced in armor, being stronger can allow you too control your opponent more, to create weaknesses or openings that would allow you to do more "damage" beyond just the strength of your swing.

So a dagger may not seem like it would do more damage in the hands of a giant, unless you consider that he might be able to grab on to you for a short period time and slam that dagger into a "damaging" point. It's not really covered in grappling as he's not trying to take you to the ground and it's a short time frame, but it can be a decent explanation for the additional damage done beyond the power added to a single strike.

[Mr. Mask]

Karmageddon: Strength can help with damage. But as you implied, it is the lesser factor. Big guys will sometimes try to cut through a tatami mat, and they do swing very hard. Their cutting technique is rubbish, and they don't manage to split the silly thing. Then, you get to see the little seventy year old man cut the mat like butter.

Strength still has a bunch of uses. You can wrestle people better, recover from swings faster (as Knaight mentioned), carry heavier weapons (as was also mentioned), and not be tired as quickly from smaller weapons. Some weapons will appreciate strength more than others, like punching.

[draken50]

Okay, well I actually do Iaijutsu and have done tamashigiri on many occasions, and I can say from personal experience that the "Strength does not help" dogma is bunk. Especially because fighting is not cutting an immobile piece of mat.

First off... immobile piece of mat. Big guys cutting tatami aren't thrusting either which is definitely a valid tactic. Second, while using katana to cut tatami is a skill based exercise, strength does not mean that there is no skill. It's big fallacy people seem to get into. Strength <> Lack of skill. A stronger sword user can use a heavier sword. You know, because similar weapons do not mean they are the same.

A heavier sword with more power to wield it, can cut easier, especially larger targets, than a smaller one can.

If you think strength doesn't matter, duck tape a katana to a hippopotamas. then piss it off and fight it. It has no skill but plenty of strength and I'd bet 10-1 you'd die before it did.

[Mr. Mask]

You might want to read my post again. I already pointed out stronger persons can use heavier weapons.

If you can't use your cutting technique outside of practice... I'd get a better instructor.

[Wardog]

Strenght does increase the force of impact and damage done, yes. I don't recall the exact equation, but putting more mass/raw strenght behind a strike increases the impact in direct proportion, while increasing velocity of a strike increases impact energy in a logarithmic (?) proportion.

So if mass of strike is doubled while velocity remains same, the energy is doubled. If velocity is doubled while mass remains the same, the impact energy is tripled.

It's quadratic, not logarithmic.

kinetic energy = 0.5 * m * v^2

So doubling the velocity quadruples the energy. (At least, the energy of the weapon. How much is transfered to the target will depend on a whole lot of other things, and I'm not sure how "energy transfered to target" translates to "damage" either).

[Thrudd]

This is more or less what I was thinking, in most systems the strength of the blow should represent how well you can overcome the toughness of an object or an enemy, but the entity of the damage itself should be determined by how accurate your hit was.
I feel this is a design decision that hasn't been explored all that much (at all?) in most games and it could have potential to spice things up, basically.

It's a trade-off between a complex but more accurate model of combat and a more abstracted system that requires less math and plays faster.
I don't know what games you are thinking of, but in D&D combat is extremely abstracted. HP and AC as well as all the ability scores each represent a variety of things. Strength is not only the ability to generate force with your muscles, but also general athletic ability and natural fighting instincts. A person with high strength has a better chance of hitting because they are better at fighting, of which muscular development is just one part.

Advancement in level and the attending increase in attack bonus or to-hit charts represents increased skill which will eventually far surpass any natural talent received from ability scores.
Given an equal level or training/skill, being stronger and more naturally good at fighting gives an advantage.

Damage dealt and HP totals are likewise an abstraction which represent more than just physical toughness and "meat". HP also represents luck, fatigue, and skill at avoiding or redirecting attacks. The damage dealt therefore represents not just how deep of a cut or how broken the bones are, but overcoming and negating all those things which HP represents.

The abstraction does break down some when you get into magical items and enhancement bonuses from various sources. Part of that is unavoidable, as some compromise must be made in the interest of keeping the game somewhat simple and playable. Other problems occur as later editions have tried to become more granular and specific while at the same time not addressing or changing the highly abstracted basics of the game.

It would not be hard to create a system that was a more accurate model of combat, but increased complexity may result in decreased playability.

[Averis Vol]

Now, this is sort of a strange question that I've been thinking about, regarding a game mechanic that we basically take for granted.
Almost all game systems out there equates how strong a character is to how much damage he will be able to do in melee. On the surface this makes perfect sense, but then I thought: would being stabbed with a sword by someone of average strenght really be any less serious than being stabbed by a big hunk of a guy?
What about being smashed with a flanged mace? Would the strenght of the man wielding the mace change the outcome all that much?
Basically what I'm saying is... Don't weapons do most of the work anyway? A sword or a knife is made sharp exactly because it's able to cut into flesh even when not much force is put behind it, after all. And it's the weight of a mace that delivers the hurt.
Being strong doesn't affect much aside from your ability to wield the weapon without straining a muscle or getting tired, I would think.

Wouldn't it make more sense if the Strength score of a character represented his ability to ignore amor instead? Because that's basically the only instance I could think of when being really strong could help, when the enemy has an armor that the weapon you are wielding can't reliably penetrate.

D&D sort of does it, with Strength being your key ability score when making a melee attack to overcome the armor of the enemy, but then it also adds Strength to damage. I couldn't really think of any game that didn't work upon the assumption that most of the damage is done by the strenght of the attacker instead of being done by the weapon itself.
What do you guys think?

In real world combat, strength is actually one of the least important qualities for a good swordsman. Of course he needs to be strong enough to wield his weapon of choice, and realistically, all that a high strength means is that you can swing your weapon faster. But besides that, the ability to adapt to your opponents strikes and quickly interpose your own blade is a lot more important. So if we were to realistically stat out combat, your combat modifier would be some combination of dex, wis and int to hit. Damage would be part dex and part strength, and combat longevity would be based on con (like con score rounds of combat before you could no longer effectively fight).

Matt easton explains strength in combat amasingly in this video, if you want an idea of accurate swordsmanship, his video's will do great to point you on the right direction.

strength in swordsmanship

EDIT: Also, it doesn't matter how strong you are (in realistic means, I'm pretty sure superman could punch through full plate with a longsword) you arent going to penetrate fullplate with a sword. You will have to attack the weakspots like the joints, eye slits or the gorget. all smashing his quarter inch thick armor with your sword is going to do is break your blade. the commonality of fullplate at the end of the medieval period is exactly why techniques like halfswording were invented.

[Knaight]

In real world combat, strength is actually one of the least important qualities for a good swordsman. Of course he needs to be strong enough to wield his weapon of choice, and realistically, all that a high strength means is that you can swing your weapon faster. But besides that, the ability to adapt to your opponents strikes and quickly interpose your own blade is a lot more important. So if we were to realistically stat out combat, your combat modifier would be some combination of dex, wis and int to hit. Damage would be part dex and part strength, and combat longevity would be based on con (like con score rounds of combat before you could no longer effectively fight).

I really wouldn't put intelligence in there, and even wisdom is dubious (though perception is really useful, particularly outside of duel situations where there's more than one person to keep track of). The "ability to adapt to your opponents strikes and quickly interpose your own blade" is a learned skill. It's part muscle memory, part situational awareness, with a great deal of entirely subconscious built up intuition, all of which are probably trained and definitely practiced. From a realism perspective, having skill be the most important thing, with high strength being helpful and low strength being detrimental would be the way to go.

An obvious way to do this would be to have skill be used as the baseline, with everything else being a small modifier. In more granular systems, it would even be a conditional modifier - you might have skill 4, +1 if you have a big enough strength/speed/reach/battlefield awareness/whatever difference over someone else.

[Mr. Mask]

The rate your brain processes the situation still makes a difference to your subconscious intuition.

[Knaight]

The rate your brain processes the situation still makes a difference to your subconscious intuition.

Sure, but that's not really the sort of mental capability usually modeled with intelligence.

[Mr. Mask]

Fair enough.

[dramatic flare]

I really wouldn't put intelligence in there, and even wisdom is dubious (though perception is really useful, particularly outside of duel situations where there's more than one person to keep track of). The "ability to adapt to your opponents strikes and quickly interpose your own blade" is a learned skill. It's part muscle memory, part situational awareness, with a great deal of entirely subconscious built up intuition, all of which are probably trained and definitely practiced. From a realism perspective, having skill be the most important thing, with high strength being helpful and low strength being detrimental would be the way to go.

An obvious way to do this would be to have skill be used as the baseline, with everything else being a small modifier. In more granular systems, it would even be a conditional modifier - you might have skill 4, +1 if you have a big enough strength/speed/reach/battlefield awareness/whatever difference over someone else.

All I could think of when I read this was, "isn't that basically what base attack bonus and feats model?" Skill with your particular form of combat is, in Dnd terminology, just character level to some degree or another.

[Knaight]

All I could think of when I read this was, "isn't that basically what base attack bonus and feats model?" Skill with your particular form of combat is, in Dnd terminology, just character level to some degree or another.

Pretty much, though there's some weirdness in what overlaps, and some weirdness in defenses.

[dramatic flare]

Pretty much, though there's some weirdness in what overlaps, and some weirdness in defenses.

Yeah. Falling into pit traps and impaling your limbs on the stakes at the bottom wouldn't give you faster reflexes over time, but that's a different quandary.