At the risk of sounding like an absolute geek – oh, who am I kidding, far too late – I’m trying to get into the classic Baldur’s Gate computer game series, and I have two questions about Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition rules:
[ol]
[li]When a character’s strength is 18/84 or 18/00, what do the numbers after the slash mean?[/li][li]When you roll a new character, is there an overall limit to your attribute points (STR, CHA, etc.) spread across all the attributes or can you theoretically get 18s in all of them if you keep re-rolling? Yes, I realize they call this munchkinism or whatever and that’s a-ok by me.[/li][/ol]
That’s “heroic strength”. Basically, it’s an additional STR bonus for fighter-type characters when they roll an 18 strength. It’s based on a d100 roll, “00” being short for 100, so “18/00” would be the highest possible bonus.
Theoretically, yes, but i’ve never seen it happen.
Would an 18/00 strength be better than a 19 (via items, etc.)? I wonder why they didn’t just make it so that fighters could roll up to 20 or some such.
Damage bonus is +7 instead of +6. Strength scores of 19 and higher are meant to be the preserve of exceptionally strong nonhuman critters, and 19 is a big jump from 18. It all gets revised in 3rd Ed, but this odd system’s a hangover from the really early days, before even AD&D!
Unmodified 18: +1 to hit, +2 to damage
18/01-18/50: +1 to hit, +3 to damage
18/51-18/75: +2 to hit, +3 to damage
18/76-18/90: +2 to hit, +4 to damage
18/91-18/99: +2 to hit, +5 to damage
18/00: +3 to hit, +6 to damage
(A 19 gives +3/+7.)
– I’m trying to get into the classic Baldur’s Gate computer game series, and I have two questions about Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition rules: