In the earliest days of Dungeons & Dragons, players rolled to determine their ability scores. On 3d6. In order.

Creating a character involved rolling your ability scores and then choosing the race and class you wanted to play based on those scores.

There was one element that alleviated the “3d6 in order” rule: You could reduce your scores in other abilities to increase that of your prime ability. But as you couldn’t reduce an ability score below nine, this rule was often of limited utility.

But note: high ability scores did very little. Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom? They only affected how much experience a character gained. A fighter with an 18 Strength had no benefit to hit or damage but gained a 10% bonus to all earned experience.

The effect of having Dexterity 13+? +1 to missile attacks. And that was it: high Dexterity didn’t modify your AC. Constitution gave at most +1 to each hit die (Con 15+) or -1 to each hit die (Con 5-). So, ability scores weren’t as important in that original game.

The Rise of Ability Scores

The release of Supplement I: Greyhawk in 1975 made ability scores far more prominent. There were two aspects to this.

First, ability scores gave more mechanical bonuses. Fighters (only) gained bonuses to attack and damage from Strength. Magic-Users needed good Intelligence to master more spells.

Second, certain classes required minimum ability scores to play. The first of these was the Paladin, which required a 17 Charisma.

Advanced Dungeons of Dragons expanded this concept further. The Paladin also required a Strength of 12, Wisdom of 13, and Constitution of 9 in addition to that 17 Charisma. The Monk required minimum scores in Strength, Wisdom and Dexterity of 15, and a Constitution of 11.

Unearthed Arcana in 1985 introduced the most difficult class to qualify for – the Cavalier/Paladin. You needed Str 15, Int 10, Wis 13, Dex 15, Con 15, Cha 17. Try rolling that on 3d6! But that was no longer the accepted way of creating characters.

Generating Better Ability Scores

I’m certain that many people in the early days discarded unplayable characters. When the AD&D Player’s Handbook was released, it didn’t even mention that you should roll 3d6 six times in order. Instead, it directed you to ask the Dungeon Master which method you should use.

The AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide provided four suggestions for ways you could generate statistics and, interestingly, omits the basic method of “3d6 six times in order”. Instead, the DM would choose one of these options

• Roll 4d6 six times, dropping the lowest die each time, and arrange the scores in any order you liked.
• Roll 3d6 twelve times, take the six best results and arrange the scores according to preference.
• Roll 3d6 six times for each statistic in order, taking the best result each time.
• Roll up twelve characters using 3d6 in order, and take the one you liked the best.

Unearthed Arcana, with its classes that were insanely hard to qualify for, introduced the fifth method.

• Humans (only) could nominate the character class they wanted and roll a set number of dice per ability score depending on their selection. (Say nine for Strength, three for Intelligence, etc.) They’d take the highest three of each one. Even with 9d6, that didn’t guarantee an 18. If a character

Still, the most common way – and AD&D second edition adopted this one – was rolling 4d6. For the most part, you could create all but the rarest classes (e.g. Monk, Paladin) with that fairly consistently. And it’s still in the latest edition, about forty years later.

Ability Checks

By the time of AD&D second edition in 1989, the idea of making an ability check to see if you succeeded at something non-combat related was a solid part of the game. For the most part, it was “roll a d20 and try to get under your ability score”.

However, it wasn’t in the original game! It took until the release of Oriental Adventures in 1985 before the first mention of that mechanic appeared in an AD&D rulebook. Meanwhile, the rule had made it into Moldvay’s revision of Basic D&D in 1981.

Somewhere – and I think it’s in an early The Strategic Review or The Dungeon magazine – there’s a method described of rolling 3d6, 4d6, 5d6 or 6d6 (depending on difficulty) under an ability score to succeed at a task. Does anyone remember that?

However, the ability scores did exist, so I’m sure the early DMs used them in many ways.

On Emergent Play

Rolling stats first, then deciding on your character, is very different from today’s method. The choice is not “I’m playing a fighter, let’s build a good fighter”, but rather “I’m playing someone who’d make a good fighter, I’ll play that!”

It’s part of the entire “emergent story” basis that you can see in early D&D. You sat down to play a game, you went into a dungeon, and you didn’t know where things might go – but the DM and the players shaped things together. “Here’s an environment, go explore it!” Neither way of playing the game is wrong – but you should choose the one that appeals to you and your group more!

Of course, when your only choices for character class are Fighting Man, Cleric or Magic-User, it’s a different thing than the plethora of options available today!

Modern Play

The Moldvay edition of Basic D&D in 1981 sowed the seeds of how we use ability scores today. The AD&D method was for each ability score to function differently, with different tables showing what each affected. In Moldvay’s D&D, for most abilities, a 13-15 gave a +1 bonus, a 16-17 gave a +2 bonus, and an 18 gave a +3 bonus.

This system was made more regular with the release of D&D third edition in 2000. An ability score of 10 gave a +0 bonus, and it increased by +1 for every two points above that. We still use that system today.

Meanwhile, D&D third edition also introduced the idea of applying that bonus to ability and skill checks. So, instead of rolling a d20 and trying to roll under your ability score, you’d add the bonus and try to hit a target number – a difficulty class (DC).

The biggest change in how D&D fifth edition handles ability scores compared to the previous two editions is in how it limits then – but that’s a topic for another time!