A Most Unfortunate 3

So now we've covered the six intrinsic stats that every character gets when he starts play: Strength
through Charisma.  But don't you remember there is a seventh roll of 3d6 that every character gets that
can quickly determine life or death when you start him on his mythical journey?  The answer, of
course, is starting gold!

What's the whole reason we go into the dungeon in the first place?  MONEY! MONEY to buy better
gear, to hire men at arms, bribe a mayor or town watch, to carouse and meet a lady, and ultimately to
buy a castle and take over the world!

You have to have money to buy your armor and so forth.  With a paltry 30 GPs (a roll of 3 x10 GP),
you're going to be stuck with crummy options for armor and weapons.

Hauler by Stefan Poag

Option #1: Cooperate with (scam) your friends into pooling your resources and use some of their
money to buy what you need!

Option #2: Visit the town loan shark and take out a loan (at 100% per week interest) to buy the sweet
plate mail and pack mule you wanted to begin with.

Option #3: Play the plucky Peasant Hero with leather armor, a sling, and quarterstaff!  It's practically
free.

Option #4: Play the Wizard, because then all you need is a bath robe and the book your master gave
you.  And then make sure to take the best magic items every time.

In any case, the 3 in Starting Money might be the most telling and informative 3 of all.  You really have
to think hard to imagine why he's completely broke and how he got to be that way.  On the other hand,
nobody has a stronger motivation to get down into the dungeon and haul out some loot!

What are some other solutions to The Most Unfortunate 3?

So You Rolled a 3: Charisma

A pitiful and smelly Aghar family. Their Charisma may surprise you!

Charisma.  The Big Cheese in old-school games.  Nothing is more important than Charisma.  Let me
tell you why.

Charisma determines how many loyal assistants your character has.  Do you need a squire? You want a
Yolus or a Gabby?  A Dr. Watson?  Would you like to be able to call on Gentle Ben? Gosh, Doc Savage
could call on like ten different NPCs, all experts in their discipline. Loyal sidekicks are great to have,
and Charisma tells you how many you can have. 

Then there are hired hands. Are you hiring out a cadre of bodyguards and attendants to help you and
your party on their way?  Charisma determines how loyal those hapless sods are, and how often you
will have to worry about them running away or stabbing you in the face.  

Finally, Charisma will help parley with monsters and enemies - a higher Charisma score means less
fighting, and less fighting means less dying.  All in all, Charisma is the "god" stat of old-school play.

In the old-school game, characters start out as an adventuring party.  They are mostly cooperative
because each of them is a squishy weakling.  After all, they don't have to outrun the owlbear; they only
have to outrun the fighter in full plate mail! As they level, they will acquire both hirelings and loyal
assistants.  Each man is like a miniature party in and of himself, and the group will be able to
accomplish more, both together and individually.   Finally each man who has lived to Name level
(around 9th) will build himself a castle and clear the land, starting his own barony. Then it's on, brother.
Every man for himself! War and peace, civil and otherwise. Even then, to the degree that politics and
intrigue enter the campaign, Charisma and reaction checks are going to be very important.

So now we know what Charisma does do.  But let me talk about what low Charisma doesn't do.
 • Low Charisma  doesn't make you stutter.  It doesn't make you a mush-mouth. You can have a
low Charisma and also be able to speak properly, even speak well.
• Low Charisma doesn't mean you are ugly.  You can be quite pleasant to look at and still have a
low Charisma.
• Low Charisma doesn't mean you are smelly or have bad breath or wheeze or snore.  It doesn't
mean that people don't want to be around you!

All a low Charisma score says is that you are not an inspiring leader and you are not very persuasive!
Even a celebrity or politician can get by with a low Charisma!

So out of all the six character stats, Charisma is the most elusive.  It is slippery - you can't necessarily
point to some quality of a character and attribute to that low Charisma.  It's just one of those things that
you know it when you see it - and you might only "see" it on the character sheet.

So You Rolled A 3: Constitution

What does it mean to have a Constitution score of 3 in old the

school game?

Mechanically, it means you get one fewer Hit Point (or worse) per level, but always at least one.  And
more often than you would like, it's gonna be one!  So you're going to have to spend your career
playing turtle a lot.  In fact, you're almost assuredly destined to play the Magic User, because none of
the classes who engage in melee will live very long with so few Hit Points.

Qualitatively, it means you get sick a lot!  You never feel well.  You complain a lot because you hurt a
lot.  If someone is going to catch a disease in the party, you can bet it's going to be you!  Save or Die
poisons and diseases are particularly deadly to you.  You're not going to survive being turned into a
newt - you won't be getting better!
But why would you have a CON of 3?  Most people with a low CON score would have died already.
Maybe you got the Pox or the Plague or the Rattle, but you were one of the "lucky" ones to survive.
Maybe you are a drug addict or smoker - that would be fun to roleplay even if it's no good in real life.

What do you think a CON 3 could mean?

So You Rolled A 3: Dexterity

I frankly have little insightful to say.  I'm going to have to lean on your to think up something cool
about having a Dexterity of 3.  For many of the same reasons that Strength could be a 3, so could
Dexterity:  Overweight, athletically unpracticed, feeble, clumsy, and blind or nearly-blind.

But it could also be due to Parkinson's Disease or Syndrome, or ALS, or polio.  Some muscular-
skeletal-nervous system disorder that is nonlethal, and for some reason you man was able to live
through childhood despite his disability.  While most people in that situation would be lame beggars,
your man has decided to seek his fortune in some way.  Because of his penalty wit missile weapons and
a worse AC, he will be at a disadvantage. But because the penalties are small he will not be at a huge
disadvantage like he would be in a new school game.

Can you think of other reasons why your man might have a Dex of 3?
So You Rolled A 3: Wisdom

Oblivious by Michael Wood

Wisdom represents your man's powers of observation, his intuition, and the sum total of the knowledge
he as gained through passive observation of people, places and things.  Generally, someone is wiser
when they are older than when they are younger, but they might not have been too wise to start with!
So what can you say about a character who has a Wisdom of 3?

This was a hard one for me.  I suppose the first thing you might say is that the person is quite myopic.
If you can't see details, then it would be very hard to spot traps, describe monsters, or even recognize
and differentiate between acquaintances.  Reading runes and "reading" peoples' emotions and so forth
becomes much harder.

You might instead say that the person is an ADHD case who can't concentrate enough to provess what
he's seeing and hearing.  Remembering names and faces becomes nearly impossible. Concentrating on
searching for a trap or, for instance, counting a large number of objects is very difficult.  The person is
always mentally far away even if he's right there with you trying to have a conversation.

You could also say perhaps the person is "on the spectrum" and gets super-focused on whatever he's
interested in at that moment to the exclusion of all other details.

But I'm really more interested in what you think a 3 in Wisdom might mean. I'm sure I'm missing
something obvious; what do you think it is?
So You Rolled A 3: Intelligence

Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!  It's

easy to imagine a
particularly dim fighting
man, who is only good for
sucking up hits and
swinging a mighty battle
axe. Decades of half-orcs
and barbarians have been
played like this and the trope has been screwed right into the ground, like some goofy Dwarf with a
Scottish brogue. 

But remember in the old school, an Intelligence score of 3 is perfectly playable. Like we said with
Strength, an Int of 3 doesn't necessarily mean someone is feeble-minded. It means instead that they
might not be so clever, creative, or be passionate about learning. It might mean they are willfully
ignorant of the world around them - incurious, as opposed to unobservant (that's covered by Wisdom). 

The most likely scenario is that the person is quite passionate about his field of expertise but you can't
get him to think very deeply about anything he doesn't care about. Fighting Men are very smart about
fighting; clerics are very smart about religion and monster hunting; and magic users are very smart
about spells and magic items. 

Yes, even a Magic-User can have an Int of 3 in the old rules! In most rules sets, his XP will be
penalized slightly, but he is perfectly able to cast spells and even able to learn new ones like his high-
Int peers!

But what an INT 3 does NOT say is that you, the player, have to stop being clever.  You can use your
player knowledge to solve problems and get by.  Don't even think you have to dumb yourself down
because your man is dumb!

So You Rolled a 3: Strength

What does a STR of 3 mean in old school games?

Well, first let's talk about AD&D 1st Edition.  At the break point of 1E, the Strength stat was for the
first time assigned a value.

Chart Copyright 2000-2002 by Stephen Nispel

We can see that the STR 3 guy can lift an astonishing 10 pounds over his head!  And he has a 0%
chance of bending steel bars or lifting a portcullis (clearly two especially important actions in 1st
Edition.)  In later editions and up until the present day, we have imagined that a STR of 3 correlates to
the weakest of the weaklings across the spectrum of people everywhere.  

But in old school play, this simply is not so!  A Strength score of 3 has no exact weight correlation.  A
STR of 3 can certainly mean someone who is a complete weakling, but it doesn't make sense that a
veteran adventurer would be too feeble to carry his own gear, does it?  No, it does not.  Instead, a STR
of 3 just means your man is very weak compared to other adventurers - perhaps he would have little
chance of winning an arm wrestling contest.  Certainly he would have little chance to bend iron bars or
break down a door with his bare hands, among other feats of strength.  

But a STR 3 character is strong enough to carry his gear, wear his armor, and swing a weapon
(just perhaps not as forcefully as Conan might do).  As far as other strength-related tasks, he would
likely fail most of the time.  That's all it means.

So therefore what can we say about your man when you roll a 3?  Perhaps he is a child.  Perhaps he is
very old.  Perhaps he is as strong as a normal person but so grand that it takes all his might just to
propel himself around on his two tree-trunk legs!  And this will get me in trouble to say in this day and
age, but perhaps he is actually a she* instead?  If you really want to get kooky, maybe you say your
man only has one arm or his legs do not work.  He's unable to perform a wide range of feats of strength
because of this drawback.

Do not despair when you roll a 3 for Strength.  Let it inform you about your man.  You will be all
the more heroic for overcoming such a limitation.

*There ought to be no mechanical difference between male and female characters, so you are free to
play a woman with an 18 STR.  However in the real world almost all women are less strong than
almost all men.  It's just a fact of biology.