Why Can't Xylarthen be a Fighter II?

The three original books of Dungeons and Dragons, including Men & Magic were published in 1974.  The first supplement, Greyhawk came out in 1975 and introduced a number of rules clarifications and additions, many of which would make it into Advanced Dungeons and Dragons a few years later.  Among other things, tables were introduced for Strength, Intelligence and Constitution that provided explicit bonuses for high ability scores and explicit penalties for low ones.  Here is the table for Strength:

The To Hit and Damage bonuses were only for fighters.  Indeed, fighters with 18+ Strength could make a further roll with percentile dice for even greater bonuses:

Gygax writes:

Fighters of exceptional strength are now far more formidable opponents, and those of extraordinary strength even more terrible in that they can hit more easily, do more damage, lug large amounts of loot around without encumbrance, bend iron bars and perform other feats of strength with ease.

It's worth noting that the tables say nothing about how Strength might help one "bend iron bars".  This would have to wait until the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook was published three years later.

But I want to go back to my original question.  Consider our friend Xylarthen with a Strength of 6. The new tables would seem to offer more reason why "there was no real chance for him to become a fighter." Now, in addition to his 10% penalty on earned experience, he will have a -1 penalty on To Hit rolls, may carry 50 fewer gold pieces and will be glaringly ineffective (50% worse than the average man) at bashing open heavy dungeon doors.

But at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'm going to ask again, are those things so bad?  Do the penalties significantly increase the chances that Xylarthen will, say, fail to make it to 2nd level?  Is the character just "hopeless" in terms of mere survival?  Or is there something else going on here?

Why Can't Xylarthen be a Fighter I?

On  p. 10 of Men & Magic, the first of the original “three brown books”, published in 1974, Gary Gygax introduces the “supposed player” Xylarthen to show how one creates a character.  Xylarthen’s ability scores are these:

Strength              6

Intelligence       11

Wisdom              13

Constitution      12

Dexterity             9

Charisma            8

What class does Xylarthen choose?

This supposed player would have progressed faster as a Cleric, but because of a personal preference for magic opted for that class. With a strength of only 6 there was no real chance for him to become a fighter.

Now, this is a very different sort of character from the ability score superhero that would later become so common.  Gygax himself would say a few years later that unless a character had a 15+ score in at least two abilities he would be “hopeless”.

Under the original rules set—with its scaled down hit points, lower damage (for characters and monsters) and lack of many explicit bonuses or handicaps for those with exceptionally high or low abilities--such an “average” character would be perfectly respectable and viable.

But why then not go all the way with that?  Why can’t Xylarthen be a fighter?

One answer is that with a Strength score of 6 it looks like he would suffer a 20% penalty on earned experience.  That’s the only penalty, by the way, in the three original books of OD&D for having a low Strength—unless one counts being possibly worse at opening doors, worse at “opening traps” (whatever that means, exactly), and inferior at facing off in a test of mental and physical power against lycanthropes, magic swords and the like.

But in fact, he wouldn't suffer a 20% penalty to experience.  Under the ability swapping rules and "for the purpose of experience only", he could use 2 points of Intelligence and 3 points of Wisdom to  adjust his prime requisite score upwards to 8 and thus only suffer a 10% penalty.  Is that so bad?  I don’t think so, especially if one had, say, a “personal preference for fighting.”

So what’s going on here?  Does Gygax in 1974 have some set of rules that he’s sitting on—Greyhawk, perhaps—that makes it more explicit why a fighter wouldn’t want a low score in Strength?  Or is he counting on referees to come up with their own rules and/or rulings to make abilities more meaningful? Or is it just that he thinks a 20% (or even 10%) loss in earned experience would be intolerable?  Or is the whole thing just some sort of mistake or oversight?

Greetings!

Over the last year, I have immensely enjoyed and learned from many of the OSR blogs.  So I thought I would try my hand at it.  One of my goals is to sharpen my thoughts about gaming and game design—a process that will hopefully include receiving feedback from other old school gamers—in part to help me put together an old school Dungeons and Dragons variant with a 16^th-century setting.  But I’m also fascinated by the history and evolution of the game for its own sake, and I think it’s interesting and fun to think and talk about it.

Tomorrow I’ll have a few questions to ask about Xylarthen.

Cheers!

Oakes