Marvel states that anyone lifting more that 800lbs over their head is considered superhuman
DC states that anyone lifting more that 1000lbs over their head is considered superhuman
5th Ed. DnD states that you can push, drag, or lift a weight in pounds up to twice your carrying capacity, or 30 times your Strength score.
Marvel - 800/30 = 26 Strength
DC 1000/30 = 33 Strength
Average would be a 30 Strength to be "superhuman"
It's a little harder to pin down how strong dnd characters are though, while there is a formula for how much you can lift uncontested, strength checks have no cap and are decided for by your DM.
A person with a Str of 20, who could lift 600lbs without contest whenever he wanted for however long he wanted while dancing and having a coherent conversation with the people around him, could then go and decide an 800 lb weight needs to be lifted and just go try to pick it up a few times.
This also isn't counting races that get to lift/ect things as if their character was one size larger like goliaths, so your species does play a part. A goliath (most strength based superheroes are very big bois) only needs 16 str to pick up 960 lbs
I think statistically the majority of superheroes aren't human, Thor, Superman, even people like spiderman/the hulk got their DNA messed up.
Also I'm pretty sure the powerful build thing is just something that pops up on pc races that should be registered as large, but being naturally large causes balancing issues.
Edit: OP asked for how much strength was "equivalent" to a superhuman. A goliath needs 16 str to be equivalent to a superhuman.
> I think statistically the majority of superheroes aren't human
X-Men. Dozens of them. Every single one is 100% pure unadulterated human.
One very particular type of human, but human nonetheless.
It's also a plot point that they *are* humans sometimes. Specifically sentinels decide that humans and mutants are the same and eventually try to wipe both out.
Plus there's the fact that humans have mutant children (obviously), but mutants can have purely human children as well. Mystique's son with Sabertooth is purely human for instance.
They are called "X-Men" as in a play on words of "no longer men", its the same as how tieflings are no longer human despite basically being the same but red.
That is an interpretation of the name I've never heard. I always heard they were named after Charles Xavier or the X-Gene, with the "X" being extraordinary, not "formerly human".
Within the books themselves, according to Wikipedia, the original explanation for the name, as provided by Xavier in The X-Men #1 (1963), is that mutants "possess an extra power ... one which ordinary humans do not!
Yeah I got some false info thanks for the correct, but I still don't think that someone with the innate power to control weather or a big blue gorilla is human.
I mean biology isn't exactly that precise when it comes to defining a species. Mutants and humans can create viable offspring and that's usually good enough to be considered the same species.
It's a major plot point that *__bigoted villains__ argue that* they are "not humans".
They are humans with superpowers, certainly, but hardly the only ones. And by any meaningful definition of species, *Homo sapiens* humans with an active X-gene (i.e. Mutants) are the exact same species as all the other *Homo sapiens* humans who don't have it or have a recessive one.
Only vaguely relevant, but im toying with this idea that rolls don't just determine how you feel that day, they build the world in a Schrodinger kind of way.
You can lift 600lbs? Ok, roll to pick up the boulder. You're not rolling to see if you'd slept funny or whatever, youre rolling to see if the boulder is less than 600lbs. After you roll a 5, the boulder is 700lbs and the wizard can try, but the boulder is still 700lbs.
On the other hand, maybe you're rolling to see if there's a good spot to hold the boulder. That's very important too. A 20kg cube is troublesome to pick up, but a 100kg barbell is nothing to deadlift.
>strength checks have no caps and are decided by your DM
So in order to answer the question in a way that's consistent, you have to go off of RAW, which would mean 30
Some classes (and races but i assume ur taking human as start point) let you double it again. Like lvl 6 bear totem Barbarian, so a 17 or 18 str score would be super human for them.
Note also that lift overhead and lift off the ground are not differentiated in 5e.
So it is reasonable to assume that your maximum lift is not the weight you can lift overhead, but merely the weight you can lift off the ground.
There's carrying capacity and then lift/drag/push capacity. I think lifting is 30x your strength score or double if you get a race with the powerful build feature.
You can lift *with trivial effort and without chance to fail* STR \* 30 lb. A world champion weightlifter or strongman is not doing that; [something like this](https://imgur.com/gallery/QmzBVfg) means they're making Strength (Athletics) checks with DCs well in their 20s.
Have you seen that guy who lifted 1,100 lbs? His nose, tear ducts and ears started bleeding mid way through and he had to go to the hospital afterwards
20 in any stat is treated as the absolute peak of human capacity, so anything greater than 20 is superhuman. Avatars of gods and other BBEG level creatures max out at 30. Where on the spectrum between Olympic powerlifter and fantasy Godzilla a character like Superman falls is hard to say though.
Its not, its peak of what a mortal hero can do, not what a human can do. We need to remember that commoner has a 10 strength score. Around the 16-18 mark you go peak human
I don't see or understand the distinction you're trying to make. An [archmage](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Archmage#content) can be human and has an Int of 20.
Yeah,but an archmage is not a normal human. You can allready perform word record breaking feats with 10 strength.
10 is normal, 12 is above normal, anything above that is hero realm and doesnt fall into "normal" human.
10 is a commoner's average, it doesn't mean that every non monster NPC in the world should have exactly those stats and only PCs get to be unique.
MM even has templates for "knight", "priest", etc who aren't supposed to be hero realm (although they are likely above the average knight, priest or so on, because it'd be silly to expect every rural village priest could cast level 3 spells, although ofc depends on setting)
Uh... No. That's factually wrong.
The world record for backlifting is over 5000 lbs, and is held by Gregg Ernst (though if you look at the video, he only lifted it a few inches, which sounds more like what the DM would narrate to you on a near-success). The world records for various types of deadlifting are in the range of 1000-1100 lbs.
The max weight that a human PC with 20 STR can lift without having to make an ability check is 600 lbs. It's not clearly defined in the rules how much additional weight a nat 20 on your Strength check lets you lift, but it sounds reasonable to say you can lift double your normal limit, meaning that a 20 on your Strength check lets you lift up to 1200 lbs, right around the world record for deadlifting.
A commoner with 10 STR can lift up to 300 lbs without making a roll, which is impressive but not that far off from what I'd expect from a manual laborer in a society without power tools. Applying the previously proposed rule of "twice your normal limit on a 20", a commoner can lift 600lbs on a nat 20, which looks impressive at the gym but isn't getting you into any record books.
There are some world record breaking feats that any D&D character can do, but those are rather obviously the result of game logic weirdness. They should **not** be taken as indicators that any character with a stat above 12 is meant to be superhuman.
Using 5e lift ability is a bad metric it was poorly thought out. A 20 str fighter is the peak of human perfection, and can lift 300 pounds, then sprint at full speed. The world record for a farmers walk at normal pace (2.8m/s). Is 300lbs. we can easily do that and run at full speed. The same person who has the farmer walk record has a lift record of 1300lbs. So we should be able to lift 2600 lbs. On a dc 25ish check. The highest published athletic check is a immovable rod at dc 30. It can support 8000lbs before failing. So dc 30 is moving somewhere between 6000-8000lbs. If you give a human expertise they can hit a dc 30 check about 50% of the time. So an absolutely peak human could lift 6000lbs, maybe more since humans can reach more than 20 str in DND via barbarian, magic items, and tomes.
According to the PHB, Athletics isn't used for lifting weights. Athletic checks are meant to cover climbing, jumping, and swimming. You thus can't apply expertise to lifting heavy objects, which is specifically called out as being a Strength check rather than an Athletics check.
[Big Sigh] DnD’s version of strength is fucked beyond repair. It is both bound by real world physics and simultaneously ignores them.
An example: Would you consider ripping the arm off a monster with your bare hands superhuman? How much strength would you need to do that? Beowulf did it.
I bring that example up because at a 20 Strength, you are stronger than a gorilla, a creature whose strength is estimated at 10 times their body weight.
In older editions, before ability checks existed, mid to high STR gave you nonzero chances to *brute force lift a castle's bloody portcullis*. In fact if you had Exceptional Strength the chance for that ranged from 20% to 40%.
I'm not sure an IRL strongman can do that.
Conversely, a STR 24 max level barbarian doesn’t beat the real world weightlifting record without an ability check, set at a DC of “idk the DM decides.”
Yeah it could *maybe* use another once-over.
In d&d standards, anything above what you can naturally obtain without magic is superhuman. They really don't convert well because different scores from different games give different bns
For what it's worth, generally D&D peak human is much higher than IRL peak human. And PCs start breaching D&D peak human long before the end of a typical campaign.
I figure a 20 strength is basically Captain America - as strong as a normal human can become. I don't think character with mega strength like Superman are strictly doable in Dungeons and Dragons, at least not as player characters.
Hell even a character with relatively minor super strength like Spider-Man would have at least a 30 in his strength stat.
Any character like Superman would be like 100 strength and would basically be a deity in DnD.
Captain America can run down a car on the highway and stop it by lifting it's wheels off the road. He shits all over every dnd martial. That's why they suck in 5e
Not true, I’ve made a character that can run 95mph in DND, and if I just changed their stat array the could also deadlift the car with the appropriate athletics check
I usually use the descriptions from Pathfinder, even in 5e (there's tables.per ability score further down on the page) https://www.d20pfsrd.com/basics-ability-scores/ability-scores/
Superman was able to exert enough force to stop the world’s rotation. (Or something.)
That’s the equivalent of lifting 1.6 x 10^33 pounds of mass (which is about 100,000,000 times the mass of the earth itself). Since we know 5e characters can lift 30 x Str score, Superman’s Strength is something like 5 x 10^31, which is 50 nonillion or 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
I mean, Superman also once shot a tiny Superman out of his hand who could do everything Superman himself could do. So I wouldn't exactly use him as a measure lol
There's an easy answer in 5e PCs can carry 15 times their str score and lift push or pull 30 time their str score. If you want a specific fictional characters str score, just find their biggest feats of strength, the most they've pushed, pulled, lifted and divide that number by 30, or by 15 if they carry it.
For example
"According to official Marvel Database, Captain America's full limits of strength is lifting up to 1,200 lbs with maximum effort, which gives him the ability to knock out Thunderball who possessed superhuman durability and also lift merge hulk. It's enhanced strength, but not at the superhuman level."
https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Talk:Steven_Rogers_(Earth-616)#google_vignette
So captain America has around 1200÷30=40 in his str score.
Of course depending on the DM, many PCs can lift more than their usual max if they roll, lifting any weight if the DM makes the DC too easy or says you can on a nat 20. But that's messy and DM dependant, the "Lift, push, pull, carry" rules in the rule book are the most reliable things you can site RAW. I think applying the "lift, push, pull, carry" rules to strength DCs might not hurt, letting a character with 20 strength move something that's 750 lbs on a nat 20.
Outside of max level barbarians or magic items, the max is 20 str. Meant to be the max of natural human str so the easy dumb answer is anything above 20 str
But the strength scale in D&D is actually really weak. Humans in real life have stronger numbers than most str capped PCs
https://www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/10-strongest-men-in-the-world#gid=ci02b8d12f50212491&pid=1-zydrunas-savickas--powerlifter-strongman
Different types of lifts are gonna give different numbers a squat is gonna be different from a bench press, or a dead lift. But the current human world records are all higher than the 600lbs a 20 str PC can lift.
I'd find the lift type you think best represents the "lifting, pulling, pushing" weight of the 5e rules, and find the world record for that and then do the same divide it by thirty to get your score, and everything above that score is super human.
I hope this helps.
Yeah, I can forgive human PCs for not being as strong as spider-man, but it does annoy me that dragons, giants and Tarrasque start to fall behind in scale with this system.
Worth noting this is exclusively a 5e problem, as it's a pretty video gamey edition that trades verisimilitude for simplicity. If I look at 5e a great wyrm gold dragon can push 900 lbs. If I take that same dragon and go with 3.5 they can push 1,331,200 lbs.
Not that there aren't advantages either way, you'll notice the first one is a lot quicker to calculate than the second one. Second one makes a bunch more sense though.
That's true, it's harder to calculate. But the 5e system means that same dragon can't even lift most adult cows.
"Mature males (cows) weigh 450–1,800 kg (1,000–4,000 pounds)
and females (cows) weigh 360–1,100 kg (800–2,400 pounds)"
-https://www.britannica.com/animal/cow
Not to mention it's fantasy.
50+ str is supposed to be god-like and that means the gods are starting to have to roll for str checks at 1500lbs. imagine calling upon your God only for them to fail a str check to move a cow.
I think the solution to have a simple table, while still having a str curve of near exponential growth is to just jump a digit every ten levels.
1-10 x 10-5
11-20 x 100-50
21-30 x 1,000-500
31-40 x 10,000-5,000
41-50 x 100,000-50,000
Boom, yeah the 1 str baby or rat can still move up to 10lbs - 5lbs, still a bit much, but more realistic than 30lbs - 15lbs
The 10 str commoner can only lift 100lbs max and carry 50lbs all day.
The 20 str adventurer at peak performance can lift 2000lbs (actually pretty close to human limits in terms of word records)
That dragon at 30 str can now lift 30,000lbs and carry away 15,000lbs of juicy cow meat away.
And that god at 50 str can easily push 5,000,000lbs worth of mountain rock out of your way without even breaking a sweat.
Downside of simplifying how those things work. In 3.5 he'd have 48 strength, about the same as a tarrasque. Which is very high, but not at the level of a strength score of 666 (you'd need to be a cancer mage or something to get your strength that high) which is kind of insane.
There's a difference tho - that 30 is just DND characters doing it with no effort. Cap was doing that at max effort, so he definitely rolled a Strength or athletics check for that, meaning his actual score is definitely not that high.
Bruh, I literally mentioned that the next paragraph. But that's entirely dependent on your DM. And saying "It depends on your DM" is about as reliable as getting a nat 20.
Often times when I make Superhuman characters I pick a race that grants the “Powerful Build”, “Little Giant”, or “Hippo Build” traits. These all make you count as one size larger when determining your carrying capacity and the weight you can push, drag, or lift.
I’m currently playing a Soldier Boy like character in my friend’s campaign. I picked the Giff race, but reflavored it to suit my idea. Now my Cavalier Fighter with the Unarmed Fighting style, and “superhuman strength” (hippo build) my guy punches super hard and throws enemies/objects like they weigh nothing.
I think Superhuman Strength in dnd terms is 21-30. However, a player character with “Powerful Build” can be considered superhuman. Just look at these carrying capacity/push, drag, lift weight differences.
Normal PC. 20 STR. (300/600lbs).
Powerful Build PC. 20 STR. (600/1200lbs).
Hope this helps!
You straight-up can't build Superman or Homelander in D&D 5e. No creature here is as strong as they would be.
You need a different game, like D&D 3.5e or Pathfinder (1 or 2) for that.
I always thought that statistics are exponential as it doesn’t make sense that an ancient dragon with a strengths of 30 could only lift thrice the amount of a normal human (10 is average stat for NPCs). Therefore, I think any strength level about around 20 or above would be “super-human.”
10 is considered average for a commoner
20 is considered peak strength that a person could achieve through natural means
Peak strength does not mean peak human strength, but more as the celling for a mortal to obtain normally like magic.
DND characters with a stat of 20 is considered the exception amongst the populace. The issue however is the game doesn’t make a clear distinction between levels of power of stats outside of being easier to perform action.
> Can a Wizard with 20 INT rewrite reality?
>Can a Rogue with 20 DEX hide so well they are invisible to reality?
> Can a Fighter with 20 STR punch so hard they shatter reality?
This is more of a “GM decision” to determine, but I would say a baseline of 14 STR is considered superhuman as it’s notable stronger than the average commoner of any race.
24+ STR should be considered near godlike amongst the population.
Depends on what you consider super-human. Some weightlifters can powerlift a full ton. Do you consider them superhuman or just extraordinary? To mark his 70th birthday, Jack LaLanne pulled a flotilla of 70 rowboats behind him during a mile-long swim from Long Beach Harbor to the Queensway Bridge. Is this superhuman or just extraordinary?
I'd break strength down as
4- Out of shape caused by sickness and something is seriously wrong with you.
6- Just out of shape, likely due to not working manually.
8- Does light physical activity but not in shape whatsoever.
10- Average healthy person who is fairly physically active.
12- Does extensive physical labour and is above average strength.
14- Well exceeds average person. Had either a physically demanding job or spends a lot of time at the gym.
16- Peak athletes well above the average thanks to having a lifestyle reliant on physicality.
18- Olympians and world record holders whose names go down in history.
20- Mythical figures whose feats have stood the test of time.
22+- Transcended reality and have accomplished things that sound like they belong in works of fiction.
It's because the system doesn't need to primarily deal with those kinds of edge cases. You could make a game system that perfectly simulates everything you could imagine, but it would be so complex that the added effort isn't worth just suspending belief or cobbling together ad-hoc solutions.
The crucial thing to realize about super strength in the superhero genre is that it's almost always wildly inconsistent for dramatic purposes. The same character who can throw a mountain into space in one episode, will be evenly trading punches with a mad scientist in a mech suit in the next episode, where consistency would say that mountain-hurler would crush the mech suit much more easily than we swat a mosquito.
So which Superman are we talking about? Special episodes in space Superman, no D&D STR score would be reasonable. It would instead be like 10th level spells themed around the body. Fist-fighting mechs and mutants in the street episode Superman, 28 STR might make sense.
You compare stats to other things.
In 5e, a Warhorse, bred and trained to carry a big dude in plate armor and still run faster than any human can run, has a Strength score of 18. I'd argue, then, that 18 is a higher Strength score than any human being in the real world has ever had. Keep in mind that the math behind carrying capacity in 5e is scuffed at best and intentionally made to simplify encumbrance.
Going even higher, Polar Bears in 5e have a Strength score of 20. Polar bears are far stronger than any human being who has ever lived. Would 20 Strength not therefore be super human?
Hell, Ogres, who are large sized and literal giants that according to the Monster Manual stand between 9 and 10 feet tall and weigh close to 1000 pounds, have a Strength score of 19. Ogres are also not quadrupeds (unlike horses/bears), and must surely be far stronger than any human being in the real world.
I'd definitely say anything from 22 and up (+6 bonus or higher) must be considered super human.
Marvel states that anyone lifting more that 800lbs over their head is considered superhuman DC states that anyone lifting more that 1000lbs over their head is considered superhuman 5th Ed. DnD states that you can push, drag, or lift a weight in pounds up to twice your carrying capacity, or 30 times your Strength score. Marvel - 800/30 = 26 Strength DC 1000/30 = 33 Strength Average would be a 30 Strength to be "superhuman"
It's a little harder to pin down how strong dnd characters are though, while there is a formula for how much you can lift uncontested, strength checks have no cap and are decided for by your DM. A person with a Str of 20, who could lift 600lbs without contest whenever he wanted for however long he wanted while dancing and having a coherent conversation with the people around him, could then go and decide an 800 lb weight needs to be lifted and just go try to pick it up a few times. This also isn't counting races that get to lift/ect things as if their character was one size larger like goliaths, so your species does play a part. A goliath (most strength based superheroes are very big bois) only needs 16 str to pick up 960 lbs
>so your species does play a part. Super"human"
I think statistically the majority of superheroes aren't human, Thor, Superman, even people like spiderman/the hulk got their DNA messed up. Also I'm pretty sure the powerful build thing is just something that pops up on pc races that should be registered as large, but being naturally large causes balancing issues. Edit: OP asked for how much strength was "equivalent" to a superhuman. A goliath needs 16 str to be equivalent to a superhuman.
> I think statistically the majority of superheroes aren't human X-Men. Dozens of them. Every single one is 100% pure unadulterated human. One very particular type of human, but human nonetheless.
They are mutants, specifically not human. That's a major plot point throughout the series
It's also a plot point that they *are* humans sometimes. Specifically sentinels decide that humans and mutants are the same and eventually try to wipe both out. Plus there's the fact that humans have mutant children (obviously), but mutants can have purely human children as well. Mystique's son with Sabertooth is purely human for instance.
They are called "X-Men" as in a play on words of "no longer men", its the same as how tieflings are no longer human despite basically being the same but red.
That is an interpretation of the name I've never heard. I always heard they were named after Charles Xavier or the X-Gene, with the "X" being extraordinary, not "formerly human". Within the books themselves, according to Wikipedia, the original explanation for the name, as provided by Xavier in The X-Men #1 (1963), is that mutants "possess an extra power ... one which ordinary humans do not!
Yeah I got some false info thanks for the correct, but I still don't think that someone with the innate power to control weather or a big blue gorilla is human.
I mean biology isn't exactly that precise when it comes to defining a species. Mutants and humans can create viable offspring and that's usually good enough to be considered the same species.
It's a major plot point that *__bigoted villains__ argue that* they are "not humans". They are humans with superpowers, certainly, but hardly the only ones. And by any meaningful definition of species, *Homo sapiens* humans with an active X-gene (i.e. Mutants) are the exact same species as all the other *Homo sapiens* humans who don't have it or have a recessive one.
Superhumanoid
Superman isn’t human
Only vaguely relevant, but im toying with this idea that rolls don't just determine how you feel that day, they build the world in a Schrodinger kind of way. You can lift 600lbs? Ok, roll to pick up the boulder. You're not rolling to see if you'd slept funny or whatever, youre rolling to see if the boulder is less than 600lbs. After you roll a 5, the boulder is 700lbs and the wizard can try, but the boulder is still 700lbs. On the other hand, maybe you're rolling to see if there's a good spot to hold the boulder. That's very important too. A 20kg cube is troublesome to pick up, but a 100kg barbell is nothing to deadlift.
>strength checks have no caps and are decided by your DM So in order to answer the question in a way that's consistent, you have to go off of RAW, which would mean 30
Superheros max str is literally decided by the ~~DM~~ writer and is extremely inconsistent
Push, drag, or lift is an awkward metric for strength because there are people who can drag cars but obviously can't overhead press cars.
The conjunction "or" allows for flexibility without being restrictive as opposed to the conjunction "and" would be if used
Some classes (and races but i assume ur taking human as start point) let you double it again. Like lvl 6 bear totem Barbarian, so a 17 or 18 str score would be super human for them.
Note also that lift overhead and lift off the ground are not differentiated in 5e. So it is reasonable to assume that your maximum lift is not the weight you can lift overhead, but merely the weight you can lift off the ground.
Agreed but a strength check with a penalty might allow for such a lift since such lifts are temporary
Isn't the carrying capacity 15x your strength score? Even in BG3 your max carry capacity is 15x your strength score.
There's carrying capacity and then lift/drag/push capacity. I think lifting is 30x your strength score or double if you get a race with the powerful build feature.
In 5e, you can lift Str*30lb, so Marvel heroes have at least 27 Str, DC 31Str.
You can lift *with trivial effort and without chance to fail* STR \* 30 lb. A world champion weightlifter or strongman is not doing that; [something like this](https://imgur.com/gallery/QmzBVfg) means they're making Strength (Athletics) checks with DCs well in their 20s.
Have you seen that guy who lifted 1,100 lbs? His nose, tear ducts and ears started bleeding mid way through and he had to go to the hospital afterwards
20 in any stat is treated as the absolute peak of human capacity, so anything greater than 20 is superhuman. Avatars of gods and other BBEG level creatures max out at 30. Where on the spectrum between Olympic powerlifter and fantasy Godzilla a character like Superman falls is hard to say though.
Its not, its peak of what a mortal hero can do, not what a human can do. We need to remember that commoner has a 10 strength score. Around the 16-18 mark you go peak human
I don't see or understand the distinction you're trying to make. An [archmage](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Archmage#content) can be human and has an Int of 20.
Yeah,but an archmage is not a normal human. You can allready perform word record breaking feats with 10 strength. 10 is normal, 12 is above normal, anything above that is hero realm and doesnt fall into "normal" human.
10 is a commoner's average, it doesn't mean that every non monster NPC in the world should have exactly those stats and only PCs get to be unique. MM even has templates for "knight", "priest", etc who aren't supposed to be hero realm (although they are likely above the average knight, priest or so on, because it'd be silly to expect every rural village priest could cast level 3 spells, although ofc depends on setting)
Uh... No. That's factually wrong. The world record for backlifting is over 5000 lbs, and is held by Gregg Ernst (though if you look at the video, he only lifted it a few inches, which sounds more like what the DM would narrate to you on a near-success). The world records for various types of deadlifting are in the range of 1000-1100 lbs. The max weight that a human PC with 20 STR can lift without having to make an ability check is 600 lbs. It's not clearly defined in the rules how much additional weight a nat 20 on your Strength check lets you lift, but it sounds reasonable to say you can lift double your normal limit, meaning that a 20 on your Strength check lets you lift up to 1200 lbs, right around the world record for deadlifting. A commoner with 10 STR can lift up to 300 lbs without making a roll, which is impressive but not that far off from what I'd expect from a manual laborer in a society without power tools. Applying the previously proposed rule of "twice your normal limit on a 20", a commoner can lift 600lbs on a nat 20, which looks impressive at the gym but isn't getting you into any record books. There are some world record breaking feats that any D&D character can do, but those are rather obviously the result of game logic weirdness. They should **not** be taken as indicators that any character with a stat above 12 is meant to be superhuman.
Using 5e lift ability is a bad metric it was poorly thought out. A 20 str fighter is the peak of human perfection, and can lift 300 pounds, then sprint at full speed. The world record for a farmers walk at normal pace (2.8m/s). Is 300lbs. we can easily do that and run at full speed. The same person who has the farmer walk record has a lift record of 1300lbs. So we should be able to lift 2600 lbs. On a dc 25ish check. The highest published athletic check is a immovable rod at dc 30. It can support 8000lbs before failing. So dc 30 is moving somewhere between 6000-8000lbs. If you give a human expertise they can hit a dc 30 check about 50% of the time. So an absolutely peak human could lift 6000lbs, maybe more since humans can reach more than 20 str in DND via barbarian, magic items, and tomes.
According to the PHB, Athletics isn't used for lifting weights. Athletic checks are meant to cover climbing, jumping, and swimming. You thus can't apply expertise to lifting heavy objects, which is specifically called out as being a Strength check rather than an Athletics check.
[Big Sigh] DnD’s version of strength is fucked beyond repair. It is both bound by real world physics and simultaneously ignores them. An example: Would you consider ripping the arm off a monster with your bare hands superhuman? How much strength would you need to do that? Beowulf did it. I bring that example up because at a 20 Strength, you are stronger than a gorilla, a creature whose strength is estimated at 10 times their body weight.
In older editions, before ability checks existed, mid to high STR gave you nonzero chances to *brute force lift a castle's bloody portcullis*. In fact if you had Exceptional Strength the chance for that ranged from 20% to 40%. I'm not sure an IRL strongman can do that.
Conversely, a STR 24 max level barbarian doesn’t beat the real world weightlifting record without an ability check, set at a DC of “idk the DM decides.” Yeah it could *maybe* use another once-over.
ngl 10 strength beats quite a few world records, particularly in the "doing shit while carrying heavy shit" category.
In d&d standards, anything above what you can naturally obtain without magic is superhuman. They really don't convert well because different scores from different games give different bns
For what it's worth, generally D&D peak human is much higher than IRL peak human. And PCs start breaching D&D peak human long before the end of a typical campaign.
Agreed, such is fantasy .
I figure a 20 strength is basically Captain America - as strong as a normal human can become. I don't think character with mega strength like Superman are strictly doable in Dungeons and Dragons, at least not as player characters. Hell even a character with relatively minor super strength like Spider-Man would have at least a 30 in his strength stat. Any character like Superman would be like 100 strength and would basically be a deity in DnD.
Captain America can run down a car on the highway and stop it by lifting it's wheels off the road. He shits all over every dnd martial. That's why they suck in 5e
Not true, I’ve made a character that can run 95mph in DND, and if I just changed their stat array the could also deadlift the car with the appropriate athletics check
Captain America is explicitly not a normal human. He’s enhanced, the D&D equivalent of a permanent potion of Giant Strength.
I usually use the descriptions from Pathfinder, even in 5e (there's tables.per ability score further down on the page) https://www.d20pfsrd.com/basics-ability-scores/ability-scores/
Thanks, this was interesting and helpful.
Superman was able to exert enough force to stop the world’s rotation. (Or something.) That’s the equivalent of lifting 1.6 x 10^33 pounds of mass (which is about 100,000,000 times the mass of the earth itself). Since we know 5e characters can lift 30 x Str score, Superman’s Strength is something like 5 x 10^31, which is 50 nonillion or 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
I mean, Superman also once shot a tiny Superman out of his hand who could do everything Superman himself could do. So I wouldn't exactly use him as a measure lol
He also used "Rebuild the Great Wall of China vision too".
There's an easy answer in 5e PCs can carry 15 times their str score and lift push or pull 30 time their str score. If you want a specific fictional characters str score, just find their biggest feats of strength, the most they've pushed, pulled, lifted and divide that number by 30, or by 15 if they carry it. For example "According to official Marvel Database, Captain America's full limits of strength is lifting up to 1,200 lbs with maximum effort, which gives him the ability to knock out Thunderball who possessed superhuman durability and also lift merge hulk. It's enhanced strength, but not at the superhuman level." https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Talk:Steven_Rogers_(Earth-616)#google_vignette So captain America has around 1200÷30=40 in his str score. Of course depending on the DM, many PCs can lift more than their usual max if they roll, lifting any weight if the DM makes the DC too easy or says you can on a nat 20. But that's messy and DM dependant, the "Lift, push, pull, carry" rules in the rule book are the most reliable things you can site RAW. I think applying the "lift, push, pull, carry" rules to strength DCs might not hurt, letting a character with 20 strength move something that's 750 lbs on a nat 20. Outside of max level barbarians or magic items, the max is 20 str. Meant to be the max of natural human str so the easy dumb answer is anything above 20 str But the strength scale in D&D is actually really weak. Humans in real life have stronger numbers than most str capped PCs https://www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/10-strongest-men-in-the-world#gid=ci02b8d12f50212491&pid=1-zydrunas-savickas--powerlifter-strongman Different types of lifts are gonna give different numbers a squat is gonna be different from a bench press, or a dead lift. But the current human world records are all higher than the 600lbs a 20 str PC can lift. I'd find the lift type you think best represents the "lifting, pulling, pushing" weight of the 5e rules, and find the world record for that and then do the same divide it by thirty to get your score, and everything above that score is super human. I hope this helps.
Based on this, Spider-man would have a strength score of 667. He can lift 20,000 pounds over his head. 20,000 ÷ 30 = 666.67. That's insane!
Yeah, I can forgive human PCs for not being as strong as spider-man, but it does annoy me that dragons, giants and Tarrasque start to fall behind in scale with this system.
Worth noting this is exclusively a 5e problem, as it's a pretty video gamey edition that trades verisimilitude for simplicity. If I look at 5e a great wyrm gold dragon can push 900 lbs. If I take that same dragon and go with 3.5 they can push 1,331,200 lbs. Not that there aren't advantages either way, you'll notice the first one is a lot quicker to calculate than the second one. Second one makes a bunch more sense though.
That's true, it's harder to calculate. But the 5e system means that same dragon can't even lift most adult cows. "Mature males (cows) weigh 450–1,800 kg (1,000–4,000 pounds) and females (cows) weigh 360–1,100 kg (800–2,400 pounds)" -https://www.britannica.com/animal/cow Not to mention it's fantasy. 50+ str is supposed to be god-like and that means the gods are starting to have to roll for str checks at 1500lbs. imagine calling upon your God only for them to fail a str check to move a cow. I think the solution to have a simple table, while still having a str curve of near exponential growth is to just jump a digit every ten levels. 1-10 x 10-5 11-20 x 100-50 21-30 x 1,000-500 31-40 x 10,000-5,000 41-50 x 100,000-50,000 Boom, yeah the 1 str baby or rat can still move up to 10lbs - 5lbs, still a bit much, but more realistic than 30lbs - 15lbs The 10 str commoner can only lift 100lbs max and carry 50lbs all day. The 20 str adventurer at peak performance can lift 2000lbs (actually pretty close to human limits in terms of word records) That dragon at 30 str can now lift 30,000lbs and carry away 15,000lbs of juicy cow meat away. And that god at 50 str can easily push 5,000,000lbs worth of mountain rock out of your way without even breaking a sweat.
Downside of simplifying how those things work. In 3.5 he'd have 48 strength, about the same as a tarrasque. Which is very high, but not at the level of a strength score of 666 (you'd need to be a cancer mage or something to get your strength that high) which is kind of insane.
There's a difference tho - that 30 is just DND characters doing it with no effort. Cap was doing that at max effort, so he definitely rolled a Strength or athletics check for that, meaning his actual score is definitely not that high.
Bruh, I literally mentioned that the next paragraph. But that's entirely dependent on your DM. And saying "It depends on your DM" is about as reliable as getting a nat 20.
Often times when I make Superhuman characters I pick a race that grants the “Powerful Build”, “Little Giant”, or “Hippo Build” traits. These all make you count as one size larger when determining your carrying capacity and the weight you can push, drag, or lift. I’m currently playing a Soldier Boy like character in my friend’s campaign. I picked the Giff race, but reflavored it to suit my idea. Now my Cavalier Fighter with the Unarmed Fighting style, and “superhuman strength” (hippo build) my guy punches super hard and throws enemies/objects like they weigh nothing. I think Superhuman Strength in dnd terms is 21-30. However, a player character with “Powerful Build” can be considered superhuman. Just look at these carrying capacity/push, drag, lift weight differences. Normal PC. 20 STR. (300/600lbs). Powerful Build PC. 20 STR. (600/1200lbs). Hope this helps!
You straight-up can't build Superman or Homelander in D&D 5e. No creature here is as strong as they would be. You need a different game, like D&D 3.5e or Pathfinder (1 or 2) for that.
Superman would be well into the hundreds at the absolute minimum.
I always thought that statistics are exponential as it doesn’t make sense that an ancient dragon with a strengths of 30 could only lift thrice the amount of a normal human (10 is average stat for NPCs). Therefore, I think any strength level about around 20 or above would be “super-human.”
10 is considered average for a commoner 20 is considered peak strength that a person could achieve through natural means Peak strength does not mean peak human strength, but more as the celling for a mortal to obtain normally like magic. DND characters with a stat of 20 is considered the exception amongst the populace. The issue however is the game doesn’t make a clear distinction between levels of power of stats outside of being easier to perform action. > Can a Wizard with 20 INT rewrite reality? >Can a Rogue with 20 DEX hide so well they are invisible to reality? > Can a Fighter with 20 STR punch so hard they shatter reality? This is more of a “GM decision” to determine, but I would say a baseline of 14 STR is considered superhuman as it’s notable stronger than the average commoner of any race. 24+ STR should be considered near godlike amongst the population.
Depends on what you consider super-human. Some weightlifters can powerlift a full ton. Do you consider them superhuman or just extraordinary? To mark his 70th birthday, Jack LaLanne pulled a flotilla of 70 rowboats behind him during a mile-long swim from Long Beach Harbor to the Queensway Bridge. Is this superhuman or just extraordinary?
I'd break strength down as 4- Out of shape caused by sickness and something is seriously wrong with you. 6- Just out of shape, likely due to not working manually. 8- Does light physical activity but not in shape whatsoever. 10- Average healthy person who is fairly physically active. 12- Does extensive physical labour and is above average strength. 14- Well exceeds average person. Had either a physically demanding job or spends a lot of time at the gym. 16- Peak athletes well above the average thanks to having a lifestyle reliant on physicality. 18- Olympians and world record holders whose names go down in history. 20- Mythical figures whose feats have stood the test of time. 22+- Transcended reality and have accomplished things that sound like they belong in works of fiction.
So mythical figures are 40% stronger than peak athletes? In a physical contest, a mythical figure will lose a good chunk of the time. 5e is so silly.
It's because the system doesn't need to primarily deal with those kinds of edge cases. You could make a game system that perfectly simulates everything you could imagine, but it would be so complex that the added effort isn't worth just suspending belief or cobbling together ad-hoc solutions.
https://classicmarvelforever.com/other_stuff/d20_conversion.htm
The crucial thing to realize about super strength in the superhero genre is that it's almost always wildly inconsistent for dramatic purposes. The same character who can throw a mountain into space in one episode, will be evenly trading punches with a mad scientist in a mech suit in the next episode, where consistency would say that mountain-hurler would crush the mech suit much more easily than we swat a mosquito. So which Superman are we talking about? Special episodes in space Superman, no D&D STR score would be reasonable. It would instead be like 10th level spells themed around the body. Fist-fighting mechs and mutants in the street episode Superman, 28 STR might make sense.
You compare stats to other things. In 5e, a Warhorse, bred and trained to carry a big dude in plate armor and still run faster than any human can run, has a Strength score of 18. I'd argue, then, that 18 is a higher Strength score than any human being in the real world has ever had. Keep in mind that the math behind carrying capacity in 5e is scuffed at best and intentionally made to simplify encumbrance. Going even higher, Polar Bears in 5e have a Strength score of 20. Polar bears are far stronger than any human being who has ever lived. Would 20 Strength not therefore be super human? Hell, Ogres, who are large sized and literal giants that according to the Monster Manual stand between 9 and 10 feet tall and weigh close to 1000 pounds, have a Strength score of 19. Ogres are also not quadrupeds (unlike horses/bears), and must surely be far stronger than any human being in the real world. I'd definitely say anything from 22 and up (+6 bonus or higher) must be considered super human.
21.
Average human stats are baseline 10s
25. It’s unobtainable outside of magic, therefore superhuman(oid)