1-1 / 2 STR meaning

[shadow_of_doom]

Hey, I was looking about in the Bonus Bestiary and when I got to the Axe Beak page, I noticed that its bite attack was listed as 1d6+1-1/2 STR or something along those lines. I'm not super-familiar with tabletop RPGs and to me it sounds like you...
1.Roll a D6
2.Add 1 to the roll
3.Subtract half of your strength from that
Am I doing this wrong, because to me it sounds like your strength is weakening your damage. Any help with this would be nice.

[FrodoOf9Fingers]

Its 1.5 times your strength modifier, not 1 minus 1/2 your strength modifier.

[Durngrun Stonebreaker]

It's plus one and a half strength modifier.

[Daethor]

Ah, I see your confusion. The "-" is not a minus sign, it's a dash. The intended way to read it is "one and a half times your strength modifier" so an 18 strength would give you a +4 mod. One (4) plus a half (2) equals 6 so that would be your bonus damage that you add to the die roll. Hope that helps! :)

[shadow_of_doom]

Okay thanks, I see why it's a dash, since the order of operations wouldn't work with a plus sign.

[Kazaan]

The hyphen isn't a minus sign, it's just a hyphen. It's a way of writing "One and a half". So you roll 1d6, then add 1.5x your Str bonus. If you have a Str penalty (you modifier is negative), then you only subtract 1x the penalty from your total damage, though, not 1.5.

[Zhayne]

It means 'one and one-half times its STR modifier'.

[Choon]

As said above, that method is the stupid way of writing 1.5 in a system that uses " -" as a math symbol routinely.

[Tholomyes]

Yeah, it's one of the things I absolutely hate about the way 3rd ed wrote things out (which has become a legacy into 3.5 and now PF). Presumably to try to dumb things down to the lowest common denominator, they made it into a mixed fraction, which doesn't work well either in a system with a good deal of arithmetic going into number crunching bonuses, or in a font printed out without specific characters for fractions. So rather than 3/2 or 1.5, which would have solved these problems, we had to use a way of representing fractional numbers that the last time I used, I think, was the third grade.

[Chris Lambertz]

Merged threads.

[James Risner]

I've been seeing a lot of duplicate threaded lately.

Dunno why.