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I could not find the magic words "abilities cannot go below 0" from 3.5, so I'm wondering if that still applies. Especially since the ability "penalty" is a Pathfinder only thing. Since going below 0 due to ability damage is not really important to track during combat, I wonder can you go below 0 due to PENALTIES.
...these penalties function just like ability damage, but they cannot cause you to fall unconscious or die. In essence, penalties cannot decrease your ability score to less than 1.
But I think the "less than 1" is fluff text since it says "in essence", the important text is "cannot fall unconscious", but am not sure.
For instance:
1. A character has only an 8 in strength (-1 modifier).
2. That character becomes exhausted. Their strength is effectively 2 and they now have -4 to their strength mod.
3. They then get poisoned, and take 7 points of damage. They have a -4 modifier before taking exhausted into account (floor(7/2)=3). Their score is effectively 1 and 1 more point of damage will cause them to fall unconscous.
Do we apply the -6 from exhausted or not? and does it hit a limit of 1,0 or none?
What is their strength modifier? (in all scenarios they are still conscious)
- modifier -4 because exhausted penalty does nothing further than a minimum effective 1 ability score.
- modifier -5 exhausted DOES apply penalty, but effective 0 is the minimum score you can have.
- modifier -7 exhausted DOES apply penalty in addition to damage penalty, even though the total is worse than -5 (for a 0 score)
My characters like to min/max so they have 7s, and I hit them with poison and debuffs. So I have hit 0 before in damage. But mainly wondering can you go below 0 in penalties. Also I'm working on updating the Roll20 character sheet, so it's not just my game but affects thousands, so I need to know if I set a limit, since at least a few people might be affected.
If you look at the descriptions of ability scores here you will see that every ability score can be reduced to zero, and you'll see what happens to you when this occurs.
So yes, ability drain CAN reduce any ability score to zero.
An interesting question is whether you can below 0. I assume you can. Damage to your HP can go below zero, and it can go below your -CON score. You could end up at -100 HP, or worse, if you get hit hard enough. I see no reason that ability score DRAIN should work differently, so I assume that in your scenario, the character is at a -5 STR and he will be unconscious and unable to move until his STR is raised back to a positive integer (1 or higher).
Likewise, ability score DAMAGE is just a total amount of damage that causes penalties (-1 per 2 points), but when that damage equals the ability score, you're unconscious. If it exceeds your ability score, you're still unconscious but it takes more healing to get you back to consciousness.
But I don't think there is a rule to support this, so I'm just extrapolating from the HP rules and applying that here.
1. A character has only an 8 in strength (-1 modifier).
2. That character becomes exhausted. Their strength is effectively 2 and they now have -4 to their strength mod.
3. They then get poisoned, and take 7 points of damage. Their base strength score is now 1...
Attribute damage does not reduce your base strength score. It gives you penalties. If Strength damage exceeds your Strength you fall unconscious. I believe the exhaustion penalty would apply here, so just 2 points of attribute damage would cause you to collapse.
If he's unconscious it doesn't matter much, but...
"For every 2 points of damage you take to a single ability, apply a –1 penalty to skills and statistics listed with the relevant ability. If the amount of ability damage you have taken equals or exceeds your ability score, you immediately fall unconscious until the damage is less than your ability score."
This says that the amount of attribute damage can exceed the level of the attribute, and it gives no limit to the penalties you can suffer as a result.
Penalties: "While in effect, these penalties function just like ability damage, but they cannot cause you to fall unconscious or die. In essence, penalties cannot decrease your ability score to less than 1."
This is badly worded since ability damage doesn't decrease your ability scores. I'd guess that attribute penalties in excess of (the relevant attribute minus one) have no effect.
I would guess that damage and penalties stack, and that the answer to your question would be -7.
Ability Damage and Ability Penalties aren't the same thing, just like how Ability Damage and Ability Drain aren't the same thing.
The key thing to note is that Ability Penalties do not cause statistics to fall below 1. Most effects will state that it causes a penalty to the relevant ability score if it was to be a penalty, whereas effects that are supposed to be Ability Damage would call it out as such (and therefore are not subject to the restrictions of Ability Penalties).
This is not much different from the ruling of Coup de Grace not being a Death Effect. Although it has a lot of the fundamental elements of a Death Effect (Saving Throw V.S. a DC or creature dies), because it does not say "This is a Death Effect," this means that Coup de Grace isn't a Death Effect (even though everything else about it basically screams "Death Effect").
In essence, if we're talking Penalties, the answer is 1. If we're talking Ability Damage or Drain, then it's not much different than a point on a given number line. The only difference is, Ability Penalties can only be counted through Natural Numbers (which is that it cannot be less than 1), and Ability Damage/Drain is counted through Integers (numbers that range from -infinity to infinity, not imparting fractions and such).
**EDIT**
I didn't realize we were combining both penalties and damage. Interesting.
To the relevant parts for that, it'll be worth noting that Ability Penalties still fall under the 1 score. This means that an Ability Penalty cannot cause a score to fall below 1, but Ability Damage can. This means that the 8 Strength character will have a -6 penalty to Strength, resulting in 2. Taking 7 Strength damage would result in a total of -5 Strength. So yes, the -7 Strength modifier applies.
If the result was a -8 penalty to Strength instead, this would result in a character having a 1 Strength, and then turn into -6 Strength via the Strength damage.