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Should we change the character Starting points from 30 to 33.
An odd number would allow for stat advencement at 4th level, as well as
give more leeway in individualization.
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Last edited by Creamsteak; 16th June 2004 at 06:04 AM..
I think asking players if they want more stat points is like asking kids if they want candy and ice cream.
That said, I did vote yes. I admit to a tendency to try to build characters who are fairly good at a lot, and despite my reluctance I ended up having to short my guy a bit on Wis and Cha. I'd be happy if I could make him a bit more keen-eyed.
Well, more points mean more customization. 3 more points allow you to increasea secons tat to 15 and raise a 12 to 13 for some feats, which is quite useful.
Still, I would've preferred a rule that just granted more skill points. That's something that everyone would be better with more.
Well, more points mean more customization. 3 more points allow you to increasea secons tat to 15 and raise a 12 to 13 for some feats, which is quite useful.
That same reasoning would support raising the count from 33 to 36, and then to 39. Will it ever stop?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Otakkun
Still, I would've preferred a rule that just granted more skill points. That's something that everyone would be better with more.
That would require changing a standard formula. The less we have to change from the SRD, the less confusing.
You should have provided more options in this poll.
Which other options do you want? I have never posted a poll before.
Can I edit it? Seems a bit late now, however.
I really didint want 20 people saying ' abstain'.
yes and no, as I am a pretty straightforward guy.
Now, if by more options, you meant something like...
1) No increase
2)Increase to 31 points
3)increase to 32 points
4)increase to 33 points
I see where that might have been favorable to many, but it would have bogged down the issue further. Besides, there is the better part of a week to go,so all can be heard in/regarding their concerns. This isn't LAW, it's a poll on how folks feel about a points increase.
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That same reasoning would support raising the count from 33 to 36, and then to 39. Will it ever stop?
The reason that I put forth the idea of an increase wasbecause I think 33 makes for a better rounded character than 30, not so as to make the reqs for all sorts of feats etc...
I would oppose an increase beyond 33, personally.
Off to work...
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I seem to recall someone once rolled 4d6, dropping the lowest, some rediculous number of times and ended up with an average of 13.333, repeating. This isn't the best way to do it, but the math of statistics in reference to "4d6 drop the lowest" hurts my brain.
For those playing at home, 13.3333 (etc.) minus the 8 point you get as base at point buy is 5.3333 (etc.), which, multiplied by 6 stats, is 32. So, if you believe me about the guy elsewhere on this messageboard somewhere (and believe him about the average), that's the closest point buy to the standard 4d6 drop the lowest method.
Which is all a long way of saying "no." Mostly as a matter of simplicity- changing now would be a pain. The differences between 30, 32, and 33 are minimal enough to not bother, and you get a slight boost in power from being able to decide which score goes where. I think these are solid arguments for keeping things the way they are.
__________________ “Taxation is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum amount of moo. And I'm afraid to say, that these days, all I'm getting is moo.”
I seem to recall someone once rolled 4d6, dropping the lowest, some rediculous number of times and ended up with an average of 13.333, repeating. This isn't the best way to do it, but the math of statistics in reference to "4d6 drop the lowest" hurts my brain.
For those playing at home, 13.3333 (etc.) minus the 8 point you get as base at point buy is 5.3333 (etc.), which, multiplied by 6 stats, is 32. So, if you believe me about the guy elsewhere on this messageboard somewhere (and believe him about the average), that's the closest point buy to the standard 4d6 drop the lowest method.
Which is all a long way of saying "no." Mostly as a matter of simplicity- changing now would be a pain. The differences between 30, 32, and 33 are minimal enough to not bother, and you get a slight boost in power from being able to decide which score goes where. I think these are solid arguments for keeping things the way they are.
I set up a spreadsheet a little while ago to compute it, and I found that the average ability score with 4d6 minus lowest is 12.24. I didn't do it randomly; I had the spreadsheet do all 1296 possible rolls of 1296. So I should have gotten the exact answer. The person you're quoting was either misremembering, or had a fluke. (If you roll enough dice, and "a ridiculous number of times" should be enough, it is almost certain that you will get a good approximation to the correct average.)
But the average *points* per character isn't 4.24*6=25.4, it's somewhat higher. If I recall, I used the same spreadsheet to calculate it as 29 point something or other. I don't recall how I treated scores below 8 for that conversion; I think I just called them all zero points. You'd get a slightly lower average if you counted them negative.
The reason you can't just plug the average ability score into the point buy formula to get the average number of points is that the conversion is non-linear. Think of it this way: the average of 16 and 8 is 12, but the average of 10 points and 0 points is 5 points, corresponding to a score of 13. If you average a bunch of ability scores you get a lower average than if you average a the corresponding point counts.
That said, I completely agree with your last paragraph. The difference isn't big enough to get excited about, and therefore I think it best not to fiddle with it. (However, it looks like we're losing that one.)
As it happens, I made a spreadsheet earlier today, using 6*5000 rolls for 4d6, drop the lowest. The average for stats is 12,25something, which translates into five 12s and a 13 (more of a 13.5), which would be a 25 point buy.
The average point buy cost, assuming that stats below 8 are 0 points, however, works out to be 29.1x.
The reroll parameters, of course, would increase this further.
That said, I have already voted no.
Edit - After a tweak in my spreadsheet, I also have the average point buy cost with taking "rerolls" into account (to be honest, it ignores "illegal" rolls). It works out to bo 30.5.
But the average *points* per character isn't 4.24*6=25.4, it's somewhat higher.
That depends on how you word your statistic...
The point buy value for characters with average ability scores using the 4d6-L system is about 25 points.
The average point buy value for characters with ability scores using the 4d6-L system is about 30 points... Or something there-abouts due to the reasons you stated above.
Do you want an average set of abilities, or do you want an average group of characters?
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The point buy value for characters with average ability scores using the 4d6-L system is about 25 points.
The average point buy value for characters with ability scores using the 4d6-L system is about 30 points... Or something there-abouts due to the reasons you stated above.
Do you want an average set of abilities, or do you want an average group of characters?
Well, a character with all 12s and 13s is a middling character *in the extreme*. That isn't what I would consider average. The average character neither has all middling abilities, nor all extreme abilities. Something like 8,10,12,13,14,16 in some order would seem more average to me for a 4d6 method -- the character's best and worst ability aren't the best and worst possible, but nor are they abnormally mediocre. 13 as a highest score is very low, and 12 as a lowest score is very high.
The appropriate average to consider, IMHO, is the mean of all characters created by a given method. That's 29 point something.
Well, a character with all 12s and 13s is a middling character *in the extreme*. That isn't what I would consider average. The average character neither has all middling abilities, nor all extreme abilities. Something like 8,10,12,13,14,16 in some order would seem more average to me for a 4d6 method -- the character's best and worst ability aren't the best and worst possible, but nor are they abnormally mediocre. 13 as a highest score is very low, and 12 as a lowest score is very high.
The appropriate average to consider, IMHO, is the mean of all characters created by a given method. That's 29 point something.
Oh, I agree.
You're making precisely the same point I was... That there is a distinct difference between a character with 'average' abilities, and an 'average' character.
__________________ The Pbartender
"Piesporter hot, Piesporter cold, Piesporter in the pot, Nine days old."
Each ability score generated by 4d6-L gives you 1296 different rolls (6 to the 4th power) possible. Each possible result (3 to 18) occurs a certain % of the time.
One easy method that I used to generate the average points value of all ability score arrays (6 sets of 4d6-L) was to use those %s as the occurence factor of each set of each ability. There are 6^24 different ways the dice could fall, many of which are the same. The very least common result would be 24 1's, which occurs 1 time out of the 6^24 total.
Using a computer, I can run a program that tests all 6^24 different rolls. It's not entirely accurate though, since I am using a certain degree of floating decimals.
If you accept all sets of 24 six sided dice, subtracting the lowest die from each set of 4 generated, you get an average points value of around 28, give or take a little.
Using all of the sets of dice, you get roughly 30.5 using my method, but I do believe someone did a more accurate method (testing all 6^24 comparisons), and came up with something closer to 31.5.
I'm not sure how much that means to anyone, but my bet would have been to vote on a change to 31 point buy. 31 seems just slightly more accurate, and it's odd. I'm also ameniable to 32... but 33 seems out of place to me.
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Using all of the sets of dice, you get roughly 30.5 using my method, but I do believe someone did a more accurate method (testing all 6^24 comparisons), and came up with something closer to 31.5.
I very much doubt that anybody ever ran a program on all 6^24 possible sets of die rolls. If you could check a million every second, you'd have to run the computer nonstop for 150 thousand years to do that. Neither D&D nor high-speed computing have been around that long.
However, for a straight 4d6, drop lowest, no exchanges or refunds, you don't need to consider 6 ability scores at once. Just consider a single ability score. There are only 1296 combinations, and very crude programs can handle that. (That's how I did the spreadsheet I mentioned earlier.) You can then get a distribution for either score on the 3-18 scale or point buy count for a single ability; find its average, and multiply by 6 to get the average for a whole character. The average points come out to 29.13 if you count everything less than 8 as 0 points, 28.71 if you count negative points (between -1 and -5) for lower scores.
If you get into a "reroll the whole character if you don't get something at least this good overall" formula, it becomes more complicated, because you can't consider each of the six attributes in isolation anymore. That's when you need to know a little mathematics. It would be fairly simple to tweak the spreadsheet to calculate averages for a "reroll if no attribute is above X" rule, but rather harder for a "total must be at least Y" rule if you want to be exact. (An approximation, however, shouldn't be too difficult with a little basic statistics, which I sometimes teach so I should be able to do it.)
Is anyone else getting the Charlie Brown grown-up voice (mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa) in their heads when they read the statistical discussion?
__________________ “Taxation is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum amount of moo. And I'm afraid to say, that these days, all I'm getting is moo.”
I very much doubt that anybody ever ran a program on all 6^24 possible sets of die rolls. If you could check a million every second, you'd have to run the computer nonstop for 150 thousand years to do that. Neither D&D nor high-speed computing have been around that long.
No, your missing the elegance of a simpler program design. You don't need to run 6^24 binary comparisons to check each total, you need to run 15^6 by simplifying the algorithm. And you only need a few kilobytes of memory to run it as well. Look at the equation from the end result (6 different sets with 3 to 18 listed) and you can simplify it based on that. That's what I've done, but a more precise language can do the same thing only vastly more precise. If I took something to the second double precision instead of the first, I could technically calculate it with less than a billionth of error.
And taking just 1 ability scores average points value for all results will not yield you the results for two reasons. 1) You can't take criteria like "one ability must be greater than 13" into consideration, and 2) Since point buy is non-differential, you can't break it down into a linear equation that breaks up evenly, so since 18s and 17s are worth more than 14s and 9s, you get a total which is related to the most common values 12-14 that will dominate the single instance, but not all instances that exist for 6 arrays.
Now, the only speculation left is what to do with abilities less than 8? Do you factor them in as 0s or as negative scores?
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If 33 point buy is better than 30 point buy, then why stop there? Why not 36 point buy? Why not 50 point buy?
I am being sarcastic. As long as everyone has the same number of points, what does it matter? The only difference I see is this: With less points, characters are more likely to have a flaw (a low score) which makes them more interesting. With a lot of points, they are more likely to be average or above average in everything- which makes them less distinctive from each other.
Mostly as a matter of simplicity- changing now would be a pain. The differences between 30, 32, and 33 are minimal enough to not bother, and you get a slight boost in power from being able to decide which score goes where. I think these are solid arguments for keeping things the way they are.
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