Recent content by Lanefan

While I agree with your overall stance, I do have to ask why damage output is seen as the primary (or only) measure of balance.

Two things about this. First, you're rolling on a bell curve, meaning duplicate stats near the centre of that bell curve are considerably more likely (relatively speaking) then you posit here. 4d6drop1 averages at something like 12.2, meaning the most likely (and thus most likely to be...

I'm going to take "ENWorlder" to mean someone I otherwise wouldn't have met or known had I not been an ENWorlder myself; as opposed to people I already know or knew before they did anything here, or who became ENWorlders only after I started playing in the same game(s) as they. And on that...

We do much the same, only our quorum is more-than-half (i.e. if there's 4 or 5 players we sail with 3; if there's 6 players we sail with 4, etc.). The absent players' characters are assumed to still be present, contributing as normal, taking risks as normal, gaining xp and loot etc. as normal...

Point-buy virtually guarantees different results as well, unless every player just happens to buy to the same array in the end.

The question is not whether two people rolling get exactly the same six values. The question is whether those six rolled values, in both cases, fall within the range that could also be reached via point buy, and why one is seen as balanced but not the other. Put another way, if one player...

Sometimes if I want a roll from someone but there's reasons to hide the existence of and-or reasons for that roll I'll just get every player at the table to roll, and only pay attention to the roll made by the player of the character in question. Another thing I do once every few sessions is...

Or find a way to pile on temporary hit points faster than you lose them?

One question not covered in the OP is the level of wealth-resources-etc. the real-world version has, or has access to. If we're to use our own personal wealth etc. for this, my (and, likely, true for many of us) options would be very limited. But if we can assume Bruce Wayne levels of wealth...

TV: Game of Thrones Black Sails ...err...that's about it Movies: Lord of the Rings (Jackson, all three) Avengers Infinity War and Endgame (and about fifteen other MCU films) This Is Spinal Tap James Bond (Daniel Craig series) The Thomas Crown Affair (Pierce Brosnan version)

I do this, when it seems to make sense, but there's no real way to hard-code much of it as every situation is different and it might not even apply across the board within a given combat. For example, a Human trying to fight in 3'-tall Kobold tunnels will be at some minuses to start with and...

And often can't be done in advance at all. When the party reach a given encounter I've no way of knowing ahead of time whether they'll have cast Strength on their warriors (raising their Strength score by 1-8 points and thus almost certainly raising their to-hit and damage bonuses) and-or how...

It's fairly rare that a known player-side bonus is negative. Most negative modifiers are applied by DM-side things that the players (both in and out of character) don't know about: a cursed item, a Bane effect on an area, that sort of thing. Player-side negative modifiers pretty much only ever...

Part of that is there's already so many spells out there it can be hard to come up with a new idea.

For THAC0 to be of much use it requires the player to know the target's AC, which they often don't until the combat is nearly over anyway. Roll the d20, add your bonuses, and leave it to me to figure out if you hit or not.