D&D 5E Array v 4d6: Punishment? Or overlooked data

[Ridley's Cohort]

I think the point is that logic alone cannot get you to die rolling being unfair. As long as all players are rolling with the same rules, there's no universal basis for calling it unfair. Whether or not you think it is unfair is a matter of preference, something I am not required to agree with, just as I may disagree with the assessment that a horse is tall or short depending on my perspective and not just some logical argument, label, or proof.

That is true. And the other side of the coin is logic alone will not get you to die rolling being fair.

Nor does the fact that we might agree that a die roll in one context is "close enough to fair for our purposes" (e.g. a Saving Throw), does not logically imply anything about dice rolling in other contexts (e.g. chargen).

 

[Umbran]

can a system be fair if it's result is not...

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air."
-MacBeth, Act 1, scene 1.

Let us break it down for a moment, by stepping away from rolled stats.

The next time your players come to the table, have them each roll a die. The one who rolls lowest must sit on a board with tacks pointy-side-up sticking out of it for the entire session. Heck, we'll be generous! The player has a choice - leave, or sit on the tacks and play.

Do you figure the players will feel this is "fair"? I mean, the decision of who gets to sit on nails was determined in a statistically unbiased manner! And the player even gets a choice! So, it is fair, right?!?

No. Because forcing a player to have a sub-standard experience or face ejection from play for no good reason isn't fair, no matter how unbiased the statistics of determination were.

Now, shall we begin quibbling on what constitutes "good reason"? Or can we accept that really, the balance of reasons and quality of experience is really a local, case-by-case phenomenon that we cannot really judge in general terms?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

When I say "campaign" I really mean "long campaign". Some lumpiness in rewards are expected in every campaign. Some modules are too small a piece of the campaign puzzle to have any reasonable expectation of non-lumpiness -- that is for the DM and players to worry over in the long haul IMO.

RttToEE is big enought to be a campaign up to itself, and was one of the ones I had in mind, having been through it relatively recently.

It, and others like it, do not concern themselves with making sure everyone's numbers balance out in the end.

Furthermore, the short ones can be dropped into campaigns as neded, and often are.

As for your last point, I have two answers:
(1) Your argument is too simplistic to the point of being meaningless. My observation is the most fun is to be had when all PCs are powerful, but shine at different times. That provides variety and encourages teamwork, which is the primary attraction of playing a RPG over one of those many boardgames I have on my shelf.

To that end, point buy is very auspicious, because I can consciously choose to develop my PC into his own niche that is different from other PCs, and work together with other players to see that happens. With rolling stats it is entirely possible that I will roll 18 Str, 16 Con, 16 Dex while you roll 14 Str, 12 Con, 8 Dex. The result is my PC, not necessarily through any plan on my part, ends up being better than yours all the time at everything. Where is the fun in that? In fact, I think that will be less fun for you and less fun for me, too.

(Emphasis mine.)
Thanks for the needless snark! Haven't had my fill in quite a while.

I will counter that in D&D, as in sports and other forms of entertainment, how you view and handle differences in abilities depends greatly on who you are.

Personally, I see having a very powerful ally/teammate translating into increased odds of success. That is why teams invest in players like Jordan or Gretzky. Teams lacking at least one player with exceptional ability- rookie or veteran status is immaterial- simply don't win championships.

Similarly, movies, TV shows, musicals and theater performances have better chance of success when there is at least one notable name among the cast, directorial group, or the underlying intellectual property. It isn't a guarantee, but it definitely stacks the odds in your favor.

Up until the designers of post-3.5Ed iterations of D&D decided that the game needed a lot more balance, you could pretty much assume that- after a certain character level- full casters ruled the roost.

When I play D&D, my goals are essentially twofold: to roleplay the PC as he/she/it should be played; to achieve the party goal. I don't give a damn whether my PC has his moment as Mr. Center Stage, I want he party to beat the BBEG and save the world. Anything super-awesome my character does along the way is gravy.

To put it differently, if I were playing a Vagabond in RIFTS, I certainly wouldn't be miffed at the dude playing the Glitterboy doing what Glitterboys do best...

I realize that not everyone feels that way. Some people feel diminished if they don't get their superstar moment. That's OK. But, like my perspective, it isn't a universal playstyle, and accommodations must be made.

Either way, sometimes that means a particular RPG or game group isn't for you.

(2) That imbalances between PCs can degrade the fun for the players is not just some random whine by a few players; I have played we DMs who said as much outright. When the imbalances are too large, a challenge to a very powerful PC risks being overwhelming to the point of downright boring to players of other PCs. It is no fun to have a great build up to a combat and have your PC knocked out of the fight on Round 1. The player does not like it. And DMs do not necessarily like it either, if they worked hard for what they were hoping would be an interesting drawn out fight.

So it is not just some players saying this is less fun. It is also DMs saying this is less fun for them.

You forgot the qualifier "some" in front of the words "players" and "DMs"- this view is not a universal perspective.

I was playing a kewl 1/2 Orc Ranger in a party, and at the end of the campaign's very first combat encounter, one foe was escaping and potentially going to warn allies. No one caught him as he slipped out a door that locked behind him. The party thief couldn't open it on his first attempt, so as the strongest PC in the group, I decided to give it a little shoulder grease...time was of the essence, after all.

And as I went through the door the thief managed to open on his second try, my PC found that on the other side was a narrow ledge that went around a yawning chasm, which he found the bottom of at terminal velocity.

As I rolled up a new PC, I was chuckling. I liked Klor-Con for a lot of reasons. I had out a lot of work into him and had hoped he'd be around a while. But his death, ignominious as it was, was a comedy, and I had had fun playing him.

In another campaign- one that has lasted since 1987 or so- every PC that is a non-full caster stands in the shadows of the heavy hitters who all are. They casters (of both sides) dictate the tempo and character of the conflict.

...and nobody complains about this, because everyone is having a good time.

Even when things go belly-side up, we have a good time. Decades have passed since the PCs in that campaign went into Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and nearly TPKed themselves due to a tactical error. And a similar amount of time has passed since the party's Mage managed to leave my Paladin stranded alone on the same side of the Prismatic Sphere as the pyrohydra. And we don't just laugh about those things NOW, we laughed THEN.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

ok see here is the problem... 5 people walk up and plan to sit here every Friday night for the next year and play poker... before they start they set the rules as they all take chips and anty X amount who ever has the most chips at the end of the night takes the anty... before the first time they play they draw for high card... the highest card starts with the most chips every week for the year... just because they all have equal chance tonight doesn't make it fair in 6 weeks when again (like every week) player A starts with twice the chips player B does...

or to get back to gaming...
the 5 of us sit down to play D&D every Friday night for a year, but before we play the first night we throw some dice, and randomly determain who has the moste powerful stats....

The classic tale raising this moral point is The Lady And The Tiger.

Randomness so employed is perfectly fair in the most narrow and stupid sense possible. When we consider that the king has a duty to provide justice and the test is supposed to be an exercise in accomplishing as much, the scenario suddenly looks perfectly unfair instead.

In the case of stat rolling, the case is more gray, to be sure. But I think the thought experiment above does shine some light. If we think in terms of the game being a group of friends who want everyone sitting at the table to be as likely as possible to have fun, then point buy has a lot to recommend it over rolling because what is the point of risking any of your friends getting eaten by a tiger (getting stuck with atrocious rolls), when you have a guarantee means of getting good enough results for everyone?

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Personally, I see having a very powerful ally/teammate translating into increased odds of success. That is why teams invest in players like Jordan or Gretzky. Teams lacking at least one player with exceptional ability- rookie or veteran status is immaterial- simply don't win championships.

It is funny you should mention sports, because Michael Jordan looked like he was on the road to be the most amazing player who would never win a championship, until his coach told him explicitly to dial it back and work more on the team game, so that the other players had more room to blossom. As for Gretzky, any real hockey fan would tell you that while his goal record is amazing, his assists are in the stratosphere.

So sports cuts both ways.

The fact is that D&D is a social team game where most people are not there to "win". Nor would most think the idea of being the redshirt while "Gretzky" takes the glory again and again and again seems like a promising way to go.

Most.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Informal logical fallacy alert! I call equivocation on the play.

Danny, when someone says they think something is unfair, they have a particular type of fairness in mind, even if they don't say so explicitly. To claim that since the term has another meaning, that person is wrong is a rhetorical no-no. You don't get to claim they mean all types of fairness at once, since you aren't the speaker.

I understand what the other person is saying; I am highlighting the differences.

The other person is calling a particular game mechanic that is statistically fair "unfair"- without any qualifier- in order to seem more reasonable, appealing to everyone's sense of fair play. Meanwhile, it is glossing over the history of the game and the fact that his preferred position eliminates certain possibilities that other players find desirable, who may thus find his position "unfair". (Hence, my "Harrison Bergeron" reference, elsewhere in the thread.)

By doing so, by staking out the rhetorical position of claiming sole possession of the high-ground of "fairness", that person is making an appeal to emotion, not the merits of his position. That is, again, a no-no.

To be clear, I play systems in which point buy is used universally, and others which use die rolls, and others that use other methods, like picking arrays. Some, like D&D, present a few ChaGen options to choose from. Some games' results are balanced, others are not. On the whole, I really don't care much, but I do prefer die rolling in D&D in particular.

 

[Umbran]

By doing so, by staking out the rhetorical position of claiming sole possession of the high-ground of "fairness", that person is making an appeal to emotion, not the merits of his position. That is, again, a no-no.

Problem: the primary purpose of playing the game is to reach an emotional state. To wit - to have "fun". Thus, there is a point where the primary merit in a position about the game (and specifically, game playstyle) is an emotional/subjective one - what we *like*. So, you rather have to work with the appeal to emotion eventually, rather than attempt to dismiss it. Dismissing it, and tryign to claim that logic will solve the issue, is what gets us threads on the topic that run for six months with no resolution

The proper way to counter an overreaching emotional appeal (what I like is the only good thing, in effect) it is not through semantics games around the definition of "fair", but instead to simply note that, since there are matters of taste involved, there is no One True Way. Rather more clear, no?

You can then get on to discussion what approaches are best for what kind of playstyles, which might actually end in something of practical use to someone.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Problem: the primary purpose of playing the game is to reach an emotional state. To wit - to have "fun". Thus, there is a point where the primary merit in a position about the game (and specifically, game playstyle) is an emotional/subjective one - what we *like*. So, you rather have to work with the appeal to emotion eventually, rather than attempt to dismiss it. Dismissing it, and tryign to claim that logic will solve the issue, is what gets us threads on the topic that run for six months with no resolution

The proper way to counter an overreaching emotional appeal (what I like is the only good thing, in effect) it is not through semantics games around the definition of "fair", but instead to simply note that, since there are matters of taste involved, there is no One True Way. Rather more clear, no?

You can then get on to discussion what approaches are best for what kind of playstyles, which might actually end in something of practical use to someone.

Except, as stated, his "unfun" is someone else's "fun"...and vice versa. Rhetorically claiming that only one clause is true clouds the issue.

To that end, I am not claiming one side is superior or exclusive, just bringing to the fore that there are equally valid definitions of "fair" within the game system, and hopefully doing away with the temptation to use that loaded word within this context.

Which means, unless a DM allows players to choose their own ChaGen method- as I stated some do- whoever finds himself the odd man out in his group is starting from a position of suffering a fun gap.

Which is why in our group, several of the DMs simply use an honor system: use whatever ChaGen method you choose, but if it doesn't pass the DM's sniff test, it gets vetoed...again, as stated before. There is no real penalty unless you somehow did roll all 16s or better.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

True. But I don't see that this is special to rolled stats. Eg every player could build his/her PC with a superior array and the same approach could be adopted, couldn't it?

The poster I replied to seemed to be asserting some sort of connection between particular means of stat generation, and particular means of encounter building or campaign pacing, but I'm not seeing any general connections of this sort.

Me neither. Self-pacing enables stat rolling but it doesn't necessitate it.

 

[Umbran]

True. But I don't see that this is special to rolled stats. Eg every player could build his/her PC with a superior array and the same approach could be adopted, couldn't it?

And, for many, using an array or point-buy might not save them from the power-disparity pitfall of rolled stats. Give point-buy to someone who is really good at optimization, and someone who isn't, and what's the likely result? The two are even in potential, but not necessarily in execution. Some would call this fair, insofar as a skilled player is rewarded, and an unskilled player... is given a motivation to be skilled. But it is a negative reinforcement, which often doesn't have the desired results...