D&D 5E Rolled character stats higher than point buy?

[FormerlyHemlock]

<rant>
The other pet peeve I have (which is related) is that in the group of all 8 intelligence, the group will still make decisions just as intelligently as if they were all 20s. Most people just ignore low intelligence in play unless it's a skill check.
</rant>

I'm having this weird feeling of deja vu. Didn't we already discuss this to death earlier on this thread? With MaxPerson, in fact. Intelligence is the one stat that MaxPerson and I refuse to dump, because it's so hard to roleplay--although in my case I'll make an exception in rare cases, such as for hermit druids who can be played more like animals-that-sometimes-turn-into-people and don't contribute to party leadership or socialization.

Edit: yes, it started around post #167.

 

[Yardiff]

<rant>
The other pet peeve I have (which is related) is that in the group of all 8 intelligence, the group will still make decisions just as intelligently as if they were all 20s. Most people just ignore low intelligence in play unless it's a skill check.
</rant>

Why don't you test this 'rant' of your by going onto twitter or facebook, where I hear you can talk with the WoTC team, and ask those who developed the game how they RP below average ability scores? I think you'll find they wouldn't fall into your 'most people'.

Just ask something like this. "So when you get a chance to play, how do you role play a low ability score and how do you role play a high ability score."

 

[Maxperson]

You are using a much different sense of the word cheating in this specific instance.

Yep! I'm using the definition of cheating

For my purposes, the method should work. If the method of used honestly has a high failure rate and some sort of "cheat" is necessary IMO it's a bad method.

If none of the methods offered achieves the goals desired by the DM/table, then a rules change is in order. The changed rule is not the method offered by the game.

If you have to discard the results a lot of the time, why are you doing it that way in the first place?

You aren't using it at all. The DM changed it.

People might be ok with it, but it remains a bad system.

It's only a bad system if you use it as offered without change and it doesn't achieve the results the game says it should. The systems offered since 1e are not bad systems. They achieve the game goals for stats. However, people who play the game have different goals much of the time and have to come up with NEW rules for rolling stats. Those new rules are not cheating in any sense of the word, or even fudging. They are house rules and nothing more.

 

[Maxperson]

So in order for it to be a "legitimate" game you have to have some people that are mentally or physically handicapped? While others in the group are above average in every stat?

That isn't even close to what I said. I said it's not very realistic when the entire table shows up with the same Forest Gump intelligence. By the way, the other stats, with perhaps the exception of wisdom, are not a handicap if low. You are not handicapped if you just get sick easy, are clutzy, or whatever.

Forest Gump was smart to run from battle, adventurers with extremely low intelligence probably wouldn't survive for long. Adventurers are supposed to be heroes, not zeroes.

He wasn't smart to run, he was wise to run. He was low on intelligence, but reasonably high on wisdom.

<rant>
The other pet peeve I have (which is related) is that in the group of all 8 intelligence, the group will still make decisions just as intelligently as if they were all 20s. Most people just ignore low intelligence in play unless it's a skill check.
</rant>

Many will, but I'm not sure about most. Maybe I've just been lucky, but most of those I've played with over the decades will roleplay a low intelligence as being low. They may help out of character, but in character they play stupid as stupid.

 

[Maxperson]

I'm having this weird feeling of deja vu. Didn't we already discuss this to death earlier on this thread? With MaxPerson, in fact. Intelligence is the one stat that MaxPerson and I refuse to dump, because it's so hard to roleplay--although in my case I'll make an exception in rare cases, such as for hermit druids who can be played more like animals-that-sometimes-turn-into-people and don't contribute to party leadership or socialization.

Edit: yes, it started around post #167.

Heh, yeah. And in the 5 int thread. Anyway, I tried that a few times, but it seemed to me that I ended up out of my element often enough to make it frustrating. I wasn't in my element, and I was highly limited in the elements the game encountered most of the time. I haven't tried it in a long time because of that.

 

[Arial Black]

You are using a much different sense of the word cheating in this specific instance.

Yeah, people are using the word 'cheat' incorrectly here, and deliberately using it to create an artificial negative connotation to the advantages of rolling for stats.

Re-rolling is part of the rolling rules if the DM says so, therefore by definition 'not cheating'.

Just checked my 3.0 and 3,5 PHBs (I long since got rid of my earlier edition books) and it's part of the official rules:-

REROLLING

If your scores are too low, you may scrap them and roll all six scores again. Your scores are considered too low if the sum of your modifiers (before adjustments because of race) is 0 or lower, or if your highest score is 13 or lower.

Re-rolling has been part of D&D character creation for decades. It's certainly been around a lot longer than point-buy.

For my purposes, the method should work. If the method of used honestly has a high failure rate and some sort of "cheat" is necessary IMO it's a bad method.

So armies never use firearms because they sometimes miss and have to 'cheat' by firing again?

Do authors ever 'cheat' and re-write a line until they are happy with it before they publish?

Do athletes only get a single throw or jump, or do they 'cheat' and get several tries and take the best?

Do aircraft pilots get to 'cheat' and use simulators to learn to land planes, or do they avoid 'cheating' and just cross their fingers?

If a chef burns his sauce and have to 'cheat' and start again, is serving the meal without the sauce the only 'honest' thing to do?

It seems that firearms, writing, athletics, pilots and cooking are 'bad methods' because of a high 'failure rate' making 'cheating' a necessity. Should we replace all of these with alternatives that don't require 'cheating'?

If you have to discard the results a lot of the time, why are you doing it that way in the first place?

To get some randomness combined with some control, to get a realistic range of scores, to avoid predictable characters made over and over again, to enable the inspiration that comes with an unusual stat array....

...because discarding bad results is actually part of the process; it is not 'cheating'...

 

[EzekielRaiden]

To get some randomness combined with some control, to get a realistic range of scores, to avoid predictable characters made over and over again, to enable the inspiration that comes with an unusual stat array....

...because discarding bad results is actually part of the process; it is not 'cheating'...

...but it does remove the key balancing element of random scores.

I totally get that most people use random scores because they want to be "surprised" by the character they get. That's fine, perfectly cromulent. The problem comes in when we start rejecting only specific kinds of rolls.

The average result for the *whole* probability space of 4d6-L is {16, 14, 13, 12, 10, 9}, approximately. But when you cut out all sets of rolls where the net mod isn't at least a certain number, or whatever other standard, you are shifting this average up. Whenever a DM allows a merely "mediocre" roll (say, {14, 13, 12, 10, 10, 8}) to be re-rolled, it's setting the midpoint of the distribution much higher. To the point that, on average, the *kept* arrays will be several points higher than what you could get from a normal point buy. And, with 5e, this is compounded by the fact that there are several results (16, 17, 18) which are not possible to buy, but are possible to roll, while neither system is particularly capable of generating the nasty low-number possibilities. It is a rare DM who forces a player to keep more than one sub-8 stat, yet legitimately rolling multiple 18s, or even multiple 16s, is met with congratulations--despite being the equivalent of 3s and 5s, respectively.

So no, it's not "cheating" in the sense of "secretly violating a rule." But it is "cheating" in the sense of "milking the system for an unfair advantage." Plying your DM's heartstrings to remove the balancing effect that's supposed--mathematically--to keep rolling from being completely superior to point-buy.

Would you prefer the term "exploitative"?

 

[Arial Black]

...but it does remove the key balancing element of random scores.

I totally get that most people use random scores because they want to be "surprised" by the character they get. That's fine, perfectly cromulent. The problem comes in when we start rejecting only specific kinds of rolls.

The average result for the *whole* probability space of 4d6-L is {16, 14, 13, 12, 10, 9}, approximately. But when you cut out all sets of rolls where the net mod isn't at least a certain number, or whatever other standard, you are shifting this average up.

I don't think the bolded part is true at all!

The set of stats you don't throw away is not affected by any set of rolls that you would have discarded.

If you roll that average 16, 14, 13, 12, 10, 9, then whether or not you could re-roll 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13 doesn't change the 16, 14, 13, 12, 10, 9 that you actually rolled in any way at all!

If you roll 3d6, the minimum is 3, the maximum is 18, and the average is 10.5. If you decide to re-roll results of less than 8, what is the average roll on 3d6? It's still 10.5!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't think the bolded part is true at all!

The set of stats you don't throw away is not affected by any set of rolls that you would have discarded.

If you roll that average 16, 14, 13, 12, 10, 9, then whether or not you could re-roll 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13 doesn't change the 16, 14, 13, 12, 10, 9 that you actually rolled in any way at all!

If you roll 3d6, the minimum is 3, the maximum is 18, and the average is 10.5. If you decide to re-roll results of less than 8, what is the average roll on 3d6? It's still 10.5!

Uh...no, it's not anymore. You've changed the center of the data by changing the produced results--you're throwing out all arrays that don't meet certain standards, so the distribution of kept arrays is quite different from the average. It's quite easy to demonstrate the effect.

For example, consider 4d6-L, where we throw out any set of 6 where the sum of the modifiers is 0 or less or the highest stat is 12 or less (inclusive or, there). I'll use Anydice to generate 3000 rolls of highest 3 of 4d6 (the equivalent of 500 test characters--plenty big enough for the kinds of numbers we want, and because I was going to do 1000 and got incredibly bored formatting the numbers so I could process them in Excel).

Edit: Expected/"ideal" average of 4d6-L: 12.24
Averages without any modification of 4d6-L: {12.328, 12.322, 12.32, 11.916, 12.114, 12.282} Net average 12.21367 (Note: not sure why the fourth column's average was so low--just a random fluke, I guess)
Averages after removing all arrays with net mod of 0: {12.48812095, 12.4838013, 12.4924406, 12.03455724, 12.27861771, 12.49460043} Net average 12.37869
Averages after removing all remaining arrays with max under 13: {12.49891068, 12.49673203, 12.50326797, 12.05228758, 12.28976035, 12.51198257} Net average 12.39216 (Note: this only appears to have removed 4 arrays at this point, which is probably why the impact is almost invisible. The two rules cover many redundant cases.)

Incidentally, these changes also shifted the median of several of the columns up by 1--no trifling feat, since the median is supposed to be a robust statistic. So, no, it is not true that removing those arrays which don't meet the standards has no effect on the averages. It may not be a huge increase, but it's definitely an increase. And this doesn't even include any attempt to capture the "beg your DM to let you reroll because two 16s/17s isn't worth having two 4s/5s" kind of situation, where an array juuuuuust barely passes the minimum requirements but are still crappy.

Being able to cajole the DM into letting you reroll a merely mediocre array will push these results even higher (since such things will almost exclusively apply sets near the low end). The exact effects are harder to estimate, since what exactly counts as "too crappy to keep" will vary a lot, but (for example) removing arrays with averages less than 11.5 results the averages shifting up another .25 or so--meaning an extra 1.5 stat points on average over the modified set, or very close to 4 extra points over the completely unmodified set. Small? Perhaps, but a statistically significant shift.

(As a side note: 269/459 of the end-modified results contain at least one 16. That's approx. a 58.6% chance of getting at least one score better than you could possibly get in 5e's point-buy system, and only 89/459 = 19.4% chance of getting no stats better than what you could get via point-buy. 'Course, that means you'd expect about one player at every rolling-only table to lose out...but it's still clear that, if you're a minmaxer, you want to roll, not point-buy. Being able to cajole in the suggested manner--when the average stat is below 11.5--boosts the chances of getting at least one 16+ to almost exactly two-thirds, for example.)

Edit: I've saved the Excel file, if you want to examine my math. I also have the original data set--6000 values, of which I only used the first 3000, arranged into sets of six to make 500 entries. You'll need to do some formatting to get most of the 500 unused sets to play nice with Excel (I strongly recommend TextPad if you're going to do that--Block Select is beautiful), but it's available if you want it.

Edit II:
Perhaps I should rephrase the "Uh, no it's not" comment. Yes, you're absolutely correct that the average result of 3d6 remains 10.5, even if you choose to ignore any result less than 8. No, you are not correct if you are trying to say that the average of the things you keep remains unchanged--which is what I was talking about.

Rolls you could get from the dice, but which aren't acceptable for play, should not be counted in the average. But because it would be a statistics nightmare to try to account for those two rules (lowest max score must be 13+, net modifier must be > 0), people just go with the nice, easily-estimated results like AnyDice does. (Incidentally, the slightly-better "standard array" in 4e could be argued to have shifted to take into account the rules that boost the averages.)

 

[thecasualoblivion]

Yep! I'm using the definition of cheating



If none of the methods offered achieves the goals desired by the DM/table, then a rules change is in order. The changed rule is not the method offered by the game.



You aren't using it at all. The DM changed it.



It's only a bad system if you use it as offered without change and it doesn't achieve the results the game says it should. The systems offered since 1e are not bad systems. They achieve the game goals for stats. However, people who play the game have different goals much of the time and have to come up with NEW rules for rolling stats. Those new rules are not cheating in any sense of the word, or even fudging. They are house rules and nothing more.

Yeah, people are using the word 'cheat' incorrectly here, and deliberately using it to create an artificial negative connotation to the advantages of rolling for stats.

Re-rolling is part of the rolling rules if the DM says so, therefore by definition 'not cheating'.

Just checked my 3.0 and 3,5 PHBs (I long since got rid of my earlier edition books) and it's part of the official rules:-



Re-rolling has been part of D&D character creation for decades. It's certainly been around a lot longer than point-buy.



So armies never use firearms because they sometimes miss and have to 'cheat' by firing again?

Do authors ever 'cheat' and re-write a line until they are happy with it before they publish?

Do athletes only get a single throw or jump, or do they 'cheat' and get several tries and take the best?

Do aircraft pilots get to 'cheat' and use simulators to learn to land planes, or do they avoid 'cheating' and just cross their fingers?

If a chef burns his sauce and have to 'cheat' and start again, is serving the meal without the sauce the only 'honest' thing to do?

It seems that firearms, writing, athletics, pilots and cooking are 'bad methods' because of a high 'failure rate' making 'cheating' a necessity. Should we replace all of these with alternatives that don't require 'cheating'?



To get some randomness combined with some control, to get a realistic range of scores, to avoid predictable characters made over and over again, to enable the inspiration that comes with an unusual stat array....

...because discarding bad results is actually part of the process; it is not 'cheating'...

Semantics, really? Come back with a real argument some time.