D&D 5E Point Buy vs Rolling for Stats

[Maxperson]

You keep cherry picking quotes and ignoring the ones you don't like:

That would be YOU, not me.

"Page 92 under NPC statistics gives 3 main options for creating NPCs. Option 1 is to give them whatever stats they need, which presumes stats. Option 2 is to give them a monster stat block, which presumes stats. Option 3 is to build them like PCs, which presumes stats. All the first paragraph says is that you don't need to roll, and you don't. You have the options 1 and 2 for picking the assumed stats."

Page 89 as I explained in the quote above, just means that you don't need to roll, not that there are no statistics. It's the general overview of the section to follow, and it's true. The NPC statistics section is very clear on the main ways for creating NPCs. All of them involve giving NPCs statistics. With two of them, however you don't need to roll stats. With the third you do unless you are using point buy and array.

 

[ccs]

Irrelevant. It's the freaking PLAYERS HANDBOOK, so of course references will be to PCs. We don't play D&D with only the PHB, though. All the books work together and the DMG proves you wrong. Just admit it man. It's explicitly right there in literal black and white.

All this debate over NPCs....

The truth is we DMs have always made them however we pleased. And always will.
Sometimes that means we roll some dice. Sometimes we just pick #s. Other times we just make up some modifier on the fly if needed.

 

[Maxperson]

All this debate over NPCs....

The truth is we DMs have always made them however we pleased. And always will.
Sometimes that means we roll some dice. Sometimes we just pick #s. Other times we just make up some modifier on the fly if needed.

Right, which is why the 5e DMG codified that into "law". 5e is about rulings over rules and does its best to help DMs see that.

 

[Oofta]

Kinda trollish of you to try and equate what I said about 5e to what I'm saying about 1e.

You're literally saying that a 5% increase across the board was no big deal, but a 7% difference on one minor thing is huge. Make up your mind.

 

[Oofta]

All this debate over NPCs....

The truth is we DMs have always made them however we pleased. And always will.
Sometimes that means we roll some dice. Sometimes we just pick #s. Other times we just make up some modifier on the fly if needed.

WHAT???? We don't need a system to determine the ability score of every individual the PCs may ever possibly encounter? But they did just that back in a book published a mere 30+ years ago! Proof that we should still do it!

Still don't understand why a different game that the majority of people currently playing D&D have never seen, much less played, has anything to do with the current edition.

 

[Arial Black]

I view every edition as stand-alone. For example I don't assume that just because 5E doesn't have rules for creating magic items, the 3.5 rules for creating magic items becomes the default.

The rules for creating magic items in 3.5 is no more relevant to 5E than a rule from 1E. The majority of people who play 5E have never even seen the rules from 1E, and the current version of the game has dramatically different mechanics

The basic assumption that ability scores are based on a 3d6 bell curve is not part of the game. The rules currently only assume is that the average commoner has around a 10 ability score, the minimum ability score is 1, the maximum is 18 with some exceptional individuals getting up to 20 (for most humanoid/NPC races).

Beyond that the DM is free to make whatever assumptions they want based on the style of game they want to play and how they envision their world working. For example, I assume a bell curve as well, just one that is far more clustered around the average than 3d6.

You're basing your entire argument on the Appeal to Tradition fallacy.

Just because something happens to be 'traditional', this doesn't mean that 'tradition' is the only quality it has.

'Inheritance', in terms of inherited characteristics, works by the mechanism of DNA. The characteristics of your forebears certainly affects you. Without question. Yet, is this merely the Appeal to Tradition fallacy? I think not.

When Darwin's ideas came into the public sphere, the Great and the Good were queuing up to state that their grandfathers were not monkeys! They denied, in the same way you are denying that D&D 5E is in any way affected by D&D 1E, that humans are in any way affected by the primate characteristics of our common ancestor; they were denying that we had a common ancestor!

You're denying that D&D is D&D!

 

[Oofta]

Just because something happens to be 'traditional', this doesn't mean that 'tradition' is the only quality it has.

'Inheritance', in terms of inherited characteristics, works by the mechanism of DNA. The characteristics of your forebears certainly affects you. Without question. Yet, is this merely the Appeal to Tradition fallacy? I think not.

When Darwin's ideas came into the public sphere, the Great and the Good were queuing up to state that their grandfathers were not monkeys! They denied, in the same way you are denying that D&D 5E is in any way affected by D&D 1E, that humans are in any way affected by the primate characteristics of our common ancestor; they were denying that we had a common ancestor!

You're denying that D&D is D&D!

There's also this concept of evolution. I don't have a tail, even though some long distant ancestor probably did. Some things are dropped because they are no longer appropriate or useful.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The idea that 1E has any impact on the current game sounds like rambling at the Old Folk Home for Gamers to me ... "I remember back in the day when we rolled 3d6 for ability scores, and we liked it! None of that namby-pamby fancy stuff! And we had to walk to the game up hill. In the snow. Both ways. Fighting off the orcs with our spiral ring notebooks!"

It was a D-ring binder, but aside from that, yeah, dead-on.

Actually it's going from 1 in 100 to 1 in 20. Again, not a huge change. And aren't you the one who argued that stats in 5e are so insignificant that it doesn't really matter if one character is lower than another?

Yes, but this is a different point. In 5e, bonuses go from +1 to +5 if you're better than average, but average is 10-11, and better starts at 12 and ends in 20 - in 1e, depending on stat, better gave you a +1 to +4, but better started at 15 (at the earliest) and ended at 18. (STR was wildly aberrant that way, better started at 16 for a +1, but went up to +6 at 18/00)
Point being, bonuses were clustered more on the tails of the bell curve. I believe that's supposed to counter your point about the curve not being as flat as it should be, giving too many 18s, but, obviously, you get just as many 18s on 3d6, and a high bonus for those 18s. ::shrug::

And, nope. The DMG specifically presumes that they DON'T have stats. Right there in the first paragraph on creating NPC's. Only NPC's that are a threat to PC's need stats. In fact it suggests simply using descriptors, rather than actually having stats.

Meh, or stats with no impact: 10s. But 5e actually gives everyone in the MM stats, including all the sample NPCs, even the quintessentially-meh Commoner.

What's that got to do with the price of tea in 1st edition?

Apparently, he feels the criticism of 5e came from a different angle, and that you're now arguing the opposite facts being true to push back. It's a different point about a different point, though. Before, you were saying that stats ultimately didn't matter in 5e, because the difference of a point of bonus here or there was dwarfed by class abilities and player skill. Now, you're arguing that the difference of even percentage points matters.
But it's a different context. Painting a picture of the population, a world-buidling context, which Hussar doesn't even recognize as a valid context for considering the rules.

In the literal sense, though, he is right, you were arguing that the difference between a 10 and a 14 is nothing in 5e, when it's a +2 to a fair range of important things, like saves/attack/damage/DCs/skills and now arguing that the difference between 10 and 14 is huge, when it's just carrying capacity and % chances to bend an iron bar.

Kinda trollish of you to try and equate what I said about 5e to what I'm saying about 1e.

1e /is/ terribly relevant to 5e.

5e is about rulings over rules and does its best to help DMs see that.

Amen!

Just because something happens to be 'traditional', this doesn't mean that 'tradition' is the only quality it has.

Sure, there are good traditions and bad traditions.

When Darwin's ideas came into the public sphere, the Great and the Good were queuing up to state that their grandfathers were not monkeys!

And they were right. For one thing, Darwins ideas suggested a close relationship between humans and apes, not monkeys. For another thing, it wasn't, as often paraphrased, "man evolved from apes," but "apes & humans both evolved from a common ancestor." And a grandfather is only two generations back.

It's easy to make factual statements that in no way contradict a theory, yet sound like a witty refutation of it.

You're denying that D&D is D&D!

Hey, it's worked before.

 

[Arial Black]

First of all, I don't think the "demonstrably untrue" bits Arial was going on about were demonstrably untrue because of the EGGs old bell-curve discussion.

The 'demonstrably untrue' part was the claim that 'point-buy lets players play the concept they want'. The rest is just pointing out the near infinite concepts that point-buy absolutely disallows, and that those same concepts are still available when rolling; even if you have to wait for the right random roll, a small chance is still higher than zero chance.

(And I consider some of what she...

I'm male.

...presents as unquestioned fact as demonstrably untrue - for instance, characterizing a collection of numbers as a 'valid concept,' it's not, it's a collection of numbers - there's nothing valid about straight 20s as a 'concept' it's just wanting to be the best at everything for the sake of the numbers, not the concept.)

If I generate a set of ability scores, by whatever method, then I try to create a concept that makes sense for those scores, or try and assign scores that match my pre-existing concept.

If I wanted to stat up The Avengers, Thor's Strength will be much higher than Captain America's, even though 'strong' is a feature of both concepts. The numbers do matter! The numbers are how the game quantifies a major part of our concepts, because how strong, dexterous, tough, smart, wise and charismatic are part of every concept, even if a particular ability is 'unremarkable' in a particular concept.

Now, demonstrate that this is untrue.

 

[Arial Black]

There's also this concept of evolution. I don't have a tail, even though some long distant ancestor probably did. Some things are dropped because they are no longer appropriate or useful.

True.

But the assumption of the bell curve was never dropped.