Right. Stats are very important in 1e. While the combat bonuses didn't kick in until 15+, PCs were expected to have them in no fewer than two stats. Class abilities weren't as important as they are in 5e, so stats had much greater prominence in 1e.
Class abilities were all-important in 1e. Want to pick a lock? You better be a Thief. But if you are, you can't wear plate, but if you're a fighter, you can, and your AC isn't much beyond the armor on your back.
In 5e, stats matter for the majority of the checks your PC might make, and class/level only matters to the few you're proficient in.
They are not going to waste valuable book space to tell you that 'nothing changed'!
Oh, they wast lots of the books' space, and it's not all that valuable.
Some things just sink to the level of assumption. The game's been around 40 years, there are some things about it that just are and don't need to be constantly re-stated and re-invented. There are some - like hps - that are better left in the mud, so each faction can think they know what's 'really' under there....
In order for D&D 5E to remove the assumption of the 3d6 bell curve it would have to tell us what the 5E assumption is! If it did that then any old assumption would fall away.
Or the Implacable Order of the Holy Bovine would start the gaming apocalypse rather than allow the change to stand. :shrug:
Gygax wrote a mini essay concerning that very thing in the 1E DMG. In it, he mentioned that some players might think of the D&D Int stat as being IQ/10, or as a creature's IQ as being its Int score x 10. He was keen to point out that this is not the case; that IQ and Int measure related but different things (Int covers more things). Upshot being that the bell curve which applies to real world IQ scores simply is not the same bell curve that applies to D&D Int, or any other D&D ability score.
That's a convenient enough dodge, but it runs into the same sort of problem, it doesn't actually provide the explanation of what INT is modeling that needs to be so different from IQ.
It's really just saying "no, the system isn't realistic, suck it up." It should have just said 'screw realism' more openly.
Y'know, one reason D&D resonates so passionately with nerds is that EGG was one of us: he just hated to be 'wrong.' ;>
You keep insisting that everyone should know the rules from all previous games that had the label D&D. The the vast majority of people I've played with over the past few years have never played 1E. Out of dozens of people I can think of 1 or 2 others who have.
Any of them entirely unaware of the idea of stats ranging from 3-18 and that corresponding to the result of rolling 3d6?
I agree that this version of the game evolved from a system that started in the 70s. It's why we use a range of 3-18 for ability scores and why we have things like OwlBears and Rust Monsters. I can't breath water even though some long dead ancestor had gills, I don't have fins, I don't have a tail and there is no assumption of 3d6 for ability scores for the general populace.
If evolution of primates worked like evolution of D&D, you'd at /least/ have opposable big toes at this point, probably a V dental arcade with prominent canines and a sagital crest, too. You'd definitely have returned to the trees.
Have fun using it for your game if you want. And tell those darn kids to GET OFF THE LAWN!
Get off my drought-tolerant CA-natives, you darn 20-30yo millennials!
