Level Up (A5E) Do Player Characters Have Average Population Stat Distributions?

[Lanefan]

Nah. You have to be born Lebron James. You can't exercise yourself into Lebron James starting from Kevin Hart.

Some PCs are Joe-Just-A-Little-Better-Than-Average, yes. But you only get to Achilles by starting as Joe Starts-With-A-16. And a lot of PCs are rocking 15s and 16s in their prime ability score and a 12-14 in their secondary before racial adjustments.

If you look only at stats, you're right.

But Joe-JALBT-Average grows into LeBron mostly by the powers and abilities (and maybe magic items too!) he slowly acquires as he levels up, not so much by improving his base stats. 3e-4e-5e have really leaned into baked-in stat improvement as you level up, something I've never been totally on board with.

 

[Charlaquin]

I do it occasionally. In the last game I ran we had a Half-Orc multiclass Barbarian/Bard. Everyone at my table thought that was cool. No shunning involved.

But it wouldn’t have been less cool if it wasn’t bad at being a bard. Also... Half-orc Barbarian isn’t exactly bucking trends or forgoing the bonus to you primary ability.

 

[Cadence]

If NPCs can have 7 Intelligence, and PCs can't, then you have an in-world indicator of out-of-game status. Your world is necessarily less believable, and less internally consistent, than if you didn't have that.

Whether or not you (or your table) care about the world being consistent and believable is a matter of personal standards. But regardless of where you stand on that, some people do care quite a bit about it. Whether a designer should cater to players who care, or the ones who don't care, is a decision for them to make.

Ah - there's problem one: point-buy does not give anything remotely resembling a bell-curve distribution across a population. It's a purely gamist idea (ditto with standard array, only more so) not meant to reflect reality in the game world, and thus IMO useless for anything except PC creation if your specific intent is to shoehorn all your PCs into a narrow window within the available bell curve.

Do you make the player play whatever they roll up? Say all 11's or lower, for example, or a negative total ability mod across the six?

Are there any NPCs in your world with a profound disability or who start their career with no training and in bondage? Do your players characters have a chance of starting that way?

Now I'm picturing a traveller-esque generation system for D&D...

 

[Guest 6801328]

You're begging the question. We don't agree with the premise that it invalidates the setting, so the question has no meaning. PCs can be exceptional. They're literally 1 in a million. Billion. You disagree, but that's all it is.

Yes.

I mean, I can understand the appeal of playing an RPG in which you start off as just like everybody else. That might be fun sometimes.

But it's also fun to play knowing that your character happens to be a couple standard deviations above average. Or even that your character has advantages that aren't just statistically unlikely among commoners, but that are just unachievable to them.

They're all valid premises for play.

What I find utterly, completely bizarre is the proposition...the insistence...by @Lanefan and @Saelorn that anything other than the first one invalidates the world and the game falls apart.

I mean, I knew they both had opinions about what proper roleplaying is that I don't share, but this one truly blows my mind.

 

[tetrasodium]

Do you make the player play whatever they roll up? Say all 11's or lower, for example, or a negative total ability mod across the six?

Are there any NPCs in your world with a profound disability or who start their career with no training and in bondage? Do your players characters have a chance of starting that way?

Now I'm picturing a traveller-esque generation system for D&D...

I once had a player with a three in one stat(along with 2 15s elsewhere). For what it's worth that stat was dex on what wound up being a heavy armor wearing fighter & the group took around 3 months at level zero before getting to level 1. Over a year of weekly sessions later covid ended that game around ten or twelve I think

 

[Guest 6801328]

3e-4e-5e have really leaned into baked-in stat improvement as you level up, something I've never been totally on board with.

But there's something we agree on.

It all started with the Cavalier in Dragon, IIRC. Downhill from there.

 

[Charlaquin]

You and Saelorn have very odd ideas.

That’s hardline simulationism for ya.

 

[TwoSix]

Yes.

I mean, I can understand the appeal of playing an RPG in which you start off as just like everybody else. That might be fun sometimes.

It's fine to play that if you're playing an OSR game or retroclone. But that's simply not where the community has moved to over the past 2 decades.

It's good to understand your personal play desires, but you also need to understand need to be able to recognize that the pdefault play style has moved on.

 

[Cadence]

It's fine to play that if you're playing an OSR game or retroclone. But that's simply not where the community has moved to over the past 2 decades.

It's good to understand your personal play desires, but you also need to understand need to be able to recognize that the pdefault play style has moved on.

I liked that PF gave a variety of different point buy totals depending on what the campaign was aiming at.

 

[Lanefan]

You're begging the question. We don't agree with the premise that it invalidates the setting, so the question has no meaning. PCs can be exceptional. They're literally 1 in a million. Billion. You disagree, but that's all it is.

Sounds like you're looking at a setting where a) the PCs are the only adventurers in existence and b) you're planning on zero PC lethality and-or turnover during the campaign. In this extremely unusual case, the PCs can be as ridiculous as you like.

Otherwise - as in just about every campaign going - when some of them die, or retire by player's choice, or get tossed out of the party, etc. and need to be replaced, where do those replacements come from? Oh, look, the replacements were out there in the setting all along - which by extension means there's others still out there; and bang goes the PCs-are-unique argument.

So, now we know there's more adventurers out there than just the PCs, how do we seamlessly fit them into the setting along with the PCs? By making them all work just like PCs. From there, it's a short and easy step to making non-adventuring levelled NPCs (e.g. lab mages or stay-at-home clerics) also use the PC chassis.

Where do commoners fit in? Well, again barring specific campaign conceits e.g. the PCs were born as children of prophecy etc., one has to assume the PCs more or less grew up as ordinary people within their cultures. Some editions show the mechanical gap or steps between commoner and 1st-level better than others (e.g. 1e has rules for 0th level; 4e has a huge gap completely ignored by RAW that I know of); but at some point every levelled entity in the setting has mechanically crossed that gap. In short: they all came from the same roots.

And those "same roots" are mechanically defined, for Humans anyway, as a 3-18 bell curve over 6 stats. Sheer gamism pushes some toward using point-buy or fixed arrays for PC stat generation; but as none of those methods ever produces anything that can't be achieved by rolling they for these purposes can be ignored.

Throw all that in with the general idea of every setting-population guide I've ever seen indicating that levelled entities are FAR more common than 1/1000000 and you've got more than enough reason to want to integrate PCs and NPCs into the same system.