More common, perhaps, but not exclusive - some "born unlucky" adventurers will survive despite their "unluckiness". And it's fun to see, for those who like cheering for the underdog.
Sure. But the whole point was people (including yourself, IIRC) saying that such "born lucky" people would be super rare, would be
unnatural to be found in a community of (NPC) adventurers, etc. So: is it unnatural for there to be so many "lucky" adventurers, or not?
I largely agree here, and I wonder if part of the problem is that the game's terminology use and the common meanings are getting in each other's way.<snip>There's an argument to be made that if something has a 90+% success chance and failure carries no real danger then just let it happen and carry on.
Right, but those are two different conditions--lumping them together may be a problem. Even if it isn't, though? There's two things at play here. On the one hand, sure, if you're pretty confident things will work, just go ahead with things etc. But on the other,
not having some stakes on some of these things means you're making it so these "born lucky" types really do achieve 100% success rates (or close to it) rather than having faults. In other words, this practice
if overused creates the very problem you cite!
It's when failure carries a real danger that even the most trivial tasks need to be looked at e.g. you're climbing a ladder (trivial task) but if you get unlucky and fail those ghouls are gonna catch you...
Depends. It certainly sounds like MoonSong wants failable rolls with zero stakes other than "having difficulty doing ordinary tasks," so what should we make of that?
It'd be a refreshing change, now and then, from "You emphatically, unequivocally, consistently can't be stopped" which 4e-5e play tends toward at anything other than very low levels.
I mean, I cited my experience with 4e for a reason. I've had retreats (even up to high Heroic; I haven't had an opportunity to play higher levels, but I've heard reports of the same from other players). I'm not saying that things aren't safe
r in 4e than in (say) LL--just that your characterization here is, basically, "You literally never lose ever." And that's flatly false. (Incidentally, this
is a case where the fact that a personal story isn't "data" is irrelevant: you're making a universal claim, "you never lose in 4e," so an individual instance
is enough to prove the universal claim isn't correct.)
You're not getting it. I don't care what the specific numbers are - 10% vs 30%, 65% vs 85%, whatever; or how they relate to the specific game system - my point is the mere presence of that amount of difference between them makes the higher "born lucky" and the lower not.
Except that the numbers involved DO matter. That's MY point. You can't divorce this from the numbers themselves. The
actually achievable numbers are 60/80, but you're making a comparison as though it were 60/99,
or worse. And it's not. Maybe only a 20 percentage point gap is enough to
You're conflating success with contribution. They are not the same!
Contribution is in the attempt to do something. Does a Fighter who stands into melee and manages to miss on every single swing she takes still contribute? Hell yes. Or a Rogue who can't get in to a combat due to lack of space but who instead keeps watch behind is still contributing, even if there's nothing back there to see. Not contributing is to attempt nothing. The Rogue who, instead of keeping watch, just tunes out until the battle's over contributes nothing because he isn't even trying.
I don't agree, but I don't totally reject what you're saying. See, the thing is? The fighter who misses an attack
is still doing a thing, it's just a thing that didn't work as intended. The Rogue who is "keeping watch"
isn't doing anything in the first place...unless the DM is going out of her way to
make "keeping watch" mean something, because that has no definition in the system. It's not actually furthering any objectives, unless the DM
makes objectives that it applies to. That's why it's what I disparagingly called "begging the DM"--it's only contribution when the DM goes to the effort of
making it a contribution.
I'm not a statistician so I've no idea why you'd divide by anything.
I've done the derivation, it's long and boring and I doubt you care. The short version is that when looking at sample means and sample standard deviations, you get more accurate results by dividing by
one less than the sample size, as opposed to parameters (which describe the entire population), where you use the entire population size. The relevant fact is that each time you have a sample size of 1, you would divide by 0, which breaks everything.
Stop. You don't. You have one anecdote in multiple parts: your personal experience. All those different games/characters/situations have at least one obvious confounding common factor,
you. (And by your own admission, you've played pretty consistently with the same group, which is yet another thing that means your anecdotes aren't distinct data points, but rather the same data--your game group--with a long time to them.)
Anecdotes only become data you can do any real work with when they're collected systematically across a representative sample. "The 47 games I've played with my game group of 30 years" is neither representative of anything but itself, nor collected systematically. Inductive reasoning derived from
your personal experience, no matter how lengthy, isn't data. It is, at best, a singular data point--which is where the "sample size of one" problems come in.
But what this does indicate beyond question is that it can be done, because it has been done; and therefore can be done again. What I'm arguing against is a system that prevents it from being done again because that system is designed to not allow that situation to arise in the first place.
First, no one is arguing for preventing things as far as I'm concerned--hence why I spoke of the asymmetry before. (I welcome examples of characters that
cannot be articulated in 4e because it has slightly higher average scores than something like LL.) More importantly, this isn't nearly as much of a point as you seem to think. That is, you can't just leap from, "well,
I had more fun with a low-stat character" to "having fun with low-stat characters is easier/better/etc." All you've done is shown it CAN be fun...but ANYTHING can be fun, and if the thing you're talking about COULDN'T be fun you wouldn't even bother defending it in the first place. That something
can be fun is an incredibly weak argument in its defense.
True average on 4d6k3 would be 12-12-12-12-13-13 or 12-12-12-12-12-13.
Actually, no! As
Anydice has shown (and I think was referenced above), the
actual average of 4d6k3 is something like 16, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8. This is exactly the argument I was making earlier, that it's really easy to confuse the
perfect average with actually likely results. Even though a 16 is pretty high on 4d6k3,
not getting at least one 16+ is unlikely.
I don't even try to square it, because I see that advice as being horrible, and as something that I would never wish to promote or support.
Okay so...again, it's really hard to discuss a game with you when you reject whatever parts of it don't suit you, and don't bother to mention this, as if we're all already specifically discussing Lanefan's version of every edition.
Hypothetical example<snip>
Okay so...how does this actually integrate with the things you said? You seem to be in agreement that we can
expect the lucky (and, specifically, the "born lucky") to predominate as adventurers--you expect that "only the lucky survive." Yet you also expect that...the unlucky will make lots of rolls, or...something? These expectations are not particularly compatible,
unless (as I've said already) you expect there to be a great many characters that fail very frequently (and often fatally) in order to balance out the survivor bias.
Also: the fact that high stats do not
guarantee survival is entirely specious. Of course they don't, it's a probabilistic game where there is a non-zero chance of instant death some of the time. Thus, a non-negligible portion of the time, instant death will occur even to those, as you say, "born lucky." No one is saying it's a guarantee of survival. Instead, it's that
because the "born lucky" have a statistically higher chance, over time, they predominate. Just like evolution, where sometimes creatures with a beneficial adaptation die before reproducing, and sometimes creatures with a non-beneficial adaptation survive to reproduce, but
overall creatures that have beneficial adaptations will be over-represented.
I was measuring survival time, in terms of adventures survived/appeared in. I could measure in terms of sessions played (I have those numbers too, or at least the data to generate such) but digging down and analysing to that degree of granularity is extremely tedious: these aren't in any database, I do it all by hand.
Obviously, any work you do on this front is up to you. But "number of adventures" sounds like a good way to miss relevant details. That is, a single adventure might have seven of your characters appear in it, but only one
survived it, which is quite related to previous stuff I mentioned (like "I'll watch it die" x12 before I get to see one survive.)
And at some point every character either perma-dies or perma-retires
No disputes there? Not sure why you bring it up.
It's also probably worth noting that my campaigns go on for many years
I would envy you if it weren't something I'm specifically told not to do. I have longed to find a long-runner 4e game. I had one, as I mentioned before, but it died due to real life issues for the DM. I've been unable to find one since.
I have no idea what all those numbers mean in what I quoted.
My point was that it is quite easy to end up with something like "oh, look, 20% of all surviving characters were low-stat, while 30% of all surviving characters were high-stat. Clearly it doesn't matter much." Except that the actual survival rates really do still favor the high-stat characters (just not to an overwhelming extent because
nobody has a high survival rate in old-school D&D).
4e's EL system assumed 4 or 5 PCs all of the same level and wealth, and with each 'role' represented.
While that was
preferred, it wasn't even slightly required. I have played 4e lacking every role (individually) except Defender, and twice lacked multiple roles (controller/striker and controller/leader specifically). Things still work. Yes, there's a wider variance as one would expect. But the numbers
still work. That is a huge part of why I love 4e's rigor. It really did allow you to break some of its assumptions--not 100% of everything all the time ever, of course, but it wasn't nearly as rigid as its critics characterize it to be.
Better, I say, that DMs learn by trial-and-error right from the start; as they're inevitably going to need that skill eventually anyway.
Looping back to the stealth thing: I don't actually think this works as well as you think it does! I'm pretty sure many DMs literally never realize how they cause some of the problems they experience. I could, of course, field some anecdotes of my own on this one, but that wouldn't be particularly effective. Instead, I'll present it as: why do we have ongoing problems with stuff like iterative probability (the "stealth" problem) and properly managing resting/conflicts, if this stuff is supposed to be so easy to pick up via trial-and-error?
I'm not saying that learning by doing is bad, by the way. Just that trial-and-error requires that you be able to
see where your errors are and change your behavior to correct them. Both parts of that can be quite dicey with DMing, which is so deeply personal to so many!
By the same token, a system full of save-or-dies can always have some of them toned down or stripped out entirely - it runs both ways.
Except that you're wrong. I mean, you're
technically correct, in the sense that it is possible to comb through a ruleset to pick out all the raisins. But it's a hell of a lot of work to
remove raisins from that bread, and you're quite likely to accidentally run into one you missed. On the flipside, inserting them where they aren't present is as easy as making a custom monster, which people will do either way.
It's the same thing as the "I want zero to hero" problem. You wouldn't believe (well, actually, maybe you would believe) how many DMs
insist on starting at 1st level, no matter what campaign they run, no matter how much experience they have with a system, no matter how much advice or suggestions point to doing other things. I have seen this ruin campaigns, because new players couldn't cope with the lethality of low level 5e. But because the designers chose to make 1st level
the most lethal level of the game, this is now something many have been saddled with, and which is
hard to escape from. Heck, you yourself think it's a terrible idea that should never be practiced! But a system could
just as easily cater to the desire for "zero to hero" play (in fact, it could specifically work to make that experience far richer and more suited to fan desires!) by having actual "zero levels" or "apprentice levels" or whatever, where you explicitly
aren't heroes and
should be constantly afraid of death etc. Having such a system, placing it front and center without any denigration or sidelining, would mean that all the people who insist on starting at 1st level
because it's 1st level and not for any other reason, would get a game that doesn't punitively impact new players just learning the ropes, while still having full, friendly support for those who hunger and thirst for that high-lethality experience.
I take it you're not a fan of 'rogue-like' computer games, then.
Not even remotely. There is exactly one roguelike I have enjoyed long-term: Desktop Dungeons. Literally every other roguelike I've played (including FTL, Rogue Legacy, the Doom roguelike, Darkest Dungeon, and (arguably) Hand of Fate) I have sooner or later soured upon because it is just so. punishingly. difficult. My successes never matter and I just always hit a skill wall eventually that I feel hopeless to overcome. Pretty much every time I've run into a situation where, after many hours of previous play, I'll sit down to play for a few hours to unwind, and I make
zero progress whatsoever in that entire multi-hour span, and I ask myself, "Why am I doing this? I'm not having fun. I'm not even getting in-game achievements. This is supposed to be
fun, but all it feels like is depressing
work."
