D&D 5E Assumptions about character creation

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
See but this doesn't make sense.

Let us imagine for a second that I go to a gun range, I pull out a rifle and I begin shooting at the target. If I hit 15 out of 20 times, a miss is noteworthy.
Where for me it'd be noteworthy if I could figure out how to load and shoot the thing at all.
This is also one of the standards for passing a CCW test in certain states, being able to hit the target 15 out of 20 times at a set distance. So, we have said that an accuracy rate of 75% is needed to considered compentent enough to be given a CCW.
CCW? What's that - Certified Competent Warrior? (I'm not American)
If competence is boring... why are you trying to play a competent person? Fighters are professional soldiers. Combat is very different from practice, this is true, but if they are expecting to miss more than 25% of the time... are they really a professional who knows what they are doing?
Yes. As a professional maybe they still miss 60% of the time, where an untrained non-professional might miss more like 80-90% of the time (1e reflected this nicely with non-proficiency penalties to hit). As they get better (i.e. advance in level) the miss rate against the same foe or target steadily decreases.

As a game-mechanical side effect, a much lower hit rate means you can reduce the crazy amount of hit points everything has. :)
 

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Maxperson

Morkus from Orkus
Ok, let me make an accurate calculation. 95.79% percentile, hey almost 1.5% certainly significantly better ¬.¬!

I don't have the time to do the hypergeometric/negative binomial? calculation right now, but I'm sure it can't be that low in the population. Edit: turns out it is a straight binomial, it is over 77.25% of the population. less than 25% of all people.
So almost 1 in 4. That's a very significant portion of the population and wouldn't be at all immersion breaking for me to have or see a PC with those sorts of numbers. :)
 


Chaosmancer

Legend
CCW? What's that - Certified Competent Warrior? (I'm not American)

Concealed Carry Weapon.

Basically the license that says you can have a secret gun on you at all time.

Yes. As a professional maybe they still miss 60% of the time, where an untrained non-professional might miss more like 80-90% of the time (1e reflected this nicely with non-proficiency penalties to hit). As they get better (i.e. advance in level) the miss rate against the same foe or target steadily decreases.

As a game-mechanical side effect, a much lower hit rate means you can reduce the crazy amount of hit points everything has. :)

You have to remember my example is for America. Getting a CCW is usually easier than getting your driver's license, it is a far far far cry from a professional. Though, maybe that state's regulations are actually quite high.

But, maybe this is part of the issue. I gave you the numbers for a civilian who wants to have a gun on them, and you assumed that was the accuracy rate of a professional. Meanwhile, the rate for an expert marksman is a minimum of 36 out of 40, or in other words, a 90% accuracy rate.

Now, that is a bit on the high end, especially for a low level character, but I think that shows the difference here. Between 75% and 90% is the range of "people who know what they are doing" My character maybe doesn't need to be 90% accurate, but if I'm 40% accurate, then I'm below the level of basic competence. In fact, even at 50% it is basically coming down to dumb luck.
 



Charlaquin

Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
Concealed Carry Weapon.

Basically the license that says you can have a secret gun on you at all time.



You have to remember my example is for America. Getting a CCW is usually easier than getting your driver's license, it is a far far far cry from a professional. Though, maybe that state's regulations are actually quite high.

But, maybe this is part of the issue. I gave you the numbers for a civilian who wants to have a gun on them, and you assumed that was the accuracy rate of a professional. Meanwhile, the rate for an expert marksman is a minimum of 36 out of 40, or in other words, a 90% accuracy rate.

Now, that is a bit on the high end, especially for a low level character, but I think that shows the difference here. Between 75% and 90% is the range of "people who know what they are doing" My character maybe doesn't need to be 90% accurate, but if I'm 40% accurate, then I'm below the level of basic competence. In fact, even at 50% it is basically coming down to dumb luck.
5e shoots for around 65% accuracy when you’re facing level-appropriate monsters. There’s a bit of wiggle room, as some monsters are more or less defensive than others, the DM (or the treasure tables) controls the flow of magic items, and rolled scores can put you a bit above or below the expected score in your offensive ability. But I’d say that’s a pretty good benchmark for gameplay purposes. I think it strikes a pretty good balance where you can feel reasonably competent, but missing is still a pretty significant possibility. With maybe a 15% margin for error based on the above factors, you will very rarely be in a situation where you are hitting less than half the time or more than 4/5 of the time.
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
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 safer 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.)
It sounds like your DM (or you, if you were the DM) was running 4e on hard mode.
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 see them as more similar: the fighter making an attack and the rogue keeping watch are both trying to "do a thing"; with the main difference being that the fighter has a known target and obvious success-fail condition where the rogue does not.

By that I mean while the attacking fighter only has two possible outcomes...

Hit the opponent for damage
Miss the opponent

...the watching rogue has three:

Succeed in noticing something
Fail to notice something because of bad luck (or incompetence)
Fail to notice something because there's nothing there to notice. (should be indistinguishable at both player and character level from failure due to bad luck)
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.)
You're assuming all the anecdotes in that 47 are my own. I could gather 47 anecdotes from 47 different people on some game-related topic on these forums with virtually no effort at all. Only one of those would be my own.
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.
Not sure quite how this is supposed to read, but it comes across as saying that fun (or potential fun) shouldn't be a reason for including or excluding any given element in the game - which seems a bit odd somehow, given as in theory fun is the root goal of the whole procedure. :)
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.
You're talking about the expected results of rolling six times, I'm talking true average: taking the actual average of 4d6k3 (which is 12.24 or something close) and breaking that out into the closest set of six whole-integer numbers.

And now I forget why we were talking about either one. :)
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.
I think you might have misinterpreted me somehow, which isn't that difficult all in all. :) We're also talking about two different definitions of 'lucky' here, which probably isn't helping.

Born lucky:
Theory: where lucky is defined as having significantly higher starting stats we can expect the lucky to survive more often and-or longer.
Practice: my own numbers tell me starting stats make a very small* to negligible difference to one's chances of survival at any point.
* - not sure if this difference is 'statistically significant' or not; the eye test says it's relatively trivial.

Lucky in play:
Theory: where lucky is defined as avoiding the mines where others do not we can expect the lucky to survive more often and-or longer.
Practice: agrees with the theory.

So yes, only the lucky survive; but here we mean 'lucky in play'. Being 'born lucky' matters little if at all.
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.
What I've been trying to point out is that this is exactly what my numbers don't tell me. :)
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.)
Rare indeed is an adventure where one player goes through seven characters! Rare enough that I've seen it happen exactly once in 38 years of both DMing and playing - but that once will never be forgotten in these parts: the most gonzo attempt at Keep on the Borderlands you'll ever (not) want to see! All four players went through at least five characters each; one managed eight of which two survived.

This was the first adventure in my current campaign; and five characters from it are still out there eleven+ years later either on hold (waiting to be played again) or retired (player has since left the game).
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.
Would 4e even be able to handle a truly long campaign without some serious slowdown in character advancement?
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?
Because the rules-as-written are crap?

Anytime unlimited re-rolling is allowed, or a mechanic like take-20 rears its head, there's a problem. But if one roll represents your best attempt period, lots of these headaches go away.
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!
Recognizing errors is easier in hindsight than on the fly, to be sure.
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.
For me, whacking save-or-die out of 1e would take about the same amount of work as introducing it to 5e.
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.
And I am one such, and will ever be.
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.
So the problem lies simply in their labelling of the first few levels as 'heroic', and you'll hear no disagreement from me on that. :)

'Heroic' shouldn't start until at least 5th level. But the marketing department has other ideas...and so low-level play gets rather badly mis-labelled.

There's also not enough warning given in the PH to advise players that bad things will inevitably happen to their characters.
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."
Where I play rogue-likes to - pun intended - death. :)
 

EzekielRaiden

Follower of the Way
Those are the two extremes, perhaps, and it's a question of toward which do we want to tend and-or how accepting of failure are we.
I reject the dichotomy. It presumes that only one result (whether it be success or failure) is the "focus" or "point." Without both being valuable, it's a non-starter.
Here I disagree. Often the very best of work comes from those who don't yet fully know the rules or in some cases even know any rules exist.
"Often" is a strong word, isn't it? How many first-year art students produce Mona Lisas? How many first-year philosophy students write a Tractatus? It is absolutely true that some people don't need formal education to learn the rules--they already learned them, whether by accident or on purpose, such that formal schooling might trip them up (in exactly the way that questions like "are you sure you know where your feet are" can screw up a dancer or the like). But your assertion is too bold; you are, essentially, saying that training and education are completely unimportant for producing any work of art or design, and I'm pretty sure history isn't on your side on this one.

To return your argument to you: There have been times even in mathematics--perhaps the most rules-based discipline around--where someone who "didn't know it wasn't possible" did something fantastic. Such events are exceedingly rare, not because The Man gets fertile minds down, but because it is extremely hard to have such brilliant insight when you don't know anything yet. And even in the only case I know of is George Dantzig, this wasn't some fresh-faced first-year mathematics student; Dantzig was a graduate student in a UC Berkeley statistics course under his own doctoral advisor. This is someone who absolutely already knew the rules of the particular art he was practicing, and his work would have been outright impossible for someone who didn't have the formal training he had.

So yeah. It's true that formal training is neither a guarantee of success, nor a requirement for it. But it's damn useful, and chasing the dream of the totally untrained rube that bests the Ph.D. is going to result in fewer good works, not more, in the long run. Recognizing that training isn't the end-all, be-all is emphatically not the same as deciding, "Welp, guess nobody ever needed to practice painting before they actually start doing portraiture!"

It's still the best homebrew module I've ever seen and would more than hold its own with any published modules then or since.
Then that is a great thing. But again, you present a singular case. There are two reasons you might do this. The first, to demonstrate the exceptionally weak claim that training (of whatever kind) isn't required for producing good work. This is true...but it doesn't actually oppose what I said, that creative rules exist to help produce better work and, thus, mastering them means learning when to break them, which is why it's worth bothering with practice and training. The second reason is to demonstrate the far stronger claim that these rules are never necessary...but that's a universal claim, and you can't make a universal claim from a particular instance.

This is the logical reason why an anecdote isn't data, by the way. You either get weak claims (that, in this case, don't actually affect my own claim), or you fail to reach strong ones.

A better example is music: look how many bands are at their creative best when they're just starting out, before they learn all the 'rules' or maybe even fully how to play their instruments (cf Sex Pistols), and then slowly get worse as they learn the rules and start conforming to them.
And how many bands struggle with their sophomore album, not because of any kind of lack of training or anything else, but because they had their entire lives to prepare their first album and perhaps a few years to prepare their second? Your evidence isn't strong enough to back up your assertion here. There are far too many confounding variables. (To name a few others: success gets to their heads so they make foolish choices; living the high life causes them to disconnect from their sources of inspiration or engage in activities that reduces their working time; the stress, anxiety, and constant attention of stardom negatively affects their ability to work; they lose interest in producing further work of the same kind; etc.)
It sounds like your DM (or you, if you were the DM) was running 4e on hard mode.
Nope. DM was explicitly and intentionally running 4e precisely by-the-book, because he wanted to know exactly how by-the-book 4e worked out. He was, I admit, a DM who primarily used old-school stuff prior to running 4e. But he was running things so thoroughly "by the book" that we didn't even use updated/errata'd materials, he really wanted to know exactly how things worked circa PHB2 (to include Druid and Bard and such).

I see them as more similar: the fighter making an attack and the rogue keeping watch are both trying to "do a thing"; with the main difference being that the fighter has a known target and obvious success-fail condition where the rogue does not.
But in every case, the Fighter is doing something with a defined benefit. The Rogue is only able to do things because the DM decided there would be benefit, and actively worked to make that benefit exist. It is entirely possible to make extensible framework rules (such as 4e's Page 42) and simple always-on options (like Aid Another) that make it so effectively all conceivable actions that have benefit can be represented by something definitively worthwhile.

It is the lack of a target (or target-like-thing--I want to be clear that "target" has a lot of baggage I'm not keen on, I'm just using your word) and the lack of an obvious success-fail condition (or, at least, one that can be found with reasonable ease) that is the difference that matters to me.

You're assuming all the anecdotes in that 47 are my own.
Unless you collected these systematically--which I sincerely doubt, since you're getting these from people you've gamed with, which is not a representative sample--it's exactly the same problem. This is one major part (though far from the only one) of why surveys are incredibly difficult to design, and why good social science is so difficult to do.

Not sure quite how this is supposed to read
Then I spoke unclearly.

What I am saying is that "you CAN have fun doing X"--as in, it is possible for at least one person to have fun doing X--is the least useful of all defenses for a game element. That is, let's look at the negation of the statement: "it is impossible for at least one person to have fun doing X." I think we can agree that any design element which you could truly label with this statement would be an objectively bad game element--something that should never appear in any game, ever.

But what does that mean? That means that absolutely all design elements that are ever worth considering--literally every single one of the possible rules or components you could put into a game--must meet the common standard of, "At least one person could enjoy this." Thing is? It's going to be really hard to assert that a given element is objectively bad for all possible games (as you yourself have stated, more or less). So...that basically means we have a criterion--"element must have the potential for fun for at least one person"--which is effectively always applicable, regardless of the design element we look at.

Now, if the criterion were, "A majority of players who want to play a game of type Y report having fun while doing X," that would be completely different. That WOULD be a matter of evaluating whether component X generates fun. But that is a dramatically different claim from "it is possible for at least one person to have fun while doing X."

You're talking about the expected results of rolling six times, I'm talking true average: taking the actual average of 4d6k3 (which is 12.24 or something close) and breaking that out into the closest set of six whole-integer numbers.
...and now we go back to my original argument. "True average" people should actually be exceedingly rare. The odds of rolling exactly two 13s and exactly four 12s are (approximately) .1327^2*.1289^4 = 0.00000486131, or about one in every 200,000. (Note that I am ignoring the order for this; the results will be the same if you account for ordering, as the factors will cancel out.) The perfectly average person is actually quite rare, as I said initially. Instead of this "true average" (which is quite rare), we should instead look at the expected results. And that's what the AnyDice calculation does. It looks at what the most likely highest stat is, the most likely second highest stat, etc. And, lo and behold, it is nearly identical to the Elite Array!

And now I forget why we were talking about either one. :)
Some posters (I think you among them?) had said that it is unnatural or unrepresentative to have characters with such high stats. I have been pointing to the statistics of such things to show that no, it is this unnatural enforcement of the exceedingly rare "true average" behavior that leads you to think these results are divergent; they are in fact more natural, more representative of the distribution used. (Admittedly, btw, 3d6-strict would generate lower overall numbers, but the fact is that 14-16 isn't nearly as unusual as you claim even with such methods.)

I think you might have misinterpreted me somehow, which isn't that difficult all in all. :) We're also talking about two different definitions of 'lucky' here, which probably isn't helping. <snip> So yes, only the lucky survive; but here we mean 'lucky in play'. Being 'born lucky' matters little if at all.
Okay then. Two questions:
1. If being "born lucky" doesn't actually matter, why do you care? It seems you have argued that your own position is irrelevant, because it's actually the underlying system math (being highly lethal, having save-or-die rolls, great uncertainty about results) that decides whether characters live or die, not their individual statistics. So why not let players play those "born lucky"? it won't matter in the end, but they'll get their little bit of enjoyment from big numbers.
2. Why are these two forms of luck so different? I genuinely don't understand. The snipped parts didn't really illustrate why luck during character generation is of an entirely different kind from luck elsewhere in play.

What I've been trying to point out is that this is exactly what my numbers don't tell me. :)
Sorry man, gut feels aren't the same as statistical analysis. I get that things don't look all that favorable to you. But crunching numbers (particularly on a much larger, unbiased data set) is what actually answers questions like this.

Rare indeed is an adventure where one player goes through seven characters!

Would 4e even be able to handle a truly long campaign without some serious slowdown in character advancement?
Um...yes? There are several 1-30 adventure paths written for 4e (including the excellent Zeitgeist, which I'm still dying to play through...ah, someday.) It is entirely possible to play a long-runner game with a perfectly reasonable pace of advancement. Say you level up every 3-5 weekly sessions; that gets you roughly 13 levels per year, so accounting for breaks and needing at least a few sessions to wrap everything up once you hit max level, a two-and-a-half year campaign would make perfect sense. I've only been a participant in one game that has ever lasted nearly that long...and that's the game I currently DM.

Because the rules-as-written are crap?
But they don't have to be. That's why I keep talking about 4e. It's a game where the rules as written AREN'T crap. They sure as hell aren't perfect, but they're quite effective at what they shot for. Dungeon World is another game where the rules as written emphatically are not crap. 13th Age is a third. It is entirely possible to design rules that, as written, are ACTUALLY GOOD. That are actually WORTH using, so that you break them only when you know you need to. We're just caught on this idea that because rules will always need exceptions, you may as well not care about design quality and constantly force the DM to re-design the game on the fly. It's incredibly frustrating to me the "well if they aren't perfect I don't want them" attitude that pervades the tabletop design community.

Recognizing errors is easier in hindsight than on the fly, to be sure.
Again: this assumes the ability to see that there was an error in the first place. It is entirely possible to never realize what is wrong, and simply feel dissatisfied or continually work to "fix" your frustrations by going down blind alleys or adjusting unrelated elements. Hence why I bring up Dr. Howard Moskowitz and chunky spaghetti sauce all the time: a full third of Americans had literally NO idea that they had been hankering for extra chunky spaghetti sauce their entire lives, because having a preference or desire and knowing what fulfills it are two completely different things.

I am NOT just saying, "Oh, well, these things can be hard to do on the fly." I'm saying these things may literally be impossible for some people to figure out on their own, because the solution requires re-conceiving the problem with tools they don't know exist and asking questions they've never even considered.

For me, whacking save-or-die out of 1e would take about the same amount of work as introducing it to 5e.
Then I applaud your substantial design skill. I can emphatically say that ripping out all of 1e's save mechanics so that I felt confident I could have the experience I wanted, without running into nasty surprises, would be an absolutely daunting task.

So the problem lies simply in their labelling of the first few levels as 'heroic', and you'll hear no disagreement from me on that. :)'Heroic' shouldn't start until at least 5th level. But the marketing department has other ideas...and so low-level play gets rather badly mis-labelled.
Or, instead of saying "oh well that choice was bad," maybe we should recognize that there are (at least) two different ideas of what low-level play is? Like, you are literally saying your idea of low level play is the objective way low-level play SHOULD be, for everyone. I, as an alternative, am asserting that we should recognize that there's a sizable audience (particularly brand-new players) for whom "low-level play" SHOULD be somewhat "heroic" (while still being relatively simple, to introduce them to the game)....and yet ALSO recognize that there's another sizable audience (which includes you) for whom "low-level play" SHOULD NOT be even slightly "heroic" (while still potentially being a very rich, detailed experience if desired). There is no way to uphold these two attitudes with a singular progression for absolutely everyone...and thus the "zero levels" idea comes into play. That way, it is equally correct to say that "low-level play" "is heroic" and "is not heroic," because "low-level play" refers to two different things: 1st level characters (who are presumed to have demonstrated their heroism) and "apprentice" characters or whatever we want to call them, who explicitly have not (fully) demonstrated their heroism yet.

By introducing this feature, you respect that there are two radically different styles of play, and design game rules that actually try to make each group happy, rather than forcing one to dance by the other's tune. That's why I argue so stridently for it. It actually says, "You know, BOTH of you want something that is D&D, so BOTH of you deserve to get what you want."

There's also not enough warning given in the PH to advise players that bad things will inevitably happen to their characters.
Oooooooooooor maybe "bad things will inevitably happen to [your] characters" isn't something objectively good, but is a really specific and fairly narrow interest among tabletop roleplayers, and thus generally isn't catered to directly? Further, maybe it's an interest that can be catered to purely through electing to (as you described earlier) run a game in "hard mode," with opt-in features that increase risk and reduce survivability?
 


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