D&D 5E Assumptions about character creation

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
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.
Disagree: only one needs to be valuable. It's only when both have no value that the usefulness disappears.

Worth doing:
Success = something happens
Failure = something else happens

Success = something happens
Failure = nothing happens

Success = nothing happens
Failure = something happens (this one's much less common but it does arise)

Not worth doing:
Success = nothing happens
Failure = nothing happens
"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.
Best example I can give here is new RPG players. Brand new players often come up with the best and most creative ideas during play. Why? Because they haven't yet become hidebound by the rules - they just imagine the situation as described, think of something they can do and then try to do it.

And I rather suspect were others to chime in here there'd be a decent degree of agreement on this.
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
Depends who's defining what 'better' work is, doesn't it.
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.
For almost anything creative that doesn't involve a safety hazard, rules are never necessary. Guidelines might be; and can be useful, as long as they're acknowledged as being no more than that.

Another anecdotal example. Despite having absolutely no formal musical training, I write lyrics and (by ear) songs, and play in a studio-only band. The other guys in the band have way more formal training than I do...and I can't count the number of times where I'll play something e.g. a chord progression and have them say "in theory that shouldn't work - but it does; how did you do that?" and I'll look at them blankly and shrug.

If a series of notes or chords sound good together I don't give a damn whether they're following any rules or not; and if they don't sound good together I'll just try something else. :)
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.)
I'll not dispute any of this; all of it happens far too often. I'll counter with all the bands who, for lack of a better term, "sell out" after their original music leads to some initial success and start following either corporate rules and-or making their subsequent music to fit a formula so it'll sell.
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.
The example I used was this forum. To the best of my knowledge I've never gamed with any of you.
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."
And then the question becomes one of determining who 'the majority' really is; as often a few louder voices saying one thing can drown out a big number of silent ones who think differently.
...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!

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 at this point be mixing up @MoonSong 's posts with mine. I have no issue with characters having high stats, in part because my own observations tell me stats don't make a huge difference in the long run. What I do have issue with is the expectation that they must all have the same stats, rather than random.
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.
Again, you're misremembering who said what. In my eyes 'born lucky' doesn't matter.
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.
Char-gen luck does not lead to luck during play. They're different and IME almost completely disconneted things.
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.
I just dug up the numbers I ran. I looked at about 180 characters, all rolled up using very similar methods and with rolls observed by others, and noted the starting stats for each. Roughly 90 of these were our 'hall of heroes' - those characters who had done at least ten adventures. The rest were a 'control group' - a random selection of characters who didn't last as long.

My intent was to determine whether starting stats made a difference in one's odds of getting to the hall of heroes. (as a sidebar I did some campaign-v-campaign comparison to see if the numbers matched the eye test where some campaigns appeared to have seen luckier rolling than others)

I'm no statistician, thus I've no way of knowing whether a 0.28 difference in overall stat average between the heroes group and the control group is significant or not; but it doesn't seem like much.
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.
We have different standards of "long". To me, two-and-a-half years is just nicely getting started. When it hits ten years, let me know. :)
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.
I'm the other way around: if they're not perfect I'll make them perfect* - or at least get them closer than they were. The game I run uses a rules system that started with 1e and has had 40+ years of modifications laid on to it; and it's still getting tweaked.

* - by my own definition, of course, which won't apply to everyone.
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.
This is exactly the trial-and-error bit I mean. Yes, not every fix is going to work, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't try.
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.
Funny - one of the next things on my to-do list is to re-do and fine-tune the save matrix. :)
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."

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?
Those hard-mode features should be opt-out rather than opt-in, as it's always easier to remove barriers and restrictions than to implement them.
 

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Chaosmancer

Legend
Best example I can give here is new RPG players. Brand new players often come up with the best and most creative ideas during play. Why? Because they haven't yet become hidebound by the rules - they just imagine the situation as described, think of something they can do and then try to do it.

And I rather suspect were others to chime in here there'd be a decent degree of agreement on this.

I wouldn't really be agreeing. More often than not my new players are so scared of doing something "wrong" that they stick with the safest and most obvious ideas.

Meanwhile the vets just cut loose and do crazy stupid stuff.

Now, this isn't a guaranteed thing. I've had my share on both sides of this, cautious vets and cut loose newbs, but if I had to put them on a scale, newds tend towards overly-cautious.
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
I wouldn't really be agreeing. More often than not my new players are so scared of doing something "wrong" that they stick with the safest and most obvious ideas.
Interesting.

I wonder if there's a difference in how we (as in all of us, not just you and I) present our games to new players, and whether that makes a difference to how those players start out.

What I mean by this is how a DM who presents the game as more 'let your imagination go, feel free to try anything, and for now let the rest of us worry about the rules', as opposed to 'here's the rules, read these before you start', might see a very different early playstyle from a new player. Put another way, does the DM come across as being rules-first or imagination-first.

I was introduced to the game via the former method, and try to do the same with any new players I bring in (though it's been a long while since I've had a truly 'new' player). Admittedly, the 'let us worry about the rules' approach is easier in an older type of system where more of the rules are DM-facing - but to me that's a benefit.
 

ph0rk

Friendship is Magic, and Magic is Heresy.
I wonder if there's a difference in how we (as in all of us, not just you and I) present our games to new players, and whether that makes a difference to how those players start out.

I think there are also DMs that are loathe to let characters die. Once a vet figures this out, they are much more likely to swing from the rigging with knives in their teeth and torches in their toes.
 

Disagree:
Worth doing:
Success = something happens
Failure = something else happens

Success = something happens
Failure = nothing happens

Success = nothing happens
Failure = something happens (this one's much less common but it does arise)

Not worth doing:
Success = nothing happens
Failure = nothing happens
Interesting. Didn’t you just give the example of a Rogue who was watching a corridor as contributing to the fight, even if nothing came down the corridor?
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
I think there are also DMs that are loathe to let characters die. Once a vet figures this out, they are much more likely to swing from the rigging with knives in their teeth and torches in their toes.
Perhaps, but as a player I'd personally tend to avoid DMs like this if I could. :)
 


EzekielRaiden

Follower of the Way
Disagree: only one needs to be valuable. It's only when both have no value that the usefulness disappears.
Again, completely disagree. Rolls to simply maintain the status quo or lose it are bad--and are, I'd argue, a leading cause of the "excessive stealth" problem, because that's what that is, forcing someone to maintain a status quo over and over again until it fails. The only area I might budge on is "success means change, failure means status quo," because implicitly on an adventure, the status quo is not good, and thus maintaining the status quo is actually a bad thing (e.g. when you roll to hit and miss, it's not just that the combat doesn't end, it's that the enemy gets another chance to take YOU down, etc.) But even there, I'd argue it should be avoided as much as humanly possible, and I learned that from Dungeon World. Both failure and success should ideally change the state of play; failing that, success should always change it.

In fact, I would call this a general...guideline, since you seem to have some bugaboos about "rules," of game design. First, don't use mechanics that don't actually matter, which I figure is relatively uncontroversial. Second, mechanics where the state of play doesn't change should generally be avoided. It doesn't have to be a HUGE change, but it should change.

Also, FrozenNorth's got a good point. This does seem to put you in a pickle WRT the Rogue's contributions vs the Fighter's contributions. The Fighter is guaranteed that either success matters or failure matters (or both), while the Rogue is not guaranteed that either success OR failure matters--there is at least a chance that NEITHER failure nor success matters, at which point even you would agree that what the Rogue is "contributing" isn't worth doing. That chance--the chance that you do a thing and it simply doesn't matter, neither by success nor failure--is a serious part of why I don't accept such actions as "contributing" the way the Fighter in your example is "contributing."

Best example I can give here is new RPG players. Brand new players often come up with the best and most creative ideas during play. Why? Because they haven't yet become hidebound by the rules - they just imagine the situation as described, think of something they can do and then try to do it.
My experience reflects that of the others who have replied. New players tend to be very cautious, because they don't want to play "wrong." I have a player who has been very slow to come out of his shell on things. Our last session was one of the first times he really actively sought out an opportunity to roleplay and it was really cool to see, but it really only happened because I was a little pushy with a prompt in the previous session. Boldness, I find, is not so much a function of "knowing the rules" as it is of underlying player personality. Some players are instigators. Some are...the opposite of that, like my current players.

Depends who's defining what 'better' work is, doesn't it.
Sure does. But, as a general thing, sentences which follow the rules of English grammar make for better literature than sentences which don't, right? There will always be exceptions. (Some would argue the second sentence of this paragraph violates a rule of English grammar: it begins with a conjunction.) Overall though, we don't expect a nineteen-year-old to write Tolkienesque prose (I respect Mr. Paolini's efforts, but they aren't up to Tolkien's level) for exactly the reason that Tolkien has more experience and training and understanding of the rules of writing, both how to obey them and when to break them. Other arts, in general, work similarly. Breaking key or time signatures is a general rules no-no for composition, but it is done quite often when doing so makes better music, because again, that is what all rules for creative works are about: they ALL contain the clause that you SHOULD break them, IF breaking them makes better work.

For almost anything creative that doesn't involve a safety hazard, rules are never necessary. Guidelines might be; and can be useful, as long as they're acknowledged as being no more than that.
And if necessity were my point, this would be SUPER relevant. But necessity was literally never my point. Utility was. Rules are useful for producing better work. Also: What is the difference between a "rule" you are supposed to break when you see that doing so produces better work, and a "guideline"? I think you're getting hung up on what "rule" means to you rather than the way I've been using the word.

I'll not dispute any of this; all of it happens far too often. I'll counter with all the bands who, for lack of a better term, "sell out" after their original music leads to some initial success and start following either corporate rules and-or making their subsequent music to fit a formula so it'll sell.
Okay? You seem to be granting me my point, which is that the rules are useful. Necessity was never my point.

And then the question becomes one of determining who 'the majority' really is; as often a few louder voices saying one thing can drown out a big number of silent ones who think differently.
Certainly. Which is why the statement you made--"some people CAN have fun while doing X"--is so useless. A mechanic which has no potential for fun is an absolute no-sell for 100% of game systems. Being able to say "some people CAN have fun while doing X" is the bare minimum qualification to be included at all. It is like saying that in order to be human a creature must have DNA. Well, I mean, yes, that is properly true at this time, but "having DNA" is a really useless criterion for whether a being is human or not, even though it technically IS a necessary condition, because there are SO MANY things that also have DNA but aren't human. By exactly the same logic, "some people CAN have fun while doing X" applies to essentially every game mechanic ever designed, including things like loot boxes, 52 pickup, and pay-to-win gaming. "Some people CAN have fun while doing X" is only useful for filtering out absolutely unacceptable mechanics--not for demonstrating that a particular mechanic is a good idea given a type of game you're going for.

I think you might at this point be mixing up @MoonSong 's posts with mine. I have no issue with characters having high stats, in part because my own observations tell me stats don't make a huge difference in the long run. What I do have issue with is the expectation that they must all have the same stats, rather than random.
Perhaps I am. Not really sure why you'd say the "must all have the same stats" thing--I don't actually think that. I actually quite like the ability to choose, more or less, between three or four different loose categories of stats via point buy: the generalist (most stats are close to the arithmetic mean), the specialist (most stats are far from the arithmetic mean), the focused (two good stats, mostly average stats), and the selective (good at a particular set of things and not good at most others). As an example, I prefer to play Paladins in 4e, and when I do, I prefer to go for 16 Str, 16 Cha as my highest stats (counting racial bonuses!) at first level. I do this because I like having higher secondary scores, because I want to be both Strong and Charismatic narratively, and because I am comfortable enough with the rules that I know the consequences of choosing to play such characters. It is not merely "playable," but entirely possible to have the intended hit probabilities even with such stats. You may consider such stats unusually high, and in a game with 3d6 rolled stats perhaps they would be, but 4e is designed with them in mind.

Again, you're misremembering who said what. In my eyes 'born lucky' doesn't matter. Char-gen luck does not lead to luck during play. They're different and IME almost completely disconneted things.
Fair enough. If the luck doesn't really matter to you, I'll drop the point. Frankly, I'm also dropping the numbers about your own game, because I don't see that conversation going anywhere.

We have different standards of "long". To me, two-and-a-half years is just nicely getting started. When it hits ten years, let me know. :)
Uhh...yeah. I'd say you have a highly divergent idea of what a "long-running" game looks like. Very, very, very few people get to that point. Even getting to two years is surprising to most people.

I'm the other way around: if they're not perfect I'll make them perfect* - or at least get them closer than they were. The game I run uses a rules system that started with 1e and has had 40+ years of modifications laid on to it; and it's still getting tweaked.
Obviously, you do you. But imagine, if you will, a game that needed only the lightest touch of house rules--places where you added something cool or the like. That's what 4e was meant to be. Something that literally doesn't NEED house-rules, but which totally still CAN be house-ruled when doing so enhances your experience. (Another oft-stated but entirely false criticism of 4e is that you can't house-rule it or it will break. This is not true. Several DMs have used house-rules in 4e games I've played. They all worked beautifully, and tended to be small adjustments or fun additions, like "leftover forced movement when a target is pushed against a wall or similar causes 1d6 damage per square of leftover." That's a great one for control-focused characters like Wizards, Bards, and even certain Avengers and Fighters.)

This is exactly the trial-and-error bit I mean. Yes, not every fix is going to work, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't try.
Again, you're not getting my point. You keep assuming that (a) the person can SEE that there is a problem to fix, (b) understand WHAT the problem actually is, and (c) can FIND a solution that fixes it even if they do actually see the problem.

Assumptions (a) and (b) are not nearly as common as you think, and while assumption (c) often does happen given you assume (a) and (b), it's not at all guaranteed. Trial and error depends mightily on realizing both that there IS an error, and actually discerning what the error is. A lot of problems IRL happen because people DON'T realize there's an error, or do know something is wrong but can't identify what.

Those hard-mode features should be opt-out rather than opt-in, as it's always easier to remove barriers and restrictions than to implement them.
Uhh...no. No they are not. There is a reason THAC0 doesn't exist anymore. It is NOT axiomatically easier to remove barriers than to place them. I would in fact say it is almost always easier to ADD barriers than to remove them, at least in the D&D design context. You keep making these bald assertions like this without any actual argument for them. I'd really prefer that you actually defend them rather than just stating them as though they are self-evident truths. Because I promise you they aren't.

I wonder if there's a difference in how we (as in all of us, not just you and I) present our games to new players, and whether that makes a difference to how those players start out.
My most skittish player is the one who's never played TTRPGs before. We play Dungeon World and I have repeatedly emphasized to him that he can describe whatever he wants to do, and I'll either agree, negotiate, or roll the dice. We are a little more rules-forward than DW usually expects, but I try to keep things fiction-focused as much as possible. The player is still very cautious about engaging in any situation (safe or not, combat or not, etc.) It honestly has nothing to do with his experience.

Or, if you prefer: inexperience isn't necessary for boldness. Beyond that, though, it's not even a particularly good indicator of boldness, as others have argued.

I think there are also DMs that are loathe to let characters die. Once a vet figures this out, they are much more likely to swing from the rigging with knives in their teeth and torches in their toes.
Ironically, my players know I am loathe to let them die, and they're STILL terribly, terribly cautious almost always. It literally took me raising my voice (something I regret, but which I have been sufficiently forgiven for that it is now a funny story the player tells to others) to get one of them to actually face a threat I had built up and had actively prepared the party to face. By the time they actually DID face it, they trounced it with flying colors and it felt good for the whole party.
 
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Interesting.

I wonder if there's a difference in how we (as in all of us, not just you and I) present our games to new players, and whether that makes a difference to how those players start out.

What I mean by this is how a DM who presents the game as more 'let your imagination go, feel free to try anything, and for now let the rest of us worry about the rules', as opposed to 'here's the rules, read these before you start', might see a very different early playstyle from a new player. Put another way, does the DM come across as being rules-first or imagination-first.

I was introduced to the game via the former method, and try to do the same with any new players I bring in (though it's been a long while since I've had a truly 'new' player). Admittedly, the 'let us worry about the rules' approach is easier in an older type of system where more of the rules are DM-facing - but to me that's a benefit.
IME, the real difference is whether the player thinks of it like a video game but looser (these players will stick to what they can clearly see the rules allowing until they get that down pat, and then experiment) or a story game (usually someone who learned about the game form streaming - since many streams cut out the boring-to-watch playing-by-the-rules parts, they'll see the rules as unimportant and expect to just describe cool things and then cool things happen.)

Once in a while you'll get someone who come to the game expecting deadly puzzles, because they learned about the game when their uncle regaled them with nostalgia-filtered tales of actual old-school play.

An while I've never seen it in the wild, I can imagine that if you have an uncommon playstyle you might simply have gotten a lot of practice explaining your style to new players and now do so before they ask - so you subvert the issues of mixed expectations entirely.
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
Again, completely disagree. Rolls to simply maintain the status quo or lose it are bad--and are, I'd argue, a leading cause of the "excessive stealth" problem, because that's what that is, forcing someone to maintain a status quo over and over again until it fails. The only area I might budge on is "success means change, failure means status quo," because implicitly on an adventure, the status quo is not good, and thus maintaining the status quo is actually a bad thing (e.g. when you roll to hit and miss, it's not just that the combat doesn't end, it's that the enemy gets another chance to take YOU down, etc.) But even there, I'd argue it should be avoided as much as humanly possible, and I learned that from Dungeon World. Both failure and success should ideally change the state of play; failing that, success should always change it.
It comes down to whether success in any given situation means getting something you want (i.e. changing the status quo for the better: I successfully climb the wall) or not getting something you don't want (i.e. the status quo is better than the alternative: I successfully remained hidden here and the guards didn't see me on their latest pass). I think either case produces relevant stakes.

What you're proposing makes retention of the status quo an impossible result: either something happens, or something else happens; and in the fiction this isn't always going to make sense.
In fact, I would call this a general...guideline, since you seem to have some bugaboos about "rules," of game design. First, don't use mechanics that don't actually matter, which I figure is relatively uncontroversial. Second, mechanics where the state of play doesn't change should generally be avoided. It doesn't have to be a HUGE change, but it should change.

Also, FrozenNorth's got a good point. This does seem to put you in a pickle WRT the Rogue's contributions vs the Fighter's contributions. The Fighter is guaranteed that either success matters or failure matters (or both), while the Rogue is not guaranteed that either success OR failure matters--there is at least a chance that NEITHER failure nor success matters, at which point even you would agree that what the Rogue is "contributing" isn't worth doing. That chance--the chance that you do a thing and it simply doesn't matter, neither by success nor failure--is a serious part of why I don't accept such actions as "contributing" the way the Fighter in your example is "contributing."
This comes down to playing in character - the character has no way of knowing whether success or failure matters or not either until later, or never.
My experience reflects that of the others who have replied. New players tend to be very cautious, because they don't want to play "wrong." I have a player who has been very slow to come out of his shell on things. Our last session was one of the first times he really actively sought out an opportunity to roleplay and it was really cool to see, but it really only happened because I was a little pushy with a prompt in the previous session. Boldness, I find, is not so much a function of "knowing the rules" as it is of underlying player personality. Some players are instigators. Some are...the opposite of that, like my current players.
I hear you. One of the things I specifically look for when deciding who to invite in is whether that player is likely to entertain me and the other players (I'm confident in my own ability to entertain); which means I default toward the more outgoing types as those tend to be more entertaining on average.
Sure does. But, as a general thing, sentences which follow the rules of English grammar make for better literature than sentences which don't, right? There will always be exceptions. (Some would argue the second sentence of this paragraph violates a rule of English grammar: it begins with a conjunction.) Overall though, we don't expect a nineteen-year-old to write Tolkienesque prose (I respect Mr. Paolini's efforts, but they aren't up to Tolkien's level) for exactly the reason that Tolkien has more experience and training and understanding of the rules of writing, both how to obey them and when to break them. Other arts, in general, work similarly. Breaking key or time signatures is a general rules no-no for composition, but it is done quite often when doing so makes better music, because again, that is what all rules for creative works are about: they ALL contain the clause that you SHOULD break them, IF breaking them makes better work.

And if necessity were my point, this would be SUPER relevant. But necessity was literally never my point. Utility was. Rules are useful for producing better work. Also: What is the difference between a "rule" you are supposed to break when you see that doing so produces better work, and a "guideline"? I think you're getting hung up on what "rule" means to you rather than the way I've been using the word.
I see "rule" and "law" as synonyms: breaking either has potential consequences. A rule in chess is that your rook can only move in straight lines.

A guideline, on the other hand, is something - usually advice - that can be adhered to or not, as the mood strikes. A guideline in chess is that the central four squares are important in the early game.

In RPGs, many things people tend to see as rules I tend to see more as guidelines.
Perhaps I am. Not really sure why you'd say the "must all have the same stats" thing--I don't actually think that. I actually quite like the ability to choose, more or less, between three or four different loose categories of stats via point buy: the generalist (most stats are close to the arithmetic mean), the specialist (most stats are far from the arithmetic mean), the focused (two good stats, mostly average stats), and the selective (good at a particular set of things and not good at most others). As an example, I prefer to play Paladins in 4e, and when I do, I prefer to go for 16 Str, 16 Cha as my highest stats (counting racial bonuses!) at first level. I do this because I like having higher secondary scores, because I want to be both Strong and Charismatic narratively, and because I am comfortable enough with the rules that I know the consequences of choosing to play such characters. It is not merely "playable," but entirely possible to have the intended hit probabilities even with such stats. You may consider such stats unusually high, and in a game with 3d6 rolled stats perhaps they would be, but 4e is designed with them in mind.
I put point buy into the all-the-same category. Sure it allows for much more variety than fixed array, but you're still starting from the same overall base. Further, in neither system can you have anything less than an 8 unless the DM overwrites the rule, and sometimes having something below 8 is what makes a character work.
Fair enough. If the luck doesn't really matter to you, I'll drop the point. Frankly, I'm also dropping the numbers about your own game, because I don't see that conversation going anywhere.
Hmmm...you don't like it when I use anecdotes as evidence, and you don't like it when I use actual numbers as evidence. This makes things tricky... :)
Uhh...yeah. I'd say you have a highly divergent idea of what a "long-running" game looks like. Very, very, very few people get to that point. Even getting to two years is surprising to most people.
Not in these parts... :)
Obviously, you do you. But imagine, if you will, a game that needed only the lightest touch of house rules--places where you added something cool or the like. That's what 4e was meant to be. Something that literally doesn't NEED house-rules, but which totally still CAN be house-ruled when doing so enhances your experience. (Another oft-stated but entirely false criticism of 4e is that you can't house-rule it or it will break. This is not true. Several DMs have used house-rules in 4e games I've played. They all worked beautifully, and tended to be small adjustments or fun additions, like "leftover forced movement when a target is pushed against a wall or similar causes 1d6 damage per square of leftover." That's a great one for control-focused characters like Wizards, Bards, and even certain Avengers and Fighters.)
As 4e seems like a system that produces something very close to what you want, that you're saying this all makes sense.

I, meanwhile, would have to strip 4e right down to the floor and rebuild it from scratch to get it even vaguely close to anything I'd want to touch either as DM or player; and what I'd probably end up with would be something more like 1e or 2e with lots of 3e and 4e elements included. (but I doubt it'd resemble 5e very much)

As that's simply more work than it's worth, I'll stick with plan A: carrying on with my own system and incorporating good ideas from others where I see them (e.g. 4e's 'bloodied' mechanic - great idea, though I still haven't worked it into my system yet)
Uhh...no. No they are not. There is a reason THAC0 doesn't exist anymore. It is NOT axiomatically easier to remove barriers than to place them. I would in fact say it is almost always easier to ADD barriers than to remove them, at least in the D&D design context. You keep making these bald assertions like this without any actual argument for them. I'd really prefer that you actually defend them rather than just stating them as though they are self-evident truths. Because I promise you they aren't.
Not sure I understand the example. Removing THAC0 (or, in my case, never using it in the first place) is easy, as to me THAC0 is an obstacle in that it adds a needless step to a process which otherwise arrives at the same result.

Ask any DM who has placed homebrew restrictions on the game (e.g. no Elves in this setting; or expansion-book XYZ will not be used in this campaign), as to how players often react. Speed limits on roads - no driver ever complains when the speed limit is raised, but they sure do when it's lowered.

It's simply easier to start with the most restrictive situation and ease it off than to do the reverse.
 

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