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<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8518973" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Alternatively (and completely in keeping with simulationist logic) it could just be that adventurers are not a representative sample of the overall group. Which is almost surely factually correct, because adventurers do ridiculously dangerous things for money, or fame and glory, or out of a perceived moral imperative to do so. Much as how the vast majority of people in fictional worlds aren't Good or Evil, Lawful or Chaotic, and they may not even be True Neutral (being best described by &quot;Unaligned&quot;), yet almost all adventurers have a clear alignment and usually are pretty committed to it. The sample SHOULD be biased, if only because adventuring is a massive selective pressure that favors those who succeed more often, even if only marginally. Thus, racial ability bonuses being individual represents the much higher likelihood of weirdness (as I've said, repeatedly) while the overall high values represent the simple fact that player characters usually aren't ordinary, but are in various ways outliers before things even begin.Each thing directly corresponds to an actual aspect of the world. Each one represents a (fictionally) real, measurable characteristic (&quot;adventurers face heavy selection pressure&quot; and &quot;populations have very high variance and extremely low probability of all being average in all possible ways&quot;), in a way that conforms surprisingly well to the actual dynamics one would expect of populations of living organisms. DMs either requesting that players stick to &quot;expected&quot; values unless there's (in their opinion) good reason not to, coupled with having NPCs that always use the &quot;expected&quot; values, will reinforce the overall statistical center, while players will represent the potential (but not always manifest) variance.People keep making a big bugaboo about the HORRIBLE SPECTER of...a dwarf with slightly higher dexterity. But is that actually going to happen very much? Is there really going to be a flood of wimpy-twig half-orcs and Hollywood homely dragonborn? Is there really going to be such an enormous tidal wave of exactly defied expectations that things are going to suddenly and forevermore look totally bizarre?I sincerely doubt it. Which makes all this &quot;but simulation! But verisimilitude!&quot; sound like a lot of hand-wringing over nothing whatever.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 8518973, member: 6790260"] Alternatively (and completely in keeping with simulationist logic) it could just be that adventurers are not a representative sample of the overall group. Which is almost surely factually correct, because adventurers do ridiculously dangerous things for money, or fame and glory, or out of a perceived moral imperative to do so. Much as how the vast majority of people in fictional worlds aren't Good or Evil, Lawful or Chaotic, and they may not even be True Neutral (being best described by "Unaligned"), yet almost all adventurers have a clear alignment and usually are pretty committed to it. The sample SHOULD be biased, if only because adventuring is a massive selective pressure that favors those who succeed more often, even if only marginally. Thus, racial ability bonuses being individual represents the much higher likelihood of weirdness (as I've said, repeatedly) while the overall high values represent the simple fact that player characters usually aren't ordinary, but are in various ways outliers before things even begin. Each thing directly corresponds to an actual aspect of the world. Each one represents a (fictionally) real, measurable characteristic ("adventurers face heavy selection pressure" and "populations have very high variance and extremely low probability of all being average in all possible ways"), in a way that conforms surprisingly well to the actual dynamics one would expect of populations of living organisms. DMs either requesting that players stick to "expected" values unless there's (in their opinion) good reason not to, coupled with having NPCs that always use the "expected" values, will reinforce the overall statistical center, while players will represent the potential (but not always manifest) variance. People keep making a big bugaboo about the HORRIBLE SPECTER of...a dwarf with slightly higher dexterity. But is that actually going to happen very much? Is there really going to be a flood of wimpy-twig half-orcs and Hollywood homely dragonborn? Is there really going to be such an enormous tidal wave of exactly defied expectations that things are going to suddenly and forevermore look totally bizarre? I sincerely doubt it. Which makes all this "but simulation! But verisimilitude!" sound like a lot of hand-wringing over [I]nothing whatever.[/I] [/QUOTE]

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