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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2311627" data-attributes="member: 4937">The thing is, I'm no longer convinced that the 3d6 distribution has any real meaning.  It's one of those legacy assumptions that is hanging around in defiance of the fact that the rest of the game has completely changed.A similar situation in 1st edition concerned the cost of labor.  EGG knew quite abit about medieval economies, enough to know that a working wage was about 1 s.p. per day.  This assumption underlies everything from his cost of hiring labor, to the ammount of money that a PC could collect in taxation once he reached name level and built a stronghold.  EGG also knew that historically, the price of gold was fixed at 1 gold coin per 20 silver coins.  But these historically derived numbers continued to exist in a game in which for various reasons, PC wealth was measured in terms of gold coins and in which treasure was a necessary measurement of player experience (and advancement).  Hense, by the time a character reached 9th-12th level he was so fantasticly wealthy that not only was the taxes he could collect from silver peice earning farmers basically irrelevant, but he could leverage whole populations to work for him for years at wages far above the rest of society.  One standard's assumptions just didn't match with the assumptions of the other standard.  The assumption that attributes are distributed to the members of society along the bell curve generated by rolling a 3d6 is one of those assumptions that just doesn't agree any more with the assumptions of the rest of the game.  Back in 1st edition, it was not really necessary for the PC to have anything like extraordinary attributes to be an extraordinary character - that is to find him or herself in the roll of a hero.  Back in 1st edition, the thing that made a Player Character more extraordinary than your average Non-Player character was PC's could gain experience points.  It's an assumption so common to 3rd edition that I doubt anyone much notices it, but everything in 3rd edition can presumably gain experience points.  In first edition, most everything could not gain experience points.  The ability to gain class levels was an extraordinary and supposedly rare ability.  The vast majority of the characters in the world regardless of race were stuck as fixed HD 'monsters' that were incapable of advancement.  Your average human was stuck as a fixed 1/2 HD 'monster' and no ammount of experience could change that.  A careful reading of the description of NPC's reveals that even most leveled NPC's - even those of say 8th level - were incapable of gaining any more levels.  They simply had been 'made' that way and that was that.  Only a tiny portion of the NPC's - 'henchmen' - in the world possessed the extraordinary power of bettering themselves the way the PC's did.  So every PC was by definition extraordinary, and as we all know experience was far more important in AD&D than your attributes (as lampooned in Terry Pratchett's 'Interesting Times' for example).  Contrast this to the situation in 3rd edition.  Everything in the game can presumably level up.  Even your lowly 'commoner' has a 20 level progression table.  If the PC's do not possess extraordinary attributes, then it is highly unlikely that they will stand out in way as potential heroes.  If the PC's are mere 25 point buy characters or even 28 point buy characters, and some 10% of the population is - even assuming nobody else out there has any experience - more capable than them by virtue of superior attributes, why does society need the PC's to do anything?  Why isn't it that group of 48 point buy NPC's that the community is depending on to save the day?  Surely they are more qualified, more likely to have this skills to do the job, and more likely to be in a position to do the job should it come up?  If the PC's are merely 'a bit above average' it makes coming up with good hooks all that much harder.  I balk at the notion that the PC's are merely lucky (or 'unlucky').  They are heroes.  They are supposed to stand out as extraordinary.  They dont' have to be veritable demigods, but they have to at least stand out in a crowd.</blockquote>

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