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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6412875" data-attributes="member: 42582">I guess all those articles and monographs on the nature of punishment, justice etc are a waste of everyone's time!More seriously, it's trivial to come up with problem cases for the notion of punishment: is a $100 fine for parking in the wrong spot a punishment, or a fee for a service?And with a tentative answer to this question, I can raise a problem case for fairness: if you're relatively poor, a $100 parking fine is, functionally, a punishment; if you're relatively rich, a $100 parking fine is a fee for a service. This is why, in some European countries, fines that are intended to serve as penalties are defined as a percentage of wealth and/or income, rather than as flat values. Whereas in Anglo-American legal systems the tradition is to set fines in absolute terms.Even if we define "fair" as something along the lines of "equal treatment", it's pretty obvious that there is a serious question to be discussed about which approach to the levying of fines counts as treating people equally, and hence counts as fair.In the context of a game where the basic premise is that a number of players will contribute more-or-less equally to the shaping of the ingame fiction by way of the play of their characters, and the stat modifiers for those characters will have a major impact on how those contributions are made, it is highly arguable that widely differing modifiers are unfair (and that this unfairness isn't cured by letting everyone play a modifier lottery); and it is highly arguable that being stuck with bad modifiers is a form of unwarranted punishment (punishment because harsh treatment; unwarranted because inflicted on an arbitrary basis).Obviously not everyone accepts the characterisation of RPGing that I have just put forward. But some people do, and I am guessing that many of those who dislike rolling stats would be among those people.And obviously to say that something is highly arguable isn't to say that it is true beyond a shadow of a doubt. But when we are talking about approaches to hobby gaming, proof beyond reasonable doubt isn't required. If someone thinks its unfair, and has an alternative solution that is acceptable to their fellow players that obviously is fair - namely, arrays/points buy - then I don't see what the problem is.</blockquote>

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