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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6625233" data-attributes="member: 6787650">I agree with the bolded part. Am curious whether your remarks assume one PC per player, or if your opinions hold even for campaigns where each player has a whole character tree. That seems like a pretty crucial playstyle difference to me, and I hypothesize that the one-per-player playstyle is less tolerant of PC variance because the stakes are so much higher. Can you help me falsify this hypothesis by confirming/denying?An alternate hypothesis would concern pillars of play. I run a fairly exploration-heavy game, so "engaging in conflict as the core of play" doesn't really apply as far as I've seen. It's more "engaging in problem solving." Players tend to pick their battles or avoid them in order to accomplish their play goals, and stats frequently have little impact on outcomes. (E.g. sneaking past vampires, it matters little whether you have +19 to Stealth with 20 Dex or +17 with 16 Dex, either way the main factor is "Did it occur to you to put out the torch and activate Pass Without Trace?" Surviving a roper attack is more "Did you bring javelins" than "Do you get do 1d8+4 or 1d8+2?" Etc.) Not that stats never impact the outcomes, but the guy who had the most impact on the last couple of sessions did it without leveraging his one standout stat at all (Dex 18)--the big deal was that he figured out how to run the lifejammer, and he had a Sailor background so he was also able to teach his hirelings to use the rigging. Other crucial non-stat-related decisions in the past have included "Who's willing to run away from this combat instead of charging into melee", "Who's willing to expend magic items here and who has them to expend," "Who's in control of the money," "Who's willing to talk to the skeletal warrior and what are you going to do about his proposal," "Who's got a plan to propose to the Council for defending the city from the hobgoblin hordes," etc., etc.Maybe in a game more focused on combat, stats might be more crucial to determining whether you have "a meaningful chance of impacting" the result of combats. Maybe.Edited to add: RE: "whose stand-out feature was the player's willingness to risk them because of poor stats." The point is that a PC who takes risks is likely to regress to the mean IMC. Either he'll die/get permanently altered or he'll get some cool extra stuff, or both. (Gaining tons of XP also counts.) The unoptimized dragonborn cleric with 12s and 13s evenly distributed in all abilities? He's the one who climbed into the xixchil machine and wound up with -2 Int, -2 Cha, a bad temper, and trollish regeneration. Now his schtick will be "the death cleric who will never meet his god again," which is good because I think his player was a bit traumatized when he (the PC) got eaten by wolves. All of the high-stats guys avoided that machine because they were too afraid of the side-effects.Regression to the mean, man.</blockquote>

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