D&D 5E Assumptions about character creation

[MoonSong]

Depends on the system, but probably not. I find characters who have little to no bonuses terribly boring, because they usually fail at least as often as they succeed, and that gets really grating. I deal with enough failures in my everyday life. Doesn't mean I want to have an unmitigated stream of successes when I game, but it does mean I'd rather the ratio be better than IRL.

Well, I find characters who have little to no penalties boring and unapproachable, because that's not relatable to me. I deal with enough people who were born luckier than me in real life. Doesn't mean I want to fail everytime when I game, but I like the idea of magic being a great equalizer that it isn't in real life.

And, as stated, "adventurers" aren't sampled from all people. They're sampled from a highly divergent group that differs from the normal distribution (hah, I'm punny) in several ways. Why should we expect career adventurers to have a distribution of characteristics that resembles the distribution of all people? That would be like presuming that all people who make a reasonable living as performers in the entertainment industry should have characteristic distributions that resemble all people from their nation of origin. (As one simple example, left-handed individuals are over-represented in interactive sports like tennis and baseball, but have about the same representation as the overall population for non-interactive sports like swimming or pole-vaulting.)

I just don't find the idea that only "übermen" are worthy of any respect and success appealing. Maybe they can be a little over-represented in adventurers, but that is very different from normal people not counting at all.

Again, none of these are power fantasies for me. It's just demonstrations of plausible IRL individuals who are not "likeable" but are charismatic.

If they aren't your power fantasies, and they aren't my power fantasies, why bring them up at all?

Alright. Let's, again, take this hypothetical all-18s character. They attempt a task which they don't have proficiency (which...should still be most things). An Easy check is DC 10, they have +4 to the roll. That means 25% of the time (a roll of 5 or lower), they will fail to do that Easy thing. That's...hardly a negligible chance of failure. I dunno what things you would consider "easy" (as opposed to "very easy"), but if you had a one-in-four chance of genuinely failing to do something, would you be all that likely to presume you can just do it no sweat?

Three in four is a pretty good chance.

And very few actual characters have all 18s, certainly none generated by point-buy methods in 5e.

And? I'm not attacking point-buy. I find it an acceptable compromise to straight 3d6 or a 13 for prime stat, 10 for Con/Dex 4's and 5's for everything else. And I like it way more than 4d6 drop lowest.

How do you mean "contradict what you are roleplaying"? Again, it is entirely possible to fail (25% chance) at "easy" things even for someone who has all 18s, and even for someone who (somehow) has a 4 in a given ability score, a Medium task (DC 15) is still potentially achievable, about 15% chance even without proficiency. So...even if you had scores wildly at variance with what 5e provides, you would still have a non-negligible (>5%) chance to succeed at things your character is supposed to fail horribly at all the time.

You seem to be very sensitive to failure.

I do not like resorting to this kind of argument, because it smacks of gatekeeping and the like:

Well, then don't use it. Because it is gatekeeping.

A 4e Paladin that dumps Strength (8) and has no training in Athletics (normal, since Paladins didn't have that as a class skill for whatever reason) would seriously struggle with at-level Athletics checks even early on--in fact, just climbing a ladder (DC 5) has a 25% chance of failure! I dunno about you, but I'd call that a pretty good demonstration of physical weakness, if one in four attempts to climb a ladder causes you to fall on your rump. Forget trying to do something like "climb a rock wall" (DC 15)!

And this contradicts my argument how? My point is could you get the same experience if that 8 was an 18? That's my whole point.

Why? Why should "you literally won't get to play anything like what actually excites you" be a red flag for the player's response to the journey not being guaranteed? I'm not asking for perfect success forever. (Anyone who presumes a desire for perfection from their opponents in a debate has ceded a point to those opponents.) I'm asking for having the opportunity to see a story with a particular beginning. I want that story to diverge from my expectations. I want that beginning to be only the vaguest hint of the places I'll go and the things I'll see. And I am far from alone in this desire. That's what most fans of point-buy want: the opportunity to begin with something they can actually enjoy watching evolve, as opposed to beginning with something that bores them or stymies them at every turn.

Funny how you defend your point with not wanting a perfect success forever, yet you are basically telling me to either actively sabotage my party by voluntarily failing each and every roll or to go play something else, because obviously there's no way I can get a perfect failure. How a 25% chance at failure is somehow so bad while a 60% chance at failure is still pretty good.

Yes, because the truth always matters, even if it is concealed from me. But that's a can of worms we maybe shouldn't open. Suffice it to say that yes, it does matter to me, and this mattering is driven by deeply-held principles, not simply arbitrary whim.

Oh so having a less than perfect score really matters to you, because truth. But I caring for having an actual 4-5 is somehow a silly thing?

People are throwing these terms around as though having stats below 8 guarantees failure. It doesn't. Or that having stats above 17 guarantee success.

Again, weak and flawed isn't automatically all failure all the time. At that point it isn't a game anymore. Perhaps your power fantasy is being so powerful that you can roleplay being the gifted and special winner. I want to roleplay in a fantasy where being like me is not an issue, because you don't need to be special to become important.

 

[MoonSong]

For a PC to get a single 16 or higher with a single roll with straight 3d6, there is a 4.21% chance. When you factor in 6 rolls, the chances are significantly higher. So a PC with a single 16 is not in the 97% percentile, he is significantly lower than that. He'd be in that percentile for that individual stat, but not an over all character.

Ok, let me make an accurate calculation. 95.79% percentile, hey almost 1.5% certainly significantly better ¬.¬!

I don't have the time to do the hypergeometric/negative binomial? calculation right now, but I'm sure it can't be that low in the population. Edit: turns out it is a straight binomial, it is over 77.25% of the population. less than 25% of all people.

 

[Lanefan]

Again, weak and flawed isn't automatically all failure all the time. At that point it isn't a game anymore. Perhaps your power fantasy is being so powerful that you can roleplay being the gifted and special winner. I want to roleplay in a fantasy where being like me is not an issue, because you don't need to be special to become important.

This is something that hasn't really been mentioned yet, that might be worth a look.

After any length of time being played in a normal campaign, a typical PC is going to end up being pretty special among its people almost no matter what: high level, various heroic deeds done, and loads of wealth will tend to have that effect. (though a good press agent helps too! )

The key question is whether one also wants that PC to start out as special and be special all along or to start out as a relative nobody and eventually become special. Put another way, is one more interested in playing a special character as it does what it does or is one more interested in playing the journey from nobody to special? (or in some cases from being a nobody to still being a nobody only with more levels and wealth)

Me, I'll take the journey every time.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Well, I find characters who have little to no penalties boring and unapproachable, because that's not relatable to me. I deal with enough people who were born luckier than me in real life. Doesn't mean I want to fail everytime when I game, but I like the idea of magic being a great equalizer that it isn't in real life.

And the will to go on, even against terrible odds, isn't itself a beautiful form of magic that anyone can practice?

I just don't find the idea that only "übermen" are worthy of any respect and success appealing. Maybe they can be a little over-represented in adventurers, but that is very different from normal people not counting at all.

Okay, so...I just want to be clear on this. People who have a single +3 as their highest stat (the best you can do at character generation) are now, to use your word, "übermen." Like...you're really arguing that having fifteen percentage points greater success with one ability score's effects makes people into "übermen." That not having "fails more often than succeeds" with several basic traits of physiology and behavior makes someone "born lucky"?

Seriously, you are WAY overstating any kind of case you might make here, and it weakens your argument considerably. Real IQ (which is a naughty word metric of intelligence, but it's the most widely-known, so I'm rolling with it) expects that a significant portion of the population (not quite 1 in 6) will be that much above the average person. That is, raw scores are regularly re-normed such that the mean is defined to be 100, and the standard deviation is defined to be 15, meaning that approximately 15.87% of all people will have an IQ greater than 115. On a random train car with 30 people, you'd expect a few of them to have significantly higher verbal-logical reasoning skills, and a few to have significantly lower such skills.

I get that any form of ability score bonus screams "super duper ultra lucky ubermensch" to you, but that is factually inaccurate, and has been since at least 3rd edition. Average people will have scores even as high as 14, and the pressures of adventuring life really can push things a bit higher. We tell stories about the people who experience interesting things, not the vast masses of people who are neither particularly lucky nor particularly unlucky. (Indeed, one might argue that being a PC in the first place is a rather unlucky state--you're courting death on the regular.)

No one is saying that normal folks don't count. Frankly, I'd actually argue that's more YOUR position--you're so violently anti-bonus that it makes you think people who have bonuses can't be ordinary folks, and that's simply incorrect.

If they aren't your power fantasies, and they aren't my power fantasies, why bring them up at all?

...for exactly the reason I said I did. They're examples of real actual living honest-to-God people who have the combination of traits described. They're not in-game fictions. They're not personal fantasies. They're actual sets of characteristics and behaviors that real people evince, and thus, unless some other reason precludes them, it seems reasonable that they appear in our fiction as well. You acted as though it was logically impossible for someone to be D&D "Charismatic" and also be unlikable or cowardly, or to be D&D "Wise" and also foolhardy. I demonstrated examples of real people who would qualify for those D&D stat-based descriptives and those general descriptives. No more and no less. Why you are making such a big deal out of giving examples, and imputing such strong commitments to me that I have repeatedly disclaimed, I'm really not sure.

Three in four is a pretty good chance.

But you weren't talking about "pretty good" chances. You were describing people who never fail. Who were, as you said it, "born lucky." I wouldn't call failing 25% of the time "born lucky." Why does that sound like being "born lucky" to you? Do people really need to fail more often than they succeed in order to not be "born lucky"?

And? I'm not attacking point-buy. I find it an acceptable compromise to straight 3d6 or a 13 for prime stat, 10 for Con/Dex 4's and 5's for everything else. And I like it way more than 4d6 drop lowest.

Whether or not you meant to attack point-buy, you have repeatedly spoken of characters with enormous stat numbers as though the only two options are "several stats with modifiers below -1" or "character that has no weaknesses and never rolls with less than a +4." You didn't use those words specifically, but you've definitely characterized things as this enormous gulf between "ordinary" folks (which apparently means people with multiple large negative modifiers) and the "ubermen"/"born lucky" etc. (which apparently means people with multiple high-teens stats).

You seem to be very sensitive to failure.

Uh...no? I'm looking at the statistics of it. Failing 1/6th of the time at (say) cooking an edible meal or tying my shoes is an unacceptable level of failure. Hell, failing 10% of the time at those things would greatly concern me--that'd mean about three times a month I'd go hungry 'cause I outright destroyed a meal. That would be enough to make me contact my doctor!

Well, then don't use it. Because it is gatekeeping.

Okay then. What value does D&D provide to you, that you would like it to use rules and concepts it hasn't for decades? Because the point of my statement was not gatekeeping. It was very literally, "You have a very clear, very specific desire which D&D is not only not currently meeting, but which its design has consistently moved away from for over twenty years." That seems like a reasonable time to ask, "Well, are there other things that you would like?" It's as if you were buying a company's products out of loyalty, but spending substantial time tweaking them to make them actually match your interests, rather than looking to see if some other product would satisfy you without such time-consuming modifications.

And this contradicts my argument how? My point is could you get the same experience if that 8 was an 18? That's my whole point.

That...I emphatically did not get that point from what you said. Especially since...that wasn't an argument I was making? So I'm really confused as to why you responded in that way if that's what you were going for. I was giving that as an example of how a game, which IIRC you had cited (and certainly others have cited) as having completely unacceptably over-the-top numbers...accomplished exactly the same thing, simply by using an 8 in the appropriate stat and choosing options as you grow to become what you want to be (a paladin who is a healer).

Funny how you defend your point with not wanting a perfect success forever, yet you are basically telling me to either actively sabotage my party by voluntarily failing each and every roll or to go play something else, because obviously there's no way I can get a perfect failure. How a 25% chance at failure is somehow so bad while a 60% chance at failure is still pretty good.

I'm sorry...what? I have literally no idea what you're trying to say here. I have never advocated "voluntarily failing each and every roll." And now you're saying you DO want "perfect failure"? What?

As for the 25% vs 60% thing, I have no idea where these particular numbers are coming from or what context they apply to, so I cannot meaningfully respond to them.

Oh so having a less than perfect score really matters to you, because truth. But I caring for having an actual 4-5 is somehow a silly thing?

That's...not what I said. I don't really appreciate words being put in my mouth.

If it is true that one character has a distinct, consistent, mathematical advantage (even one I do consider small!) over others, or a distinct, consistent mathematical disadvantage, that's a problem for me. D&D is a cooperative game. Everyone should get the same opportunity to contribute. Stat rolls that are wildly divergent (e.g. one character with three scores at or above 16, while another has but one 14 and everything else below 10) prevent equal opportunity to contribute. Lanefan's example was hyperbolically close, which I chose to ignore in favor of the actual differences I have personally seen (where it's quite common for one player to barely scrape the "minimum" and another to be off in the stratosphere--and believe it or not, I'm usually the lucky one and that upsets me. I have literally told DMs that my rolled scores were TOO GOOD to play, because I would have too much advantage over other players.)

Again, weak and flawed isn't automatically all failure all the time. At that point it isn't a game anymore. Perhaps your power fantasy is being so powerful that you can roleplay being the gifted and special winner. I want to roleplay in a fantasy where being like me is not an issue, because you don't need to be special to become important.

Okay. Who said having a 14-or even a 16, or even an 18--makes you all that "special"? Only about 2/3 of people (68.3%) lie within the first standard deviation of a normal distribution for a single stat. Multiply that out across six stats, you get 10.2%--meaning 90% of people lie outside the first standard deviation on at least one stat. Now, sure, half(ish) of those people will be below, rather than above. But that still means around 44% of people have at least one thing they're "born talented" with.

And let's go to that 25% failure rate thing you seem to be so keen on. Again, if climbing up a ladder meant I fell off 25% of the time, I would be gravely concerned for my health, not "oh, 75% success is pretty good." If trying to teach a friend about a topic I've encountered and they didn't resulted in failure 25% of the time, I would consider myself a bad teacher who either needs to not offer such help, or needs to bone up on my skills. (This, incidentally, was pretty true of younger me. I was terrible at communicating ideas person-to-person until I really really worked on it.)

25% failure does not mean failure all the time. Hell, it literally doesn't mean failure most of the time, on average! But it's also an unacceptable rate of failure for tasks that are supposed to be "easy." Failing 25% of the time on "easy" tasks--and much more often on "medium" tasks, to say nothing of hard!--means lots of failure in the long run. Because most things adventurers do AREN'T "easy."

This is something that hasn't really been mentioned yet, that might be worth a look.

After any length of time being played in a normal campaign, a typical PC is going to end up being pretty special among its people almost no matter what: high level, various heroic deeds done, and loads of wealth will tend to have that effect. (though a good press agent helps too! )

The key question is whether one also wants that PC to start out as special and be special all along or to start out as a relative nobody and eventually become special. Put another way, is one more interested in playing a special character as it does what it does or is one more interested in playing the journey from nobody to special? (or in some cases from being a nobody to still being a nobody only with more levels and wealth)

Me, I'll take the journey every time.

Isn't this a false dichotomy?

It's not that we have two choices: start as the most special snowflake ever, or start as a below-average nobody. There's a HUGE excluded middle there, and my preferences are absolutely found within. I really don't enjoy the DCC-like "funnel" experience, neither in that faster, compressed version, nor in the more classical one-at-a-time version. It is entirely possible to have a game where people are ordinarily special--by which I mean, no more special than one would expect from a perfectly ordinary normal distribution. "Specialness" is a sliding scale, and (as argued above) being somewhat special in something is actually quite common.

It's not like I don't want to see a journey, nor like I want to begin absolutely kicking every ass and smooching every dapper swain and solving every problem. I just vastly prefer the journey start at a point of "demonstrated competence" rather than a point of "hope you survive and don't f**k it up too much!"

 

[Campbell]

Here's the thing. Strength is not an inherent quality. It is something you work for. Same goes for all the other ability scores. Genetics have a role to play, but are usually more expressive on the higher end of the scale (in people that are already working super hard). Our bodies and minds adapt to stimulus. The idea that a trained warrior has stimulated their body and mind more than an "average person" only makes sense to me. The type of people who become adventurers just work harder than the rest of us.

Professional athletes are often genetic freaks at the high end, but what generally separates athletes from nonathletes at the low end is hard work. Also those genetic freaks still work their tail off to get there.

 

[Lanefan]

Real IQ (which is a naughty word metric of intelligence, but it's the most widely-known, so I'm rolling with it) expects that a significant portion of the population (not quite 1 in 6) will be that much above the average person. That is, raw scores are regularly re-normed such that the mean is defined to be 100, and the standard deviation is defined to be 15, meaning that approximately 15.87% of all people will have an IQ greater than 115. On a random train car with 30 people, you'd expect a few of them to have significantly higher verbal-logical reasoning skills, and a few to have significantly lower such skills.

Agreed.

And to me, that says all those who fall between those outer 16-ish % extremes should have a bonus of +0 - they're close enough to average to be, well, average. This is why I don't like the 3e-4e-5e linear bonus system where only 10 and 11 give +0 - the +0 range should be more like 8-13.

But you weren't talking about "pretty good" chances. You were describing people who never fail. Who were, as you said it, "born lucky." I wouldn't call failing 25% of the time "born lucky." Why does that sound like being "born lucky" to you? Do people really need to fail more often than they succeed in order to not be "born lucky"?

If you fail 25% of the time and I fail 45% of the time, at a wide variety of things, depending on which of us was closer to the typical average I'd be saying either you were born lucky or I was born unlucky.

Thing is, I'm more willing to accept this disparity as part of the game than many are, I think.

Whether or not you meant to attack point-buy, you have repeatedly spoken of characters with enormous stat numbers as though the only two options are "several stats with modifiers below -1" or "character that has no weaknesses and never rolls with less than a +4."

Hell, I'll attack point-buy all day long for a ton of reasons but 'too overpowered' won't be one of 'em.

Uh...no? I'm looking at the statistics of it. Failing 1/6th of the time at (say) cooking an edible meal or tying my shoes is an unacceptable level of failure. Hell, failing 10% of the time at those things would greatly concern me--that'd mean about three times a month I'd go hungry 'cause I outright destroyed a meal. That would be enough to make me contact my doctor!

You've obviously never seen me try to cook. I can destroy a meal just by passing through the kitchen while it's being made.

If it is true that one character has a distinct, consistent, mathematical advantage (even one I do consider small!) over others, or a distinct, consistent mathematical disadvantage, that's a problem for me. D&D is a cooperative game. Everyone should get the same opportunity to contribute.

Where this is something I don't mind, as in my view everyone has the same opportunity to contribute; with said contribution coming through their role-play, what they say in-character at the table, and their interactions with other players/characters and with the game world. Even a character with Int 6 and well-played to it by its player can contribute greatly*.

If, however, you're talking about straight-up DPR, combat effectiveness, and that stuff as being the only ways to meaningfully contribute then we're not on the same page at all. Sure, you don't want your character to be completely useless in combat, but if due to its base stats its average DPR is 6.8 instead of 8.8, in the end who flippin' cares? I don't.

* - the most wonderfully entertaining character I've seen in many a year had Charisma 6, and the player ran it brilliantly: the character simply could not utter two sentences without offending someone - or a lot of someones. Caused no end of headaches for the party having to clean up the diplomatic messes he made (and yes, he saw himself as a diplomat!), but for sheer entertainment and amusement value he couldn't be beat.

Stat rolls that are wildly divergent (e.g. one character with three scores at or above 16, while another has but one 14 and everything else below 10) prevent equal opportunity to contribute. Lanefan's example was hyperbolically close, which I chose to ignore in favor of the actual differences I have personally seen (where it's quite common for one player to barely scrape the "minimum" and another to be off in the stratosphere--and believe it or not, I'm usually the lucky one and that upsets me. I have literally told DMs that my rolled scores were TOO GOOD to play, because I would have too much advantage over other players.)

In the 3e game I played, as none of us knew the system yet and we had no idea how lethal it might be, we started out with 2 PCs each: roll-and-rearrange. One of my two had a starting stat average around 15, with nothing lower than 12 and a high of 18. The other averaged just over 11, with a range of 6 to 15. I was easily able to come up with backstories and distinctive personalities etc. for both, very different from each other.

One of these two turned out rather ordinary, and while it had a reasonable enough career in the end it didn't amount to all that much. The other turned out to be perhaps the best character I've ever had in any game. Care to guess which was which?

Okay. Who said having a 14-or even a 16, or even an 18--makes you all that "special"? Only about 2/3 of people (68.3%) lie within the first standard deviation of a normal distribution for a single stat. Multiply that out across six stats, you get 10.2%--meaning 90% of people lie outside the first standard deviation on at least one stat. Now, sure, half(ish) of those people will be below, rather than above. But that still means around 44% of people have at least one thing they're "born talented" with.

With these numbers, are you referring to real life or to the game stats?

If it's the game stats, I agree the 3-18 bell curve is considerably flatter than what we see in real life: there's fewer geniuses than 3-18 would indicate, and also fewer idiots. But it's what we have to work with. To get a steeper (and thus more realistic) bell curve would involve rolling 6d6 and using half the total, rounded up if less than 10 or down if higher than 11 and flipping a coin if the result was 10.5.

Isn't this a false dichotomy?

It's not that we have two choices: start as the most special snowflake ever, or start as a below-average nobody. There's a HUGE excluded middle there, and my preferences are absolutely found within. I really don't enjoy the DCC-like "funnel" experience, neither in that faster, compressed version, nor in the more classical one-at-a-time version. It is entirely possible to have a game where people are ordinarily special--by which I mean, no more special than one would expect from a perfectly ordinary normal distribution. "Specialness" is a sliding scale, and (as argued above) being somewhat special in something is actually quite common.

I get that.

I guess I just see adventuring as being at the extreme end of high-risk high-reward, and that the high-risk part is going to lead to something of a funnel effect no matter what even if the adventurers are a cut above the norm. In fact, the lethality is almost a different issue: you could quite easily run a low-lethality campaign in which characters are made using 3d6 in order; by the same token you could have a highly lethal campaign where every character starts with 16s-plus across the board.

The 'special-ness' issue for me is more of how seamlessly the adventuring population can fit in and be - and be believable as - a part of the overall population in the setting.

It's not like I don't want to see a journey, nor like I want to begin absolutely kicking every ass and smooching every dapper swain and solving every problem. I just vastly prefer the journey start at a point of "demonstrated competence" rather than a point of "hope you survive and don't f**k it up too much!"

I tend to prefer the latter, for two reasons. First, it reflects the sense of adventuring being a very high-risk occupation where only the lucky survive; and second, it's often far more entertaining for all when they do screw up than when they don't.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

And to me, that says all those who fall between those outer 16-ish % extremes should have a bonus of +0 - they're close enough to average to be, well, average. This is why I don't like the 3e-4e-5e linear bonus system where only 10 and 11 give +0 - the +0 range should be more like 8-13.

Honest question: Why should all "average" things equate to no bonus? It seems to me that the (as noted, purely hypothetical) "perfectly average" person is actually...decent at a lot of things? Treating "humans are average" as "humans have no bonus" leads to weird results on a d20 distribution, see the aforementioned "falls off ladders an average of 1 in 4 attempts" problem. Wouldn't it make more sense to say, well, average isn't +0, it's maybe +1 or +2?

(Obviously the other way to "fix" this is to alter the DCs of "easy" tasks so that they're actually very difficult to fail for someone with +0 modifier, but I'm not sure if that would work either.)

If you fail 25% of the time and I fail 45% of the time, at a wide variety of things, depending on which of us was closer to the typical average I'd be saying either you were born lucky or I was born unlucky.

That...just seems like a really confining view of things. To me, "born lucky" should mean...well, someone who basically doesn't lose, or if they do lose it's incredibly unusual for them. As TVTropes defines the phrase, "A character that's so mind-bogglingly lucky, it defies all probability," up to and including having winning states seek the character out despite no personal effort to engage with them. E.g. a 95% win rate would be low for someone "born lucky." It...basically sounds like you define any likelihood of success higher than "clear majority" (2/3) as being "born lucky" which...I wasn't exactly dealt the best hand in life, and I'm not even that pessimistic about it.

You've obviously never seen me try to cook. I can destroy a meal just by passing through the kitchen while it's being made.

I honestly don't believe it's actually that bad, especially because I'm not talking about making something fancy. But substitute whatever simple skill you like. Would you feel you were "pretty good" at reading if 25% of the time you stared at the page and literally could not determine what the words said? Or "good at walking" if 25% of the time crossing a room caused you to fall down? (This last one cited because "unable to cross a room" was literally referenced as a desired character status upthread.)

If it was something actually difficult, like "play a competitive sport against other players" or "win at a difficult game of strategy against other skilled players" or "prepare professional-quality meals at home," I could certainly call a 75% success rate great--even excellent. But I'm not talking about those things, which are supposed to be "hard" tasks. Again, I'm talking about something that's supposed to be as easy as "climb up a ladder."

Where this is something I don't mind, as in my view everyone has the same opportunity to contribute; with said contribution coming through their role-play, what they say in-character at the table, and their interactions with other players/characters and with the game world. Even a character with Int 6 and well-played to it by its player can contribute greatly*.

If, however, you're talking about straight-up DPR, combat effectiveness, and that stuff as being the only ways to meaningfully contribute then we're not on the same page at all. Sure, you don't want your character to be completely useless in combat, but if due to its base stats its average DPR is 6.8 instead of 8.8, in the end who flippin' cares? I don't.

* - the most wonderfully entertaining character I've seen in many a year had Charisma 6, and the player ran it brilliantly: the character simply could not utter two sentences without offending someone - or a lot of someones. Caused no end of headaches for the party having to clean up the diplomatic messes he made (and yes, he saw himself as a diplomat!), but for sheer entertainment and amusement value he couldn't be beat.

You're correct that roleplay is a wide-open field for contribution...except that whatever your stats are, that remains precisely identically true. There is literally zero difference in the potential roleplay contributions of a character with no stat above 6, compared to one with no stat below 18. Exactly zero difference. Which means that roleplay shouldn't be considered as part of the metric. It's already factored in--because it will be there no matter what, unless the player chooses not to (which, as noted, is on them--players should be free to choose not to engage, and even though that certainly has its problems, we as TTRPGers value the freedom to choose what to engage with). But having some strong statistic, some area of talent or expertise or whatever, actively enables additional stuff. It lets you put your money where your (roleplaying) mouth is, so to speak.

Perhaps a better way to say the above: Assume you have two players of effectively identical roleplaying ability. They're good players who work well with each other and the DM, who don't just do things for min-max potential but do take advantage of the tools provided to them, often in creative ways that surprise and delight the DM and fellow players. Alice has a character with high stats. Bob has a character with low stats. In any circumstance where roleplay alone is sufficient to address an issue, Alice and Bob are on reasonably equal footing--it is their choices and their interests which will be the key determinant of who contributes more in any given situation, and even a mediocre DM can handle that so both really do contribute to a similar degree. In any situation where base statistics set the terms of contribution (not just combat--anything depending on them), Alice clearly has the edge, and there's basically nothing Bob can do about that other than beg the DM for an extra advantage. So that covers two of the three possible situations: pure roleplay challenges, and pure statistic-based challenges. The remainder is, obviously, mixed challenges...but the problem is that no mix ends up providing a net benefit to Bob instead of Alice. Bob can only get back up to where Alice is...assuming Alice doesn't also do things to eke out extra mechanical advantages.

On pure roleplay, Alice and Bob are equal--no points scored. On pure statistics, Alice is ahead--one point to her. On mixes, there is never a situation where Bob can score a point, he can only (sometimes) avoid losing further points. That's the problem I have.

I was easily able to come up with backstories and distinctive personalities etc. for both, very different from each other.

Of course. That's part of what I mean by "purely roleplaying" stuff. Anyone of approximately similar improvisational/writing skill can do the roleplay. No one can make a statistical silk purse out of a statistical sow's ear.

Care to guess which was which?

The plural of anecdote is not data.

With these numbers, are you referring to real life or to the game stats?

Technically, yes. That is, a true normal distribution has 68.2% of its probability density between -1 and +1 standard deviation, and 95.4% of its probability density between -2 and +2 standard deviations. Of course, IRL, many things are not normally distributed, but the normal distribution is generally a good prior when looking at human variability. (Often you end up with an asymmetrical distribution with a long upper tail--e.g. it's quite rare for a human to be 3 standard deviations below average height for their gender and geographic origin, but meaningfully more common to be 3 SD above, because of the physical and biological stressors involved.)

I guess I just see adventuring as being at the extreme end of high-risk high-reward, and that the high-risk part is going to lead to something of a funnel effect no matter what even if the adventurers are a cut above the norm. The 'special-ness' issue for me is more of how seamlessly the adventuring population can fit in and be - and be believable as - a part of the overall population in the setting.

Okay. So, with that "funnel effect" thought in mind: What happens if you just skip over the funnel process, and focus on only those who survived a funnel? What happens to their distribution? How likely are they to be, compared to the un-funneled population, "special"? Should we expect the post-funnel population to meaningfully resemble the overall population in either average or spread of results?

I tend to prefer the latter, for two reasons. First, it reflects the sense of adventuring being a very high-risk occupation where only the lucky survive; and second, it's often far more entertaining for all when they do screw up than when they don't.

So you don't want people "born lucky," but you want something "where only the lucky survive"? That sounds pretty clearly like you want most of your characters to fail...which is exactly the thing I'm talking about being asymmetrical toward player interests. A player that wants to find failure a lot can always up the difficulty, as it were. It is much harder to remove difficulty already baked into the game. Sorta like how it's very hard to whip an unreliable difficulty metric (such as 3e's CR system) into shape as a reliable one, but it's quite easy to either ignore or intentionally modify a reliable difficulty metric (such as 4e's XP budget system) such that you no longer have reliable difficulty estimates.

I'll also be honest: it's a little ironic that you challenged the stuff I said earlier about selective pressure. In a world where "only the lucky survive" adventuring, those "born lucky" will become overrepresented among the population. Exactly how quickly depends on exactly how hard you mean that "only," but if I take you at the usual meaning of the phrase (as in, you're guaranteed to die unless luck factors in sooner or later), you're basically saying that those "born lucky" should predominate among adventurers, whether PCs or NPCs.

 

[Fenris-77]

The above is one of the reasons i prefer attribute tests based directly on the stat number and not abstracted out to a DC and a mod. In many OSR games, the Black Hack, for example, tests are all roll under the stat and there are no bonuses associated at all. Higher stats already grant a higher chance of success so there's no need for mods. That also means that there is a quantitative difference between each stat step, poor, average or great. It makes characters with low and middling stats feel a lot different.

 

[Umbran]

You seem to be very sensitive to failure.

Mod Note:

Folks, let us not make this personal.

Anyone in this discussion - you need to be on board with the fact that different people like different things, and to leave openings for that. And also, if someone says they don't like your way, that needs to be okay.[/colr]

 

[MoonSong]

Okay, so...I just want to be clear on this. People who have a single +3 as their highest stat (the best you can do at character generation) are now, to use your word, "übermen." Like...you're really arguing that having fifteen percentage points greater success with one ability score's effects makes people into "übermen." That not having "fails more often than succeeds" with several basic traits of physiology and behavior makes someone "born lucky"?

They are less than a quarter of the population. Or should be. Again, my beef isn't with point buy. My beef is with rolling methods that make these numbers higher.

Seriously, you are WAY overstating any kind of case you might make here, and it weakens your argument considerably. Real IQ (which is a naughty word metric of intelligence, but it's the most widely-known, so I'm rolling with it) expects that a significant portion of the population (not quite 1 in 6) will be that much above the average person. That is, raw scores are regularly re-normed such that the mean is defined to be 100, and the standard deviation is defined to be 15, meaning that approximately 15.87% of all people will have an IQ greater than 115. On a random train car with 30 people, you'd expect a few of them to have significantly higher verbal-logical reasoning skills, and a few to have significantly lower such skills.

Someone with an IQ of 115 is at int 13. (Within a SD of the mean) Someone at IQ 125+ is in the 16+ range.

But you weren't talking about "pretty good" chances. You were describing people who never fail. Who were, as you said it, "born lucky." I wouldn't call failing 25% of the time "born lucky." Why does that sound like being "born lucky" to you? Do people really need to fail more often than they succeed in order to not be "born lucky"?

I blame hyperbole, and well that is in part a failure of the system. But failing one quarter of the time is significantly better than failing about half the time, and that failing more than half the time. As for where I'm taking the numbers 25% versus 60%. Somewhere else you mentioned that achieving something 40% of the time wasn't the sign of an incompetent character, but that is still a character that fails something 60% of the time.

You are claiming that by failing a quarter of the time someone isn't a born winner, but that failing 60% of the time (the same as achieving something 40% of the time) on something else is somehow a sign of competence and being very good (or at least beign good enough to not being incompetent/bad).

Whether or not you meant to attack point-buy, you have repeatedly spoken of characters with enormous stat numbers as though the only two options are "several stats with modifiers below -1" or "character that has no weaknesses and never rolls with less than a +4." You didn't use those words specifically, but you've definitely characterized things as this enormous gulf between "ordinary" folks (which apparently means people with multiple large negative modifiers) and the "ubermen"/"born lucky" etc. (which apparently means people with multiple high-teens stats).

I don't remember how the character with six 18's came to be into this discussion, but to me the ubermen I'm talking about are characters consistently above average on every stat and with more than one score above the normal range (16+)

Uh...no? I'm looking at the statistics of it. Failing 1/6th of the time at (say) cooking an edible meal or tying my shoes is an unacceptable level of failure. Hell, failing 10% of the time at those things would greatly concern me--that'd mean about three times a month I'd go hungry 'cause I outright destroyed a meal. That would be enough to make me contact my doctor!

That is why I mentioned sensitive to failure. It is a cognitive bias, you're biased to notice failure. (I didn't intend it as an insult, but an observation, sorry if it came that way). You are predisposed to notice failure, I'm predisposed to gloss over it. The failure rate of a 16+ is too low for me to notice, but once we are in an 8- I'm more likely to notice it. I'm not bothered by failing, but rather having so many failures and so many risks make things sweeter when I win at the end.

That...I emphatically did not get that point from what you said. Especially since...that wasn't an argument I was making? So I'm really confused as to why you responded in that way if that's what you were going for. I was giving that as an example of how a game, which IIRC you had cited (and certainly others have cited) as having completely unacceptably over-the-top numbers...accomplished exactly the same thing, simply by using an 8 in the appropriate stat and choosing options as you grow to become what you want to be (a paladin who is a healer).

I was talking about the value of low stats, and how low stats produce experiences that high stats don't. And how these weaknesses count in ways that just roleplaying a weakness while remaining mechanically optimal don't.

Okay then. What value does D&D provide to you, that you would like it to use rules and concepts it hasn't for decades? Because the point of my statement was not gatekeeping. It was very literally, "You have a very clear, very specific desire which D&D is not only not currently meeting, but which its design has consistently moved away from for over twenty years." That seems like a reasonable time to ask, "Well, are there other things that you would like?" It's as if you were buying a company's products out of loyalty, but spending substantial time tweaking them to make them actually match your interests, rather than looking to see if some other product would satisfy you without such time-consuming modifications.

I'm finding a lot of what I need. And I'm not with D&D out of loyalty, it is just the closest thing to what I look for. 13th age is a bit too mechanical for my tastes, PF left me behind in complexity long ago. Other games are too cinematic or edgy, or just lack the flavor of fantasy I want out of a game.

If it is true that one character has a distinct, consistent, mathematical advantage (even one I do consider small!) over others, or a distinct, consistent mathematical disadvantage, that's a problem for me. D&D is a cooperative game. Everyone should get the same opportunity to contribute. Stat rolls that are wildly divergent (e.g. one character with three scores at or above 16, while another has but one 14 and everything else below 10) prevent equal opportunity to contribute. Lanefan's example was hyperbolically close, which I chose to ignore in favor of the actual differences I have personally seen (where it's quite common for one player to barely scrape the "minimum" and another to be off in the stratosphere--and believe it or not, I'm usually the lucky one and that upsets me. I have literally told DMs that my rolled scores were TOO GOOD to play, because I would have too much advantage over other players.)

I have had similar experiences. Except that instead of considering my rolls unfair related to others, I consider them too good to what I want to play. You yourself have said it, there aren't many chances to play, so every character has to be something you want to play. I want characters with mechanical weaknesses, not characters without them that I pretend they have.

Okay. Who said having a 14-or even a 16, or even an 18--makes you all that "special"? Only about 2/3 of people (68.3%) lie within the first standard deviation of a normal distribution for a single stat. Multiply that out across six stats, you get 10.2%--meaning 90% of people lie outside the first standard deviation on at least one stat. Now, sure, half(ish) of those people will be below, rather than above. But that still means around 44% of people have at least one thing they're "born talented" with.

A 14 doesn't necessarily, mean special. A 16+ is, 16+ is beyond two s.d. And it isn't a straight multiply by six scenario. We solve this by a binomial calculation. 100%-4.21%= 95.79% and that to the sixth power. 77.25% of people won't have a single 16+ (the statistical outlier for high stats) . Though I concede, about 19% of normal people will have one 16+

25% failure does not mean failure all the time. Hell, it literally doesn't mean failure most of the time, on average! But it's also an unacceptable rate of failure for tasks that are supposed to be "easy." Failing 25% of the time on "easy" tasks--and much more often on "medium" tasks, to say nothing of hard!--means lots of failure in the long run. Because most things adventurers do AREN'T "easy."

This is a symptom of the system, you say a 75% success rate is too low for a good character doing something easy, I consider it too high for a character that is supposed to be bad at it. 40-45% failure is good enough for what I want. A bit under average, but mostly on the normal range.

In the end we don't come from places that are too far away from each other, we just have different biases and different power fantasies. But we overlap pretty well. I mean both of us like the control of point buy for character creation, we have a preference for strong concept, and both of us care about having accurate stats to back up our characters. Just like I share many preferences with say, @Saelorn, (we both have in common some pretty OSR preferences specially in regards to HP, healing and party dynamics) we just don't meet eye to eye on thematic/flavor stuff (I love a lot of modern flavor, multiclassing and cut my teeth at sorcerers, Saleorn thinks otherwise)