NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8117103" data-attributes="member: 29398">Perhaps, but what you've been saying certainly comes across as your having a distaste for failure.  Roulette wheels, if you simply bet red-black, are a tad under 50-50 (I forget if there's one place or two on the wheel that is neither colour); which means success is almost as frequent as failure.  Given as adventuring is generally fraught with danger and sees characters undertaking some pretty risky stuff, a baseline chance of success (before modifiers) of just under 50-50 ain't so bad.I see it as a guideline rather than a hard rule.  I then look at the pre-gen characters given in various adventure modules (some of which he authored) and find not many of them have two 15s and quite a few don't even have one, which kinda backs up my 'guideline' stance.I certainly don't allow players to re-roll just because they don't get two 15s. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  My re-roll rules are simple: if the average of the six stats you rolled is less than 10.0 OR if no stat is higher than 13, you have the option of starting over before going any further with char-gen.  This is actually pretty close to what 3e had, despite pre-dating 3e by about 10 years.I'm talking in a thread about D&D, about a subject (character creation) relevant to all editions.Yeah, I'm still going to fight the good fight regardless... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Perhaps surprisingly, no it doesn't.  The evolution occurs via different methods and (almost always) takes longer, but it still happens.  Many characters die or retire or for some other reason don't last; but some do last, and those are both the result and cause of evolution.That said, I see the evolution of the party as a whole as being far more important in the long run than the development of any one character.Ah, but they can both accommodate both interests - they just need to be massaged in odifferent directions in order to do so.Where I suppose one could almost say I'm to some extent in it for just those things: the mercenary attitude, the cavalier disregard, all the things I can't do or be in reality. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  It never gets old.Not sure where this comes from.My usual metric is the average of the six stats.  Using straight 3d6 it's 10.5; using 4d6k3 it's about 12.2 or 12.3, which is higher but (in 1e anyway) not enough to affect bonuses or penalties*.  And if someone's lucky enough to get a set of rolls averaging higher than 16.0 (yes, I've seen this rolled right in front of me) then have at it**.  But I also want there to be a chance for someone to start with 15-10-10-10-10-6 (one of the longest-lasting and most successful PCs in my current campaign started with about this - I'm sure on the 15 and the 6, not so sure about the 10s).* - side note: that's something I quite like about 1e, that bonuses are bell-curved rather than linear like 3e-4e-5e.** - the character with these rolls died in its (second ever?) combat.You have, and always have had, a great degree of control over what risks you decide to take.  Do you try to climb that wall, or find another way around?  Do you engage those Orcs in battle, or parlay with them, or turn and walk away?  Do you try to pick that lock knowing it might be trapped, or do you get the party muscle to take a hammer to it?  Do you accept Baron von Evil's invite to dinner and risk his throwing you in jail, or do you find the nearest ship and sail into the sunset?  You always have a choice.Once you commit to taking any of those risks, however, all you can do is try to mitigate the odds in your favour: in the end, if you're rolling dice it's still a crapshoot.My point is that I see a typical adventuring PC as being an integral part of its game world, indistinguishable from an adventuring NPC and both having started as part of the general common population.  I don't subscribe to the notion that PCs and NPCs are or should be 'built differently'; that an adventurer rolls 4d6k3 rather than 3d6 is a game-based concession to allow a bit more survivability.Don't get me started about minions. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Not sure where I saw it (must have been either in one of the first round of 4e books, as those are all I have, or in one of the 4e adventure modules I've got) but somewhere I read that, absent the presence of PCs which turn them into minions, a typical villager in 4e has something like 5 hit points and no useful proficiencies.And I'm not talking about level 1 Entertainers (I don't even remember that being a class in 4e), I'm talking about level 0 non-adventurers.People lacking the intellectual flexibility to handle subtraction as well as addition, or low rolls being good sometimes and high rolls others, need not apply to play at my table.And again, this thread deals with an edition-agnostic topic; meaning good ideas from any edition are fair game to toss in here.</blockquote>

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