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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8118112" data-attributes="member: 6790260">And the will to go on, even against terrible odds, isn't itself a beautiful form of magic that anyone can practice?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....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.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"?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).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!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.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'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.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.)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."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!"</blockquote>

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