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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8118161" data-attributes="member: 6790260">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.)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.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."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.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.The plural of anecdote is not data.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.)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?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.</blockquote>

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