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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8118421" data-attributes="member: 29398">For something like falling off a ladder, most of the time climbing an ordinary ladder would be a no-roll auto-success in my eyes.  If there's external stress involved e.g. a need to be extremely quiet or the ladder is unstable or the climber is being chased by ghouls then sure, a roll is warranted.  I don't think this is controversial.The numbers I used were just for example.  Replace them with 80% and 99% if you like; my point remains the same.For a typical book, no.  But there's been books I've read where I've have been ecstatic with a comprehension rate as high as 75% - with that I might have even passed the courses!A normal healthy person would ordinarily be no-roll auto-success here.  That said, if someone's character concept is that it's very old or infirm or somehow physically disabled then maybe walking across a room unassisted does become a roll-worthy challenge for it.  A corner case, to be sure, but maybe (?) this is the sort of thing [USER=6689464]@MoonSong[/USER] has in mind.In our game last night a combat arose where the opponents could only be hit by magic weapons, and due to previous misfortune one non-caster PC didn't have one.  So instead of just standing there (which he easily could have done) he found other ways to be useful - keeping watch, directing traffic (kind of like a field general), and once or twice acting as a blocker a.k.a. damage soak.As for Alice and Bob in combat or other stat-dependent scenarios, instead of begging the DM for extra advantages maybe Bob might look to either finding ways to contribute around what Alice is doing or outright supporting Alice, while recognizing Alice is the key person in those moments.  Similar to a quarterback and his o-line: the o-line are there purely as support to let the quarterback do his thing, but without those linemen the quarterback is toast.Every time I see this statement it irks me, as what is data but the plural of observations, and in any non-scientific realm what are observations other than anecdotes?Yes, and there's fairly simple ways to model that very thing (long-tail height distribution) in the game if one wants but it involves rolling a couple more dice during char-gen.I assume this is what's being done when DMs start their games at 5th level (or whatever other not-1st level), and fair enough for thems as wants it.  Not me, though.  I love low-level play, both as player and DM, and to skip it would rather butcher the fun for me.What I want is somewhat irrelevant.  What I expect - and what I expect my players to expect - is that bad things (often but not always meaning death) can and will happen to their characters.And 'born lucky' (as in having a significantly higher stat line than usual) does not necessarily translate into 'lucky to survive' once the puck drops, at least in my/our own games.  I have almost every character sheet I've ever DMed, as does the other main DM in our crew; and just for kicks I ran some numbers a while back.  I took the character sheets of every character I could find that had lasted over a certain length of time (my cutoff was ten adventures, and at the time there were about 90 such characters), and a large random mittful of 100 or so of those who hadn't lasted as long, and compared their starting stats (after racial adjust) vs their career length.  In both the 'high' and 'low' groups there were some characters whose careers were artificially cut short by the game ending, I didn't bother winnowing these out as their spread was fairly consistent across the board, i.e. a wash.The difference was surprisingly low.  I'm not statistician enough to say whether it was even 'statistically significant' or not, but the eye test told me that to a very large extent starting stats are at best a very low determinant of a character's future career length.As I just said in another thread, encounter builders are for the birds.  Any half-decent DM is quickly going to learn via trial and error what her party can handle, and it'll be different for every party and every player group.  No encounter builder can possibly account for variables in party size, party composition, degree of optimization, optional rules in or not in use (relevant in 5e and a factor in old-school), accumulated magic items and possessions, internal level variance, or a bunch of other factors - so unless the intent is to tell people how to play (you must have x characters of a-b-c-d party composition always at the same level, which - sadly - 4e kinda leaned into) it's probably best for a DMG to largely steer clear of encounter-build formulae and just give some rough-edged advice.See above.</blockquote>

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