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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8118691" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Are they? Where are you getting these statistics? Maybe in OSR D&D you might argue that, but not so much in modern D&D. Even if it were, again, I don't think this properly accounts for the selective pressures that apply to adventurers (whether PC or NPC). If, as Lanefan says, luck is the determining factor in winning (and your desire for sub-50% success rates would support that), then "born lucky" or "uberman" adventurers would be more common in relatively short order.Er...no. Someone with an IQ of 115 is exactly at 1 standard deviation above the mean, not within one. I would say that's 14, possibly 15. Again: where are you getting these statistics? These don't even match the "standard deviation = modifier" approach, as you've made 1 SD too large and 2 SD much too small.I mean, yes? I never said otherwise. Lower probability of failure is lower probability of failure.I don't recall saying that myself, but I have a memory like a sieve. So, allow me to correct the record (whatever it may be): I don't actually think 40% success rates with easy tasks (again, this is critical, I'm specifically speaking of easy tasks, which seems to be very quickly forgotten...) is anything like a reasonable success rate. I'd call that a reasonable success rate for fairly difficult tasks, like trying to persuade someone fairly skeptical or pulling off a gourmet multi-course meal on a tight budget. For an explicitly "easy" task, failing 60% of the time would be a sign of incompetence as far as I'm concerned.To summarize:"Easy" tasks (that can still be failed) should be very high success rate (90%+)...otherwise they are not "easy." Failure is a genuine surprise.Moderate tasks should be in the (very roughly) 60%-75% success rate range. Reasonably achievable, but failure isn't a surprise per se.Difficult tasks should be in the 40%-50% range--you're about as likely as not to fail them, so there's high tension for each such effort.Formidable (for lack of a better term) tasks should be roughly 35% or less: success wouldn't be a surprise per se, but you expect to fail.Nigh Impossible: 10% or less chance of success. Success is a genuine surprise.All of the above labels are just descriptives to indicate that difficulty rises. And note all the "roughly"s in there--these are squishy categories, not absolute bright lines.Combat, for example, is mostly full of Moderate tasks (fighting opponents of very roughly analogous combat ability), with Difficult tasks not uncommon and some rare Easy tasks along the way. "Skill challenges" (things overcome through a sequence of skill checks, rather than combat per se) may run the gamut, but generally also sit in the Moderate range with a few Easy and a few Difficult tasks depending on the approaches players choose.Where is this average defined? (Essentially the same "where are you getting these statistics from" thing.) The typical stat is somewhere between 10 and 13 for most 5e characters--only their two best and their worst stats fall outside this range.I find this a little hard to believe, frankly. Changing the rate of success by 20 percentage points (going from 8 to 16 in the stat) is meaningful, to be sure, but going from "wow I can't believe I never fail" to "ah, good, I do fail sometimes" doesn't jive. You'd have to be going from something like 75% success to 95% success for that--and you've already made expressly clear, you're expecting something close to 40% success range.And, again, please remember that I am chunking different kinds of actions into different groups. Failing 60% of the time on easy tasks means failing essentially all the time on what I called "Difficult" tasks above--forget Formidable or Nigh-Impossible. Failing 60% of the time on tasks that are supposed to be hard, on the other hand, is perfectly reasonable, even expected, unless you're a genuine expert in your field...and first-level characters generally shouldn't be experts in their field (yet).Alright, I'm...not really seeing how that disagrees with what I said, then. Choosing to not take Strength into high numbers in 4e is a valid choice, and because the game expects you to take on greater challenges with time, you not only start off weak with those things, you'll get (compared to "appropriate" challenges) even weaker with time. Fixed DCs do mean you slowly get better, but if you've gone from a 1st-level no-longer-green adventurer (which 4e explicitly says that's what 1st level characters are--they've been tested, but haven't made any kind of a name for themselves yet) to a literal demigod or living incarnation of magic (two different 4e Epic Destinies), I don't know if it should be all that surprising that you have a reasonable chance of busting down a door that you couldn't physically budge originally.And....I'm not getting where this "roleplaying a weakness while remaining mechanically optimal" thing comes from. What does this refer to? I have given specific examples of how you can quite easily have real weaknesses, because the stats of D&D don't perfectly correspond to all human variations. I don't see how "cowardly" MEANS "low Charisma." A cowardly person who easily persuades others to protect them IS "charismatic" and making use of it, while still roleplaying a real and serious character fault, one that will deny them opportunities and put them in bad spots frequently. A character that has a single-minded devotion to her faith SHOULD have high Wisdom, as far as D&D is concerned--but that doesn't mean that she can't also have a deep acquisitive streak and a compulsion to steal shiny things. (This is, in fact, exactly the reason why we have the "tu quoque" fallacy IRL--someone can be quite Wise because they're flawed and have made lots of mistakes.)No one is asking you to have Strength 16 and pretend that you can't actually lift boulders that you totally can. Instead, I'm suggesting that an 8 (which you never improve) is a perfectly reasonable "weakness" for adventurers, who must face great danger and thus any weakness can be a serious one. And that flaws/faults/whatever you want to call them are both much more interesting, and much more achievable regardless of system or rules or whatever else, for limiting the opportunities of a character and forcing them out of their comfort zone.Like...do you really NEED the game to tell you, "You emphatically, unequivocally, consistently suck" in order to actually feel your character has any limits at all? Because that's really confusing, and...basically just factually incorrect?Okay but like...you can totally have mechanical weaknesses. That's why I gave the example I did, of the healer-focused Paladin. It's still completely possible to be a good Paladin who isn't strong (objectively; 8 is the lowest Strength score a standard 4e character can have, same as standard 5e), and in fact being a Paladin who is a good healer actually welcomes people with that particular weakness. It even has other mechanical weaknesses attached--most Cool Things Paladins can do that rely on Charisma are risky to do in melee combat, yet melee combat is exactly where Paladins need to be in order to take hits (the default role for Paladins). Meaning, by playing a low-Strength Paladin, you really are limiting yourself in a serious and meaningful way, while at the same time supporting the very story you spoke of (sucking at strength but wishing to SEEM or APPEAR strong, while actually being a very good healer). A low-Strength 4e Paladin doesn't have to pretend to be bad at typical Strength-based checks, they will be bad at them (failing more often than succeeding on anything but explicitly Easy checks, and even then only at the very earliest levels--even Easy checks may become a challenge as levels increase). So there's no "well I'm actually statistically optimal, I'm just faking being bad," hence my confusion.Again, I disagree with these statistics, but even taking your numbers as they are, that's basically my point. If about 19% of all people have at least one 16+, what happens when we apply the "this is a population regularly threatened with death, which actually has many more deaths than the population overall" selection pressure? People who have no stat above 12 (for example) will appreciably die off more often than people who don't, which will skew the distribution toward the upper end, inflating that 19%--perhaps by a lot. Like, if the death rate is 25% for people with at least one score of 16+, but 60% for people who don't have at least one 16+, then we're looking at (.19*.75)/(.19*.75+.81*.4) = .30547..., or about 30.5%, a substantial increase. And again, I don't buy this statistical distribution you've claimed--I'd like to see where you're getting the mean and standard deviation from for this.I just...how is that an easy thing? How can an "easy" thing be something a (supposedly) average person fails at almost half the time? What does "easy" even mean in this context?Given the "I don't want to pretend to have mechanical weaknesses when I don't," I think it rather is more controversial than you think. And even apart from that, the whole "roll steath every single round until you fail and get seen" problem would seem to indicate that there's yet further controversies to just giving people automatic successes.Well...no, it kind of doesn't. Because, for example, 85% success rates are only barely achievable for the all-18s person in 5e (and I don't even know if they can be achieved in 4e). Having Proficiency and a +4 modifier in 5e vs. a DC of 10 means 1d20+6. So you still fail on a roll of 1-3, or 15%. Even leaving aside that 99% success isn't a number you can really achieve in any d20 game, 95% success (the closest we can get without genuinely "doesn't fail ever") is literally impossible on such checks at 1st level...and this is for something a character IS supposed to be "good" at, because they have Proficiency. If we look at things a character is supposed to be untrained with ("bad" at, to a loose approximation), it's now d20+4, meaning you fail on a roll of 5 or less...which is below your 80% figure.The numbers really do actually matter here. The numbers you gave are totally reachable...but don't come across as "born lucky." The numbers that do come across as "born lucky"...aren't reachable without effort (such as investing Proficiency). That's my point here.Again: conflating any check whatsoever (or, rather, specifically Hard checks) with specifically Easy checks, which I have explicitly stated several times. I 110% agree that for checks that are SUPPOSED to be hard, comprehension rates as high as 75% (or whatever) should be great. BUT I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT THAT. Please, please, PLEASE stop this incredibly annoying pivot from talking about what I actually said, to talking about a distinctly different thing, as if they were equivalent. They're not. Hard checks SHOULD have a different success rate!Given the examples explicitly described, yeah, that's certainly what I thought MoonSong was talking about.But those ARE begging the DM for other ways to contribute. Literally every single one of those things requires negotiating with the DM to even have the potential to do something useful. Because without the DM's active involvement in making those things useful, they don't contribute any more than giving flowery descriptions of the clothing he wears, or a Bard writing actual poetry to use when she casts a spell: all cool things, arguably vital to the best experience of roleplay, but not contributing to the party's success.Because anecdotes aren't collected with any degree of rigor. If you treat them as data, they suffer the "sample size of 1" problem--meaning, their statistics become literally meaningless because we divide by (N-1)...and when N=1, what does that do?But to give you the full version of that statement, which gets abbreviated for concision: In literally every single thing where a spread of possible results happens, you are going to get individual cases that do X thing, pretty much guaranteed.  Consider astrology. Astrology is pseudoscience, plain and simple, and for the vast majority of its predictions, it is either specific enough to actually be demonstrably wrong and then is demonstrably wrong, or vague enough to be "predicting" all possible results. But we absolutely expect that, a portion of the time, astrological predictions that actually ARE specific specific enough to be wrong turn out to be true.Let's say Dave is criticizing the pseudoscientific nature of astrology. I then say to him, "Ah, but I once got an official reading that formally and documentedly predicted the day my now-wife would propose to me AND that I'd win the lottery on the same day, AND I DID!" Does my observation count as data? Most people interested in empirical rigor would say it absolutely does not, because I'm ignoring a vast data set of counter-examples and focusing only on my personal experience, which happened to be one of the rare cases where a specific prediction actually came true.So: Does you having more fun with this one particular character, who happened to have lower stats, indicate that having fun is totally independent of (or even negatively correlated with) having high stats? No. It simply indicates that you, personally, on one occasion, had such a contrast. It doesn't illustrate any trends, it doesn't provide us a lick of meaningful evidence, because it is an isolated case without any consideration for the distribution from which that single case was drawn.In other words: your personal story is great, and is certainly something you observed. But it doesn't actually tell us anything on its own. It is an anecdote...but it isn't data.Well...yeah. Like 4d6 drop lowest. Which literally gives a distribution where it is average to have a 12-13 and no high result is especially unusual (18 with 4d6 drop lowest is like, four hundredths of a point above being exactly 2 standard deviations up.)Okay. So...how do you square this with the explicit and repeated advice that low level in 5e is meant to be a hard experience and most players should skip it? Like, this is again literally something the developers have told us. Why should EVERYONE have to slog through hard content you enjoy? Why should the default experience be Dark Souls?"Wanting" vs "expecting" sounds like a distinction without a difference. Care to elaborate?I mean...yes? I literally said that earlier. The difference should be (assuming a "high stat" character has just 1-2 stats of 16+ while a "low stat" one does not) at best a 10% or 20% higher overall survival rate, which might end up being (say) the difference between 50% and 60%. Which would mean if you've played, say, a thousand characters total and 60% of them were "low-stat" while 40% were "high-stat," you'd be looking at about .6*.5*1000 = 300 "low-stat" survivors vs .5*.4*1000 = 200 "high-stat" survivors--overall numbers not all that different. (Plus...old school D&D is explicitly super lethal, as I already said, which skews things toward most characters not surviving.) A more useful metric would be survival time rather than survival rate, because again AIUI and as I have experienced it, old-school play has a very high body count. Like, losing at least one character on average every session is normal.Hard disagree. I'd like to see your evidence for this claim.Not sure which specific thing I'm supposed to see above, so some elaboration would be useful (though I presume you'll cover that in responses to things I've said above in this post!)Technically speaking, I'm not bothered by this either. But when the successes are rare and the failures frequent and dramatic (e.g. lots of character death, such that I go into each new character presuming it will die and will rarely be surprised otherwise--something you explicitly described yourself as doing), it doesn't make the successes feel sweet. It makes them feel like false hope dangled in front of me. And, again, it is much easier to ADD "you fail a lot, and probably die a lot" to systems that don't feature that, than to remove it from games that do; a system built without early-D&D "save or die" mechanics can always have a few added in, whereas a system full of them presents a minefield that must either be cleared, navigated...or run afoul of.If you'd like an analogy, for me, failure (and especially death) is like vinegar: pungent, but removing it from my repertoire would be bad and would make my dishes taste worse. It must be used carefully or else it sours everything else about a dish, however, and that doesn't improve if you try to balance it out with some sweetness and let it sit for a while (the vinegar can, in fact, become stronger due to fermenting some of the sugar). Likewise failure and death. It isn't even "I'm not opposed to their presence"--I WANT failure and death as carefully-used tools, because without them, the cool and exciting stories I want to experience cannot happen. But when failure is the typical state of affairs, when even easy tasks are a great challenge, when I go into each character not wondering if they'll die, but wondering whether I'll get one session or four out of them before they do die...why invest? Why care? I'll just get disappointed again. Whatever I build, whatever I accomplish, it'll be taken away from me sooner or later. Might as well not bother. Might as well not even play. Then at least I can chill out doing nothing, rather than getting my hopes up one more time just to have them dashed against the rocks.</blockquote>

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