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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8120299" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Sure. But the whole point was people (including yourself, IIRC) saying that such "born lucky" people would be super rare, would be unnatural to be found in a community of (NPC) adventurers, etc. So: is it unnatural for there to be so many "lucky" adventurers, or not?Right, but those are two different conditions--lumping them together may be a problem. Even if it isn't, though? There's two things at play here. On the one hand, sure, if you're pretty confident things will work, just go ahead with things etc. But on the other, not having some stakes on some of these things means you're making it so these "born lucky" types really do achieve 100% success rates (or close to it) rather than having faults. In other words, this practice if overused creates the very problem you cite!Depends. It certainly sounds like MoonSong wants failable rolls with zero stakes other than "having difficulty doing ordinary tasks," so what should we make of that?I mean, I cited my experience with 4e for a reason. I've had retreats (even up to high Heroic; I haven't had an opportunity to play higher levels, but I've heard reports of the same from other players). I'm not saying that things aren't safer in 4e than in (say) LL--just that your characterization here is, basically, "You literally never lose ever." And that's flatly false. (Incidentally, this is a case where the fact that a personal story isn't "data" is irrelevant: you're making a universal claim, "you never lose in 4e," so an individual instance is enough to prove the universal claim isn't correct.)Except that the numbers involved DO matter. That's MY point. You can't divorce this from the numbers themselves. The actually achievable numbers are 60/80, but you're making a comparison as though it were 60/99, or worse. And it's not. Maybe only a 20 percentage point gap is enough toI don't agree, but I don't totally reject what you're saying. See, the thing is? The fighter who misses an attack is still doing a thing, it's just a thing that didn't work as intended. The Rogue who is "keeping watch" isn't doing anything in the first place...unless the DM is going out of her way to make "keeping watch" mean something, because that has no definition in the system. It's not actually furthering any objectives, unless the DM makes objectives that it applies to. That's why it's what I disparagingly called "begging the DM"--it's only contribution when the DM goes to the effort of making it a contribution.I've done the derivation, it's long and boring and I doubt you care. The short version is that when looking at sample means and sample standard deviations, you get more accurate results by dividing by one less than the sample size, as opposed to parameters (which describe the entire population), where you use the entire population size. The relevant fact is that each time you have a sample size of 1, you would divide by 0, which breaks everything.Stop. You don't. You have one anecdote in multiple parts: your personal experience. All those different games/characters/situations have at least one obvious confounding common factor, you. (And by your own admission, you've played pretty consistently with the same group, which is yet another thing that means your anecdotes aren't distinct data points, but rather the same data--your game group--with a long time to them.)Anecdotes only become data you can do any real work with when they're collected systematically across a representative sample. "The 47 games I've played with my game group of 30 years" is neither representative of anything but itself, nor collected systematically. Inductive reasoning derived from your personal experience, no matter how lengthy, isn't data. It is, at best, a singular data point--which is where the "sample size of one" problems come in.First, no one is arguing for preventing things as far as I'm concerned--hence why I spoke of the asymmetry before. (I welcome examples of characters that cannot be articulated in 4e because it has slightly higher average scores than something like LL.) More importantly, this isn't nearly as much of a point as you seem to think. That is, you can't just leap from, "well, I had more fun with a low-stat character" to "having fun with low-stat characters is easier/better/etc." All you've done is shown it CAN be fun...but ANYTHING can be fun, and if the thing you're talking about COULDN'T be fun you wouldn't even bother defending it in the first place. That something can be fun is an incredibly weak argument in its defense.Actually, no! As <a href="https://anydice.com/articles/4d6-drop-lowest/" target="_blank">Anydice has shown</a> (and I think was referenced above), the actual average of 4d6k3 is something like 16, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8. This is exactly the argument I was making earlier, that it's really easy to confuse the perfect average with actually likely results. Even though a 16 is pretty high on 4d6k3, not getting at least one 16+ is unlikely.Okay so...again, it's really hard to discuss a game with you when you reject whatever parts of it don't suit you, and don't bother to mention this, as if we're all already specifically discussing Lanefan's version of every edition.Okay so...how does this actually integrate with the things you said? You seem to be in agreement that we can expect the lucky (and, specifically, the "born lucky") to predominate as adventurers--you expect that "only the lucky survive." Yet you also expect that...the unlucky will make lots of rolls, or...something? These expectations are not particularly compatible, unless (as I've said already) you expect there to be a great many characters that fail very frequently (and often fatally) in order to balance out the survivor bias.Also: the fact that high stats do not guarantee survival is entirely specious. Of course they don't, it's a probabilistic game where there is a non-zero chance of instant death some of the time.  Thus, a non-negligible portion of the time, instant death will occur even to those, as you say, "born lucky." No one is saying it's a guarantee of survival. Instead, it's that because the "born lucky" have a statistically higher chance, over time, they predominate. Just like evolution, where sometimes creatures with a beneficial adaptation die before reproducing, and sometimes creatures with a non-beneficial adaptation survive to reproduce, but overall creatures that have beneficial adaptations will be over-represented.Obviously, any work you do on this front is up to you. But "number of adventures" sounds like a good way to miss relevant details. That is, a single adventure might have seven of your characters appear in it, but only one survived it, which is quite related to previous stuff I mentioned (like "I'll watch it die" x12 before I get to see one survive.)No disputes there? Not sure why you bring it up.I would envy you if it weren't something I'm specifically told not to do. I have longed to find a long-runner 4e game. I had one, as I mentioned before, but it died due to real life issues for the DM. I've been unable to find one since.My point was that it is quite easy to end up with something like "oh, look, 20% of all surviving characters were low-stat, while 30% of all surviving characters were high-stat. Clearly it doesn't matter much." Except that the actual survival rates really do still favor the high-stat characters (just not to an overwhelming extent because nobody has a high survival rate in old-school D&D).While that was preferred, it wasn't even slightly required. I have played 4e lacking every role (individually) except Defender, and twice lacked multiple roles (controller/striker and controller/leader specifically). Things still work. Yes, there's a wider variance as one would expect. But the numbers still work. That is a huge part of why I love 4e's rigor. It really did allow you to break some of its assumptions--not 100% of everything all the time ever, of course, but it wasn't nearly as rigid as its critics characterize it to be.Looping back to the stealth thing: I don't actually think this works as well as you think it does! I'm pretty sure many DMs literally never realize how they cause some of the problems they experience. I could, of course, field some anecdotes of my own on this one, but that wouldn't be particularly effective. Instead, I'll present it as: why do we have ongoing problems with stuff like iterative probability (the "stealth" problem) and properly managing resting/conflicts, if this stuff is supposed to be so easy to pick up via trial-and-error?I'm not saying that learning by doing is bad, by the way. Just that trial-and-error requires that you be able to see where your errors are and change your behavior to correct them. Both parts of that can be quite dicey with DMing, which is so deeply personal to so many!Except that you're wrong. I mean, you're technically correct, in the sense that it is possible to comb through a ruleset to pick out all the raisins. But it's a hell of a lot of work to remove raisins from that bread, and you're quite likely to accidentally run into one you missed. On the flipside, inserting them where they aren't present is as easy as making a custom monster, which people will do either way.It's the same thing as the "I want zero to hero" problem. You wouldn't believe (well, actually, maybe you would believe) how many DMs insist on starting at 1st level, no matter what campaign they run, no matter how much experience they have with a system, no matter how much advice or suggestions point to doing other things. I have seen this ruin campaigns, because new players couldn't cope with the lethality of low level 5e. But because the designers chose to make 1st level the most lethal level of the game, this is now something many have been saddled with, and which is hard to escape from. Heck, you yourself think it's a terrible idea that should never be practiced! But a system could just as easily cater to the desire for "zero to hero" play (in fact, it could specifically work to make that experience far richer and more suited to fan desires!) by having actual "zero levels" or "apprentice levels" or whatever, where you explicitly aren't heroes and should be constantly afraid of death etc. Having such a system, placing it front and center without any denigration or sidelining, would mean that all the people who insist on starting at 1st level because it's 1st level and not for any other reason, would get a game that doesn't punitively impact new players just learning the ropes, while still having full, friendly support for those who hunger and thirst for that high-lethality experience.Not even remotely. There is exactly one roguelike I have enjoyed long-term: Desktop Dungeons. Literally every other roguelike I've played (including FTL, Rogue Legacy, the Doom roguelike, Darkest Dungeon, and (arguably) Hand of Fate) I have sooner or later soured upon because it is just so. punishingly. difficult. My successes never matter and I just always hit a skill wall eventually that I feel hopeless to overcome. Pretty much every time I've run into a situation where, after many hours of previous play, I'll sit down to play for a few hours to unwind, and I make zero progress whatsoever in that entire multi-hour span, and I ask myself, "Why am I doing this? I'm not having fun. I'm not even getting in-game achievements. This is supposed to be fun, but all it feels like is depressing work."</blockquote>

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