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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nai_Calus" data-source="post: 4983762" data-attributes="member: 79670">4E I find abstracts things to the point where I can cheerfully just not care. If I can dumpstat STR to 8 and then use my massive intelligence to swing a sword as good as a fighter can and with as much force... Meh who cares, why not cheerfully assume that an 8 INT character is perfectly normal intellect-wise? (Which oh look, he kind of totally is.) (I don't have a character with an INT dumpstat, though I do use exactly that logic to cheerfully have my 18 INT Swordmage act perfectly normal and not like some know-it-all. He represents his high INT by being... Basically a historian. He's well-read and well-researched and travels the world looking for new bits of lore to add to his collection. He's not a super-genius. He's just fairly bright and educated.)Some people would say that this makes 4e a bad system. I say it makes it a good system that doesn't try to tie your hands so much. I *like* my mechanics to be abstract and have little basis in 'reality'. But I'm not a simulationist, and I'm there to play a character and how he interacts with a story. Not interested in the slightest in whether or not I am roleplaying him absolutely perfectly to his stats. I do tend to build characters to *have* mental stats roughly in line with their capabilities as people, but find that it's impossible to perfectly model a person with a bunch of numbers... So I just shrug, get it vaguely close, and if Mr. 8 WIS has no common sense but is insightful and can tell what the people he's travelling with are feeling and thinking... Oh well, he can. Or maybe Mr. 18 WIS notices every little detail of things but can't read people at all. You can't model that in D&D anyway, so who cares? Play it if you want.I'm a lot more interested in if people are playing interesting characters with fleshed-out personalities and motives than if they're perfectly portraying the random numbers on a sheet of paper.</blockquote>

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