D&D 5E Characters are not their statistics and abilities

Corwin

Explorer
Unless you're playing an "Against the Illithids" campaign, or your DM makes you roll an Intelligence check to remember where you parked your horse.
Still ...in my game. I'm pointing out that your assumptions are your own. To claim you are speaking for all tables is folly. And ill advised.

Also, are you trying to be demeaning and dismissive? Because that's bad form. Do you honestly believe those are the two most likely reasons a fighter will roll Intelligence checks?

Even taking into account the wide variety of playstyles, fighters are highly unlikely to be making many Intelligence checks.
...in my game. Again.

If that's not true at your own table, then take that into consideration on your end.
Or, maybe don't try to speak for everyone as if an authority on the subject. Just a suggestion.

If everyone in this forum filtered everything they said through every unlikely circumstance, we'd have no common ground for discussion.
That you are still claiming the way other people play as "unlikely circumstance" doesn't bode well for my point ever getting across to you that you are not qualified to speak for how others play their games.
 

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Mercule

Adventurer
Unless you're playing an "Against the Illithids" campaign, or your DM makes you roll an Intelligence check to remember where you parked your horse.

Even taking into account the wide variety of playstyles, fighters are highly unlikely to be making many Intelligence checks. If that's not true at your own table, then take that into consideration on your end. If everyone in this forum filtered everything they said through every unlikely circumstance, we'd have no common ground for discussion.
Dunno. I'll grant that the Valenar blade master doesn't roll as many intelligence checks as the Wizard, but she rolls quite a few. She's got proficiency in smithing and animal handling, plus ancestor worship, so she's often the one who checks to see if she knows anything about weapons, tactics, critters, etc.

As I said, previously, I wouldn't consider my group to be heavy roleplayers, by any measure.
 

Sacrosanct

Legend
Most of the people I've gamed with want to at least have an option to be involved in every aspect of the game. Much like the basketball analogy above, where not just the best shooter takes all the shots, most players like to try at something even if they don't have the highest score in it. In fact, sometimes they are the only ones who can try. For example, if the party runs into something that only the PC with a mariner background would reasonably know, I'll have that PC make an investigation or insight check.

Hyper specialization is great, as long as that's the only thing you do in your games. In our games, every part of every pillar is experienced.
 

Unless you're playing an "Against the Illithids" campaign, or your DM makes you roll an Intelligence check to remember where you parked your horse.

Within that very specific example, perhaps not (although the examples already made of the loreful and crafting fighter is a good exception). In a broader sense, it is harder to find that universally applicable. Another specific example might be a paladin who can choose 15 str, con, and cha/8 dex, wis, int or a more balanced approach. The former is something you might argue for as an optimized paladin, especially if you also select vHuman with +1 cha and str, and the feat resilience:Con. However, in that instance, you really can't say that the paladin won't be making any Dex (saves, acrobatics), wis (saves, perception), or Int (religion, intellect devourers <shudder!>) checks.
 

Tony Vargas

Legend
Every time this comes up, it has been explained how there are more pages to combat rules because that's what's needed to mitigate that portion of the game. You don't need as much page count when dealing with role playing aspect.
True enough, and that's a valid counter point to the argument of "look at how the rules are structured, how they have been structured in various editions, and easily identify what type expected playstyle those rules support."

This argument is like saying the game expects there to be 20x as many casters as fighters because spells take up most of the page count.
It's even sorta right, by accident. Look for instance, not just at the much greater space devoted to magic-users in the 1e PH, look for corroboration in the PCs remembered from the original playtests - Tenser and Rary and so forth, and even EGG's own character, Mordenkainen - all magic-users.

But, no, you can't just look at the structure of the game, no matter how objectively, and divine the One True Way in which its meant to be played.
Because there isn't one.

Which was the point of bringing up that old saw about combat & page count.

1. RAW, if you used combat as your first choice and ran the game like you would in say 4e, your PCs would die all the time.
Sure, but that's hardly fair to 1e AD&D. First of all, assuming RAW in 1e (RAW was coined for 3e, because that was the era when the idea that you could count on the rules in any sense gained some currency), when 1e assumed DM primacy over the rules. And, also, of course, in the simple sense that you couldn't run 1e like you ran 4e - it's simply impossible, as the tools to do so aren't there. 1e was a much earlier itteration, and it's rules simply weren't able to handle the same breadth of styles as later, more sophisticated systems. Not without, as you put it "DM intervention" (though, really, DM intervention /was/ assumed).

2. You didn't get hardly any XP for defeating monsters. You got most of it from treasure.
Depends on how the DM stocked the dungeon. Going just with treasure types, for instance - easy to do, since that's what's actually presented, you'll /only/ get treasure for defeating monsters (that are in their 'lair').

3. The vast majority of PCs only went to name level before retiring.
"Retired by name level, if they survived" would probably be more accurate.

A 9th level thief will only have an average of 32 hp. So even at higher levels, the risk of death remains and doesn't drop as much as you're presenting. An owl bear will rip that PC to shreds in one on one combat
Thief name level was 10th, and it was a decidedly weak class, you probably didn't make it to 10th as one without a CON bonus, some lucky HD rolls (or just a lot of luck in general) - or some DM Intervention.

And, yes, lethality dropped off rapidly. Monster damage potential and hps didn't balloon like they do in 5e, and player hps and saves did improve rapidly from 1st through name level.

So no, AD&D hasn't always been a combat first game. Anyone who's played AD&D anywhere near RAW knows AD&D was "combat as a last option" game.
Anyone who's ever played AD&D anywhere near raw never really played AD&D.

Only when 3e came out and PCs got boosted in power exponentially, and then 4e made it all about combat.
I get that 2e paid some lip service to the storytelling trend of the 90s and produced a lot of detailed settings that made tourism-style play almost interesting (and enough PC options that losing a PC might actually start to hurt a little), but D&D really did start as a wargame, and 3e merely came back to being open about that. 2e was the aberration in that sense, and, as much as 5e resembles 2e in many ways, a pretense of despising those wargaming roots is not one of them.
 
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That's not a reasonable assumption, though. I'm not sure if it actually says that anywhere, but there's no way that they could not expect you to put your ability boosts into your main stat as soon as possible. They certainly didn't balance anything around the assumption that a fighter would throw their +2 into Intelligence.

Right, except the way that the game math works, the fighter making an INT save isn't going to perform any differently whether their score is 8 or 20, because that's just one save that they have to make and the variability in the die is a larger factor than your ability modifier.

On average, in order to see any difference whatsoever between a modifier of -1 and a modifier of 0, you need to make twenty checks with that stat. To see a difference between -1 and +2, you need to make around six or seven checks with that stat. And unless your fighter has a sage background, you might see a total of six or seven Intelligence checks over the course of twenty levels. To contrast, you'll see hundreds of Strength or Dex checks, and the wizard will have their Intelligence modifier factor into hundreds of checks as well.

If the goal of optimizing your bonuses is to succeed more often, then you get more bang for your buck by investing in stats that you'll be using more often. That's why the fighter maxxes Strength, the rogue maxxes Dex, the wizard maxxes Int, and the cleric maxxes Wisdom; by putting your high stats where they'll see the most use, you guarantee the highest success rate for the party as a whole.

It would be kind of cool if Battlemaster maneuver DCs could be based off of Int as well as Str and Dex. And what if the number of superiority dice you got was modified by your Int bonus?

I smell a variant rule...
 


jasper

Rotten DM
"Retired by name level, if they survived" would probably be more accurate.
What did the dm ignore the rules for raise dead? resurrection? Rods of resurrection? Some us counted the number of times the pc died and came back.
 


However, in that instance, you really can't say that the paladin won't be making any Dex (saves, acrobatics), wis (saves, perception), or Int (religion, intellect devourers <shudder!>) checks.
You can say that they'll be making fewer Dex saves or Wisdom-based checks than they'll be making Strength-based checks, though. Even when you're talking about things that will come up fairly frequently for everyone, nothing compares to what you'll be doing with your attack stat in terms of frequency.

Granted, paladins are one of the better examples for having a lot of variety while remaining comparable in terms of efficiency, since they have one stat that can improve all of their saves and the saves of those nearby; but even then, there's generally very little reason to improve your Dex/Wis/Int directly, given that you get so much more out of Charisma.
 

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