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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 9195839" data-attributes="member: 6801228">So, while playing the game I'm supposed to feel bad and have bad vibes? Obviously not. Sure, you won't be actually, mathematically useless. But I'm speaking from experience here. I had a character with a 10 in a stat that turned out to be very impactful for the campaign. And I found myself actively contorting the narrative to do anything other than have to roll, and sometimes beg the DM to give me any other option. Because if I rolled, I failed. And I hated it. I caught myself avoiding good story moments, because I knew if I got involved, I would fail, and the party would be penalized for my involving myself.And, I like that you mentioned "vibes" here, because there is a lot of stigma attached to not wanting statistically crappy ability scores. I've been treated as though I'm some man-child who doesn't want to be challenged, just because I don't find challenge in a low number being added to a die roll. And, I've also noticed something else interesting. When a character has multiple scores of +1 or +2 as their lowest? They are far more engaged in the story. They are far more likely to try a variety of things. Think about this for a second. How often have the players in your game come to a situation where they need to convince someone of something, and they ask who in the party has the highest persuasion score? Or have you ever had a situation where the party is stating something, one player gets carried away and makes a point, the DM asks to roll... and the player wants the character with a better score to roll instead of them? Or they express regret over having "overstepped" and had the roll fall on them? I've seen all of this. I've played at tables where DMs informed us that asking about other character's mods is metagaming and not allowed, and if you stop and think about that... isn't that weird? If it ruined the fun, why would players do it? And we don't tell them not to share their other stats, just not their skill mods. All of this can be traced back to this same thing. The players don't want to fail, and they know the basic math of the game. Whether or not +0 is mechanically balanced is meaningless in the face of the reality that it means they have a 70% chance of failing, and they don't want to fail. But once you have players with positive modifiers in everything... then yeah, they are going to go for that speech, they are going to ask if they can vault over this, or climb that, or look for clues. Because they feel like they have a reasonable chance of success and won't be wasting time trying to "overstep" their role.</blockquote>

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