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Message: <blockquote data-quote="OB1" data-source="post: 7089058" data-attributes="member: 6796241">As part of yet another GWM discussion in another thread, the concept of the base difficulty level of 5E has come up once again.  I've made the argument for quite a while that 5e is designed to be more like the Uncharted series that the Dark Soul series of video games, in that it's default difficulty is geared more towards casual rather than expert level gamers.But one of the great things about Uncharted (or Dragon Age or Fallout or a host of others) is that difficulty level can be set to match your ability very easily.  Now, of course 5e can always depend on the DM to do this, or, as I have argued, players can self police their ability choices to purposefully nerf themselves to greater challenge, but it got me thinking that there may be an easy way to standardize some difficulty settings so that players can still have the joy of doing all they can to optimize while not making the DM have to rewrite pre-published adventures to accommodate.  Thus, my proposal below for a set of starting ability arrays to mimic the difficulty settings in modern video games.  I plan to test these out with my group for TftYP, but would love to get the communities thought on if this will have the intended effect.Narrative Array - 18, 18, 17, 16, 14, 12Easy Array - 17, 16, 15, 14, 12, 10Standard Array - 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8Average Array - 11, 11, 11, 10, 10, 10Hard Array - 13, 12, 10, 8, 8, 8Legendary Array - 11, 10, 9, 8, 8, 6Legacy Array - Roll 3d6 in orderWhat I'm hoping Hard and Legendary accomplish is to make the ability decision tree much more complicated.  For example, GWM is really -6/+9 until you get to 20 STR, which would take until your 4th ABI with Hard or 5th on Legendary (assuming maxed racial bonus), but in choosing to go after that feat, you are also leaving yourself vulnerable on a host of saves.  Party synergy, spell selection and combat tactics should all get more critical to overcome baseline challenges.At the end of the day, 5e is about creating exciting stories about bold adventurers facing deadly perils.  What better story is there than those adventurers who weren't born for greatness, but through courage, luck and determination found glory anyhow!</blockquote>

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