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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arrowhawk" data-source="post: 5701708" data-attributes="member: 6679551">I'm not sure I understand the purpose of your suggestion.  He would agree that people can perceive the difference in ability.  But his argument is that no one conceptualizes it as a quantized difference...or that abilities are quantized to begin with.  Again, using his football disanalogy, you would argue that Tom Brady is better than Matt Hasselbeck, but you couldn't translate that to a number or even know what number Hasselbeck or Brady were at. In D&D...you can.  If being a QB in football were analogous to being a Wizard (which it's not), the distance you could pass a football would be determined by your level, so it would be trivial to determine who was better and by how many increments.  Everytime you threw a football, it would go exactly X feet.  You'd gain a level and it would go exactly X feet plus your level increment.  You'd see this pattern repeated over and over.  You'd see that every other QB had the same exact pattern and threw in exactly the same incremental increases...it would be self-evident that the world of football QB's advanced in quantized levels and people would start rating their QB's according to those levels. This level classification would occur naturally as a result of the QB's abilities being dependent on his level and that his level would give you a 100% accurate predictor of the QB's abilities to do various things.  It would be unavoidable that levels would be used by coaches, owners, and everybody else who's livelihood depended on knowing their QB's abilities. With Intelligence...you wouldn't know your "bonus" because I'm not aware of anything in D&D that could be used to metric it (I'm not aware of it...but maybe it exists).  A better example would be Strength.  One could and can determine the amount you can lift.  There is strength chart in the game that tells you how many pounds you can lift.  This could be used by people to determine a persons strenght "bonus."   You could load some up with weights and then document to the pound, when someone's movement level went from 30' to 20'.   But...to what real advantage would that be?  It's not really important for a Fighter to know his bonus like it is for a Wizard to know his spell range or radius or how many hit dice of damage he can do.   So while Fighters might could go through a process to accurately determine their Strength bonus...and indeed some Fighters might have even determined it...that information isn't very useful in the context of being a Fighter.   Yes, if I were higring a Fighter, I'd like to know his bonus, but I'm concerned about his level...and...I can just arm wrestle him to gauge his strength.  Finally, even if a Fighter knew his strength modifier, it would be talked about in terms of pounds since nobody knows how much damage weapons do...just their relative effectiveness against various targets.</blockquote>

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