Level Up (A5E) Do Player Characters Have Average Population Stat Distributions?

[Guest 6801328]

I was ignoring it because it wasn't favorable to you. A Spartan diplomat is the real life equivalent of an orc wizard. It's proof that, even if you aren't the best in the world at what you do, sometimes it's more important to provide that service at all, if it can't otherwise be found around there. A bad wizard is still a wizard, and they're all the more valuable in a society where wizards are rare.

It's proof of no such thing.

You offered an alternative interpretation, which also makes for a good story.

The mistake you keep making is to assume that the stories you prefer are the only logically coherent stories.

Unless the story of Thucydides involved him talking circles around his Athenian counterparts, in spite of his cultural background. The only Thucydideses on Wikipedia were Athenian.

I believe we were just talking about the wizards (or diplomats) being equal, not superior.

We can believe anything we want about stuff that doesn't exist, because it doesn't exist. If it did exist, and the way it existed was not in matching with our beliefs, then we'd be fools to continue believing it against all evidence to the contrary.

And yet the human ability to believe in the absence of evidence is pretty much the foundation of storytelling.

 

[Lanefan]

Feel free to ask again if you don't know what this means.

Gotcha - sorry, missed seeing that bit in the post I quoted.

 

[Lanefan]

If one halfling has an 18 strength and all other halflings have no higher than 16, then 18 strength isn't impossible, merely very unusual. The very existence of the 18 strength halfling demonstrates that this can happen within the game world. Its inhabitants might have, wrongly as it turns out, believed that this was impossible.

Impossible according to the rules for NPC generation isn't the same thing as impossible within the game world. Unless the stats for every single halfling in the world have already been generated by the GM, then there's always room for the hitherto unknown.

The stats haven't been determined for every Hobbit in the world but the outer extremes of the range in which those stats can fall has been.

Ideally, if Hobbit' strength range is 3-16, a 16-strength Hobbit should be just as unusual as an 18-strength Human. A 17-strength Hobbit would be the same rarity as a 19-strength Human. A 20-strength Hobbit would be the same degree of impossibility as a 22-strength Human.

Looked at another way, in theory the DM is omniscient within her setting and thus already knows all the 'hitherto unknowns' - which means, the potential existence of strength-18 Hobbits would already be known by her and accounted for in the setting; and would thus be rollable-uppable in the game. But they're not - they're capped at 16; which means that strength-18 Hobbits simply don't exist in that setting.

Caveat: all of the above ignores magical or divine aid and-or any stat improvements gained through levelling.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Looked at another way, in theory the DM is omniscient within her setting and thus already knows all the 'hitherto unknowns' - which means, the potential existence of strength-18 Hobbits would already be known by her and accounted for in the setting; and would thus be rollable-uppable in the game. But they're not - they're capped at 16; which means that strength-18 Hobbits simply don't exist in that setting.

Why would a GM wish to decide such a thing in advance? What are the benefits? Seems to me they're boxing themselves into a corner for no reason.

 

[Lanefan]

3e is the only edition of D&D where PCs and NPCs are built in the same way. Even in 3e there are classes intended only for NPCs, such as the commoner and expert. It's impossible for NPCs to gain XPs the same way PCs do as a player can get a bonus for good roleplaying (DMG pgs 40-41).

In 1e ability scores are determined differently for PCs and NPCs (DMG pg 11). It is possible for an NPC to be a Sage (DMG pgs 31-33) but impossible for a PC.

Yeah, I threw out those ideas pretty early on.

It would be possible for someone to play a Sage as a PC, but highly self-defeating as said Sage in the field would likely have an expected lifespan measured in minutes; hours if really lucky.

By the rules it is not possible to play a 0th level character as a PC*.

There's at least one TSR module from that era (I forget which one, I think it's in the N-series) which would somewhat disagree. In it the PCs start as 0th-level commoners, and grow into their classes as the module goes along. By the end they're all 1st-level in whatever class they've chosen.

PCs, having the capacity for level advancement, are extremely unusual individuals: "Human and half-orc characters suitable for level advancement are found at a ratio of 1 in 100. Other races have an incidence of 1 in 50." (DMG pg 35). 1e PCs start off as heroes in the sense that they have exceptional capabilities - higher ability scores and character classes.

This is another Gygaxian-ism I've long since disagreed with, in part because it blows away setting consistency. All those high-level stay-at-home NPC casters. All those 2nd-level gate guards. The army in which everyone above the rank of trooper has some Fighter levels. These things are common as dirt in published modules (even some that were written by Gygax!) and all those people didn't all get their levels by field adventuring.

It makes far more sense to have it that most people have the capacity to gain levels, but that those who do so without adventuring gain them much more slowly - one every few years at most. Adventuring is merely the fast-track.

 

[Phoebasss]

I was ignoring it because it wasn't favorable to you. A Spartan diplomat is the real life equivalent of an orc wizard. It's proof that, even if you aren't the best in the world at what you do, sometimes it's more important to provide that service at all, if it can't otherwise be found around there. A bad wizard is still a wizard, and they're all the more valuable in a society where wizards are rare.

Unless the story of Thucydides involved him talking circles around his Athenian counterparts, in spite of his cultural background. The only Thucydideses on Wikipedia were Athenian.

We can believe anything we want about stuff that doesn't exist, because it doesn't exist. If it did exist, and the way it existed was not in matching with our beliefs, then we'd be fools to continue believing it against all evidence to the contrary.

Thucydides is the historian, not the guy himself. And the Spartan was better than his Athenian counterparts. A big part of the reason why Sparta won the peloponnesian war actually. He convinced the Thebans to side with Sparta over Athens. EDIT: The specifics of the example are also largely irrelevant to its point. Sometimes societies produce people who excel in skills not deemed important by the society.

People in the world don't have perfect access to all information. The high elves don't sit in their gilded towers reading PC creation guidelines. They can only know what they see. In the US, for example, there is a common stereotype of French people as snooty, or as so-called "cheese-eating surrender monkeys". This view is largely counterfactual and ignores hundreds of years of french military history and the existence of the Free France movement even during WW2. And yet the belief that this is true persists. Why is real life so unbelievable to you? If game worlds are held to higher standard for verisimilitude than real life, we're holding them to too high a standard.

 

[Lanefan]

I think in some games it's the characters are competing against the world (the DM) with no particular expectation of any of them becoming heroes (Call of Cthulhu & Paranoia ?).

In others I think the assumption is that the characters are actively on their way to most likely become heroes with the DM as facilitator of their legendary tale (13th age with the "Meaningful Death Rule" & Fate?).

In old D&D, didn't Gygax also talk about not making it too hard on them? I don't think the goals of presenting a setting and a story and leaving it to the players were meant to contradict the goal of them (hopefully) becoming heroes of the story. They all set off from the metaphorical Rivendell, we hope they'll all become heroes, and but some of them would probably (in 1e, 2e, and B/X anyway) fall along the way. Trying to think back to the 1980s, it feels like the difference was that for the first few levels your odds of dying in the world were vastly bigger than they are today, but once we made it past that I don't remember it being particularly more deadly than the games that came after.

My experience is that it stays fairly deadly until somewhat higher level, but by 4th-ish level you've built up enough resources and contacts to enable revival from death leading to more continuity with characters.

Given the increased effort it feels like players put into making their characters backgrounds in some cases, I'm not sure I mind them starting off today at what would have been 3rd level in the old days.

This is why - while I don't mind the idea of backgrounds etc. in the least - I personally don't put much effort into them (usually) until the character's been around a while and proven it's going to stick; and suggest the same to my players.

The other factor is speed of char-gen. Any system where (once familiar with the process) it takes more than 20 minutes to bang out a character needs a long hard look taken at it, as it's become too complex.

 

[Lanefan]

Of course you don't think so! I mean, you are you, right? Just like people that write in free verse have trouble understanding why anyone would choose to write a villanelle. After all, you can write anything you want in free verse, but there are formal constraints with other forms.

Where is the FUN in that?

side note

Speaking as someone with over 7000 as-yet-unpublished poems and lyrics under his belt, all I can say to this is AMEN!!!

/side note

 

[Lanefan]

I don't know of any other tabletop game in which the fanbase is so embracing of the idea of player characters starting out on objectively unequal footing, and resistant to the idea of "hey, maybe people don't like their character concept being suboptimal right out of the gate, let's change that". Well, other than games that use completely random chargen and expect you to go through 10 different characters in the course of a campaign. But putting meatgrinder style OSRs aside, I can't think of any games other than D&D and D&D adjacent trad games where this is an issue.

If you look at D&D as a meat-grinder OSR-style game where success is achieved on the backs of the fallen (which IMO is what it should have been all along, and how it plays best) things become much clearer.

 

[Phoebasss]

If you look at D&D as a meat-grinder OSR-style game where success is achieved on the backs of the fallen (which IMO is what it should have been all along, and how it plays best) things become much clearer.

That may have been the case in 1E and 2E, maybe even as far as 3e. But 4E and more importantly 5E have never played that way intentionally. 5E is built at a fundamentally heroic level, and the rules for death are the easiest way to see this. It is hard to get your character killed in 5e unless the GM is out to get you.