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

[Charlaquin]

Fair enough. I'm just saying if being a sorcerer and being from Fishertown were both important to me, I would accept a less than optimal main stat. I'm cool with sacrificing one part of my character if other parts are more important to me.

That’s great, but most folks would prefer not to have to choose between having a baseline functional character and playing the race/class (or background/class) combination they want.

 

[Phoebasss]

Fair enough. I'm just saying if being a sorcerer and being from Fishertown were both important to me, I would accept a less than optimal main stat. I'm cool with sacrificing one part of my character if other parts are more important to me.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But it doesn't have to be this way.

Maybe not, but I'm cool with it. Makes the world feel more real to me if you can't just do anything you want.

 

[tetrasodium]

Mate. Wanting your main stat to start at +3 rather than +2 isn't ultimate minmaxing. It's the expected value for a level one character. It makes you 5% worse at everything you do for your class for most of the game. Just because you wanted to have a more interesting character and not be a caricature of your cultural heritage. There's just no reason to tie ASIs down.

I gave a lot of reasons why the GM might have chosen lakedweller culture for +2cha & felt like I made it clear that I literally just made them up on the spot as fast as I could type. At what point in all of that were you somehow prevented you from saying "hey $gm you said these cultures are local but I really want to be from korth & want that +2 can we work something out" & Maybe the gm says "sure", maybe "no but after a bit of back & forth it sounds like you want korth because $reason, that reason fits $OtherCity great so that works for +2 cha"... maybe the gm says "sure if you take one of these backgrounds instead of that one"

 

[Kinematics]

“I don’t disagree with your position, but I’ll argue against it anyway because you make it sound too philosophical”? That’s... pretty anti-intellectual...

Perhaps it would be clearer if I explained it as: the arguments are philosophical, while simultaneously discarding out of hand any counterarguments that are mathematical or statistical, because philosophy allows one to take any position and ignore any arguments he doesn't like, while mathematics requires rigorousness that he can't provide.

It's a sleazy type of argument methodology, not an intellectual one.

 

[schneeland]

I'm quite conflicted on this. On the one hand, adventurers are clearly exceptional types among their kin (otherwise they would just stay home, tend to the crops/forge new stuff all day/etc.). Yet at the same time, a certain verisimilitude is important for me, implying that the dwarf cannot shed all his "dwarfiness", and exceptional strength for the halfling means something different that it does for the Goliath.
So some mechanical representation of the different means in attribute value distribution should be there (I tend to say, minimum and maximum values would be a bit better than racial bonuses, but it seems to me these have gone out of fashion for a while now).

 

[PsyzhranV2]

All these arguments could be avoided if we:
A. made ASIs free-floating,
B. dispensed with ASIs and adjusted the array/point buy/dice roll to compensate, or
C. dispensed with ability scores altogether and reworked the skill and proficiency systems to fill the gap

I don't see why people are so bound to the idea of fixed ASIs.

 

[Charlaquin]

Perhaps it would be clearer if I explained it as: the arguments are philosophical, while simultaneously discarding out of hand any counterarguments that are mathematical or statistical, because philosophy allows one to take any position and ignore any arguments he doesn't like, while mathematics requires rigorousness that he can't provide.

It's a sleazy type of argument methodology, not an intellectual one.

Maybe we have very different perspectives on this conversation, but I don’t think I’ve seen any mathematical arguments in favor of racial ASIs being dismissed...

 

[Micah Sweet]

All these arguments could be avoided if we:
A. made ASIs free-floating,
B. dispensed with ASIs and adjusted the array/point buy/dice roll to compensate, or
C. dispensed with ability scores altogether and reworked the skill and proficiency systems to fill the gap

I don't see why people are so bound to the idea of fixed ASIs.

If the argument is that you want ASIs to exist and be attached to something, it certainly is not avoided.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Perhaps it would be clearer if I explained it as: the arguments are philosophical, while simultaneously discarding out of hand any counterarguments that are mathematical or statistical, because philosophy allows one to take any position and ignore any arguments he doesn't like, while mathematics requires rigorousness that he can't provide.

It's a sleazy type of argument methodology, not an intellectual one.

Pardon? What mathematical or statistical arguments did I dismiss?

The only statistical argument I recall is the assertion that if race X doesn't get bonus Y, then statistically that race isn't "good at Y". My response to that was that, yes, that's true, but that since we are talking about the rules for PCs, that variation would not be noticeable to characters in the imaginary worlds we are describing. We may know as players that the result of creating thousands of characters would be a noticeable bias, but that's us players interpreting the rules, not our characters observing the world, and thus is metagame thinking. Which was funny, coming from an avowed anti-metagamer.